The Cloakroom

"Progressive" Christians

2008-11-10T14:48:00.003-05:00

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...

2008-10-15T09:05:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-10T17:31:00.002-04:00

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?

2008-10-09T10:50:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-08T10:53:00.004-04:00

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?

2008-10-08T09:04:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-24T14:52:00.004-04:00

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...

2008-09-22T13:31:00.005-04:00

... 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."

2008-09-18T13:57:00.002-04:00

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

2008-09-17T09:17:00.002-04:00

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

2008-09-16T11:31:00.008-04:00

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

2008-09-16T11:31:00.001-04:00

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

2008-09-11T16:25:00.004-04:00

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

2008-09-10T10:50:00.004-04:00

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

2008-09-09T11:14:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-04T14:47:00.002-04:00

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

2008-09-01T19:52:00.006-04:00

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

2008-08-29T13:57:00.002-04:00

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

2008-08-29T12:10:00.004-04:00

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

2008-08-28T17:57:00.005-04:00

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

2008-08-28T17:16:00.005-04:00

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

2008-08-27T11:22:00.008-04:00

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?

2008-08-26T23:25:00.001-04:00

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

Facts that don't fit the narrative

2008-08-25T15:50:00.004-04:00

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

2008-08-21T15:20:00.004-04:00

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

2008-08-15T19:56:00.004-04:00

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

2008-08-06T15:37:00.003-04:00

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

2008-08-06T10:30:00.004-04:00

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

2008-08-05T16:20:00.002-04:00

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

2008-08-05T11:45:00.005-04:00

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

2008-07-24T15:02:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-24T09:48:00.005-04:00

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

2008-07-23T20:47:00.010-04:00

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

2008-07-16T16:40:00.005-04:00

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

2008-07-16T15:38:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-15T15:41:00.006-04:00

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

2008-07-10T10:24:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-09T11:16:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-27T10:36:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-25T11:41:00.004-04:00

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?

2008-06-24T20:52:00.002-04:00

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...

2008-06-20T07:55:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-17T09:41:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-16T13:33:00.006-04:00

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

2008-06-16T13:10:00.001-04:00

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

2008-06-15T15:53:00.004-04:00

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

2008-06-07T09:27:00.002-04:00

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...

2008-06-05T08:05:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-02T08:05:00.003-04:00

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

2008-05-30T09:32:00.004-04:00

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

2008-05-28T17:48:00.005-04:00

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?

Mr. Popular

2008-05-28T17:16:00.004-04:00

This article from the Boston Globe concerning liberal activist US District Judge Nancy Gertner and her blogging hobby is notable not for its discussion of Gertner but rather for its quotation of Professor Doug Kmiec. Kmiec thinks it's a fine idea for Gertner publicly (she blogs on Slate with Kmiec and others) to call into question the efficacy of the laws she is charged with enforcing. Quoth the former Reagan-administration-official-turned-law-prof:

It's one thing for us pontificators to speak grandly about how we'd like to see the law arranged. It's another for someone who bears the burden of that responsibility and has identified a . . . shortcoming in the law to be able to say, "I've seen the consequences of this, and the consequences are worrisome."

Right. It is another thing altogether. Several adjectives comes to mind: unseemly, inappropriate, partisan, dangerous. Public confidence in the judiciary and the rule of law depends in part on the confidence that judges demonstrate for the laws they must apply. When judges actively undermine confidence in the law, they undermine confidence in their rulings. If Judge Gertner thinks the federal sentencing guidelines and federal exercises of prosecutorial discretion are unjust, she should resign and do everything in her power as a private citizen to reform the law.

That much is old news. Waddya know? Another Clinton appointee on a federal bench actively undermining both the rule of law and confidence in it. We're shocked, right?

The truly befuddling aspect of this story is Kmiec's role. Since the former conservative endorsed Barack Obama and dissed John McCain he has been the liberal media's favorite "conservative." That is fine and dandy if he is still committed to conservative principles; I do not begrudge him his newfound popularity. But I am increasingly skeptical that he is still one of us.

At last, a tax I can heartily support

2008-05-27T10:28:00.002-04:00

A tax on porn in California? Eugene Volokh doubts its constitutionality. He asserts that "the law targets not just unprotected and illegal obscenity, but also constitutionally protected pornography."

For those of you who are not corrupted by a law school education and not familiar with the Supreme Court's bizarre obscenity doctrines, simply know that the Court in its infallible judgment claims to discern a difference between obscene porn and merely erotic porn. Merely erotic porn is constitutionally protected, while obscene porn is not.

If the California tax proposal is over-inclusive, that problem can be remedied. The bill can be amended to exclude so-called "soft porn." It could, for example, provide a defense to a claim for non-payment of the tax that the material to be taxed is protected under extant Supreme Court obscenity rules. The bill would then permit men to buy not-too-naughty magazines, with all of their manifest artistic and literary value, free of the 25% tax. The men are happy, the Supreme Court is happy, and the people of California can tax the heck out of an industry that objectifies women's bodies, encourages vicious conduct, and swamps millions of men in an unhealthy addiction.

The amended bill would have the addional, ancillary effect of demonstrating how silly and unworkable the Supreme Court's obscenity jurisprudence is. Amended to exclude constitutionally-protected material, the tax bill would generate massive litigation over the question what counts as obscene porn and what constitutes merely erotic porn. Dockets in California would expand accordingly. And that's a good thing. Let the courts bear the costs of their own forays into obscenity regulation.

GOP in denial

2008-05-27T09:11:00.001-04:00

Exactly:

As congressional Republicans contemplate the prospect of an electoral disaster this November, much is being written about the supposed soul-searching in the Republican Party. A more accurate description of our state is paralysis and denial.

Many Republicans are waiting for a consultant or party elder to come down from the mountain and, in Moses-like fashion, deliver an agenda and talking points on stone tablets. But the burning bush, so to speak, is delivering a blindingly simple message: Behave like Republicans.

Unfortunately, too many in our party are not yet ready to return to the path of limited government. Instead, we are being told our message must be deficient because, after all, we should be winning in certain areas just by being Republicans. Yet being a Republican isn't good enough anymore. Voters are tired of buying a GOP package and finding a big-government liberal agenda inside. What we need is not new advertising, but truth in advertising.

Becoming Republicans again will require us to come to grips with what has ailed our party – namely, the triumph of big-government Republicanism and failed experiments like the K Street Project and "compassionate conservatism." If the goal of the K Street Project was to earmark and fund raise our way to a filibuster-proof "governing" majority, the goal of "compassionate conservatism" was to spend our way to a governing majority.

The case for mystery -- civic evangelicalism part 3

2008-05-21T11:04:00.003-04:00

This is part 3 of an ongoing series. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

One of contemporary evangelicals' common ailments is the obsession with resolution. Evangelical sermons offer five step plans for reducing stress. Evangelical books offer seven disciplines for becoming totally surrendered to God. Instead of hymns, cantatas, and concerti, most evangelical churches now use that execrable substitute for music, the praise chorus, which follows a predictable and tension-free IV-V-I chord progression through an elementary melody and vapid lyrics.

Our obsession with resolution (and our corresponding aversion to tension) seeps into our civic lives. Put simply, we evangelicals are not very good at dealing with suffering. Most evangelicals today are extremely uncomfortable thinking about issues not easily resolved. Broken families, depression, fatherlessness, cancer, sexual abuse, rape. These and other life circumstances present difficult and painful realities that humans (not just evangelicals) would prefer not to think about. We Christians have a peculiar mandate to meet suffering people in their suffering. But all too often when these circumstances defy resolution, evangelicals simply throw a trite cliche at the problem and go back to their praise choruses.

How many evangelicals do you know who have read Chesterton or Kierkegaard, Mother Theresa or Frederick Buechner? (I know not too many.) Those Christian brothers and sisters knew the true depths of human suffering. And they did not trivialize suffering by offering trite solutions. Instead, as they matured they became more comfortable reconciling the love of God with irremediable pain. They did not accept, much less preach, easy answers. As Michael Novak has written of Mother Theresa, she lived darkly in the presence of her Beloved.

The world needs to know that we do not trivialize its pain. The world needs to know that our God can handle tension, even tension that is never resolved during an entire lifetime. Some families are never reunited. Some cancer victims are never cured. Some drug addicts never recover. Some abusers never repent. Those are awful realities, problems for which there are no easy answers, and perhaps no resolution within the four dimensions of time and space.

Much human suffering is real and unfixable. Yet God is still sovereign and we are promised a coming Eschaton, free of suffering. The world needs that message.

Fathers need not apply

2008-05-21T10:20:00.005-04:00

In their same-sex marriage decisions, the high courts of California, Massachusetts, and Canada proclaimed the moral lesson that gender doesn't matter. A man may choose to marry a woman or a man. A woman may choose to marry a man or a woman. It doesn't matter. Whatever the individual's gender preference, the law must endorse the morality of the individual's choice.

The UK Parliament has learned the lesson well. Last night the House of Commons voted to do away with the requirement that fertility clinics consider a child's need for a male role model before providing fertility treatment to women. A child has neither an interest nor a right to have a father because men are obsolete. That is the claim.

The war against fathers and their children is real. Studies show time and again that fatherlessness is a root cause of a host of social ills, including career criminality, poverty, psychological disorders, and drug use. Yet enlightened social engineers continue to chip away at the legal supports for fatherhood. First no-fault divorce, then same-sex marriage, now this. Must we Westerners pretend that we have no enemies without, all the while destroying ourselves from within?

John Adams is all the rage

2008-05-21T08:08:00.004-04:00

You knew it would happen. After the HBO miniseries Hollywood types are tripping over one another to declare their allegiance to an Adamsonian view of America. Stars from Pete Wentz to Michael Moore (ok, I use the term "star" loosely with these two) have got nothing but love for the prickly but principled New England Founder.

I welcome the fact that so many liberals watched the series. I also welcome the fact that they recognize greatness in the character of Adams. These two developments simply confirm my belief that the American people can largely agree on foundational principles. It is in the application of the principles that we get crosswise.

But it must be observed that there is still a huge disconnect between their perceptions of Adams and the reality of who the man was.

Entertainers suddenly love John Adams. Consider “The View” co-host Joy Behar, who told Larry King: “When you see what John Adams was like and George Bush, it’s almost like Darwinism in reverse. You know?”
...funny-producer-turned-serious-producer-turned-all-purpose-Bush-hater Michael Moore said: “The Founding Fathers would never have uttered the presumptuous words ‘God Bless America.’ That, to them, sounded like a command instead of a request, and one doesn’t command God, even if they are America. In fact, they were worried God would punish America. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington feared that God would react unfavorably against his soldiers for the way they were behaving.
John Adams wondered if God might punish America and cause it to lose the war, just to prove his point that America was not worthy.”

To these Hollywood liberals, Adams is a foil to use against the GOP and Bush, nothing more. In fact, were they to really be confronted with many of Adams' beliefs their liberal sensibilities might well be repulsed. But that matters not, as long as he serves a purpose for them right now. That purpose of course being juxtaposing our current President with the second President. I dare say few Presidents would wear well in that harsh light.

Conservative reconnection

2008-05-20T08:06:00.001-04:00

Good stuff...worth a read:

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan singlehandedly turned around the American economy. On the heels of the lackluster Carter years that saw high inflation and a poorly performing economy, Reagan proposed sweeping income tax cuts that transformed the American tax system. Indeed, Reagan’s policies have been credited for ushering in a new era of American prosperity.

By all accounts, the tax cuts of the 80’s were a massive success as were many other conservative wins over the last two decades. Defeating the “Evil Empire,” reforming the failed welfare bureaucracy, and winning confirmation of conservative judges — these are just some examples of conservative victories that made America better. And on these victories we must always defend the ground we have won because in Washington, no victories are permanent.

But today we have a problem.

Viva la Regulacion?

2008-05-19T22:25:00.006-04:00

Many of my musings over the last several months (again sorry for that brief hiatus) concerns attempts to legislate our way out of the Credit Crisis. Since I rarely attempt to match wits with someone that has an British accent, I defer to an article in this week's Economist, which succinctly argues the success of the current financial system and the danger of the alternatives.

Here are few of the highlights:

As this week's special report on international banking makes clear, the main structural causes of trouble—the collective misjudgment of risk; a zealous search for yield; and the failure of oversight—are deep-seated. In financial history they crop up time after time. Financiers are rightly rewarded for taking risks, which by their nature cannot be entirely managed away or anticipated. The tendency for success to breed complacency and recklessness is as ingrained in financial markets as it is in any other walk of life. However bankers are paid, they cannot just sit out a credit boom; they have to keep dancing. Regulators lack the knowledge, the clout (and often the talent) to keep up with the banks' next brilliant scheme.
That reads like an indictment, until you consider the alternatives. Western finance, to paraphrase Churchill, is the worst way to allocate capital, except for all those other forms. It is obviously better than the waste and dysfunction in China, where centrally planned capital is dished out to the well-connected. But it is also better than the financial system the West used to have. Thanks to the astonishing innovation of the past few decades, derivatives can help firms and investors to hedge risks (there are plenty of Chinese manufacturers who would be grateful for an easy way to soften the impact of exchange-rate shifts). Securitisation widens access to capital for borrowers and to assets for investors: it can finance everything from water utilities to film studios. Leverage brings more lazy companies within reach of determined investors and more homes within reach of poorer consumers.

It is true that financiers have enjoyed vast profits—and the vast salaries that go along with them (pay at American investment banks has been nearly ten times the national average). But the collapse of the credit bubble will bring that down. And despite all the disasters, there are signs of finance's resilience. In the past few months the banks have commanded enough confidence to raise $200 billion in new capital from investors. Bear Stearns and Northern Rock were calamities, but rare ones, because the vast overall losses were spread far and wide. This time, there has been no industry-wide government recapitalisation. After 20 years of growth, the flaws of modern finance are painfully clear. Do not forget its strengths.

The Newest Thing Congress Will Regulate

2008-05-19T16:37:00.005-04:00

Today's WSJ, has an article that discusses a bond known as the PIK-toggle. The article explains that the PIK-toggle (payment-in-kind) is allowing companies that issued these bonds to turn off the cash interest payment and replace it with more debt.

This means that $100 of interest income you expected to get will come in the form of $100 of additional bonds. Or in personal terms, its like having a $1000 credit card bill but instead of paying that $100 bill you just send your envelope back to the card company with a note that says "I'm short on cash this month IOU sometime in the future." Private Equity firms inserted the PIK-toggle provision in lending agreements to preserve cash in times of credit crises such as the one we find ourselves in today. The use of the PIK speaks to the severity of the cash crisis since compounded interest will cost these firms more in the long run.

I'm sure that Barney Frank already has drafted a bill to outlaw the PIK as well as force PE firm CEO's to wear chicken suits as just compensation for being smarter than everyone else. In all seriousness though, I expect Congress to weigh-in based on its incessant need to legislate that which it does not understand.

Let them eat... less

2008-05-19T08:13:00.004-04:00

We've made the comparison before, but Barack Obama is now not merely making Jimmy Carter-esque policy proposals, he is now also sounding a lot like our Elder National Disgrace.

George Bush and McCain have suggested that me being willing to sit down with our adversaries is a sign of weakness and sign of appeasement.

Did he say "appeasement"? Like Carter's premature peace-in-our-time declaration after his meeting with the terrorist organization Hamas?

How about this from Obama?

We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times.

Compare that with selections from Carter's infamous 1977 energy speeches:

All of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night we could save half the current shortage of natural gas.

and

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years. Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline.

Of course, we all think conservation is a good idea. But there is something unbecoming, un-American, and unimaginative about a President or candidate for the presidency telling Americans how to spend their money.

Are we prepared for four years of economic malaise, a projection to our enemies of a weak will, and feckless leadership in the face of real crises? That's what we will get with an Obama presidency.

Can the GOP get it together?

2008-05-18T10:31:00.004-04:00

The Fox News Sunday panel discusses...note the bipartisan agreement that a ban on earmarks and a return to fiscal restraint is in order for the GOP.

Pence: Time to leave compassionate conservatism behind

2008-05-16T13:57:00.004-04:00

Despite his cheerleading for McCain, who contrary to what Mike Pence says, has not always been a limited government conservative (there is nothing limited government about McCain-Feingold), Pence is right on the mark here calling for the end of so-called compassionate conservatism.

We will chalk up his kool-aid drinking on McCain's conservative credentials and on the GOP's prospects this fall to him being the consummate team player. Otherwise, really good stuff here from Pence, who should be among those the Party looks to for leadership after November.

Exactly

2008-05-16T09:54:00.001-04:00

The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel nails it today:

This is what Republicans haven't yet understood. Their failures in office kicked off this anger, and they remain its target. Yet they've been doing a remarkable impression of 1980s Democrats, who engaged in trivial warfare even as Ronald Reagan laid out his vision for the future.

Today's GOP spends so much time fretting about how to relive the Reagan heyday, it has failed to do him credit by laying out its own plans for today's unique challenges. It remains in hock to interest groups, running ads about sanctuary cities as Americans curse over gas prices. In a repeat of 2006, it spends more time trying to scare voters about Democrats than defining itself. It refuses to give up the earmarks that are a symbol of its worn-out reign.

Evangelical right pushes back on climate change

2008-05-16T09:03:00.002-04:00

For all their drawbacks, Dobson, Perkins and others are performing a valuable service here by establishing a right flank on this issue. That said, it would have been nice if they could have secured the support an evangelical of note who is not so identified with the right wing. Because they didn't the press will chalk this up as more reactionary rhetoric and the further splintering of the evangelical movement.

WASHINGTON - Evangelical leaders who reject arguments that climate change is human-induced but are nevertheless concerned about the environment are trying to gather 1 million signatures of people who agree with them.

The "We Get It!" campaign, launched May 15 at the National Press Club, includes a brief declaration that states "God created everything" and there is a God-given mandate to "tend his creation" and care for the poor.

"Our stewardship of creation must be based on biblical principles and factual evidence," the four-paragraph statement reads. "We face important environmental challenges, but must be cautious of claims that our planet is in peril from speculative dangers like man-made global warming."

The campaign is the latest in the back-and-forth battle between different strains of evangelicals. Some believe action is needed to protect the environment because human activity has caused its degradation, while others believe the notion of human cause is a fad and alarmist.

"We're here to say evangelicals as a whole, evangelicals even as a significant part, have not suddenly embraced man-made catastrophic global warming alarmism," said E. Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance, one of the partner organizations leading the campaign.

Other participants in the launch of the new campaign included Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.; Institute on Religion and Democracy President James Tonkowich; and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
"You can be green without being gullible," said Perkins.

CA follows MA off the deep end

2008-05-15T13:36:00.005-04:00

By a 4-3 decision, the California Supreme Court has overruled the carefully-considered laws of the State of California, which recognized conjugal marriage and same-sex domestic partnerships, and has imposed its own moral views on the people of that State. This act of judicial tyranny makes California the second state, after Massachusetts, to enshrine in law the morally-partisan claim that same-sex intimacy is morally valuable conduct, which deserves equal approbation in law to conjugal monogamy (the committed union of one man and one woman).

The court left no doubt about its moral partisanship. From the introduction to the majority opinion:

One of the core elements of the right to establish an officially recognized family that is embodied in the California constitutional right to marry is a couple’s right to have their family relationship accorded dignity and respect equal to that accorded other officially recognized families, and assigning a different designation for the family relationship of same-sex couples while reserving the historic designation of “marriage” exclusively for opposite-sex couples poses at least a serious risk of denying the family relationship of same-sex couples such equal dignity and respect.

Of course, California's conjugal marriage law never denied to any of its citizens, homosexual or hetereosexual, equal respect and dignity. What it did was to endorse the proposition that conjugal marital sex is intrinsically valuable while other sexual acts are not. The California Supreme Court thinks it knows better.

The court has done a grievous disservice to the people of California, especially those citizens tempted toward homosexual acts and those who reside at the margins of society, who need the encouragement of the law to take responsibility for their actions and to choose to marry.

UPDATE: It strikes me that advocates for same-sex marriage have committed a strategic blunder, in light of the popular referendum that will appear on the November ballot in California. That referendum would amend the state constitution to anneal the traditional definition in the state constitution. It is now almost certain to pass, and to motivate conservative Californians to get out and vote. Defense of (the special status accorded to) conjugal marriage always gets people to the polls. Defense of marriage from judicial overreach really gets 'em goin'.

So, unless (heaven forbid) the United States Supreme Court creates same-sex marriage nationwide, this California decision looks an awful lot like the high water mark for the same-sex marriage project. Even if Connecticut follows suit later this year, other states are unlikely to do so. The high courts of New York and New Jersey have already declined to create same-sex marriage in those states.

Along similar lines, Election Law Blog wonders whether the California Supreme Court just did John McCain a favor.

This helps John McCain because those conservative voters may not have come out in great numbers for him, but they will come out now to vote for this amendment, and they are more likely to vote for McCain than for the Democrat once they are already voting. That's not to say that California will go red, but it is to say that the Democratic nominee will have to devote more resources to this very expensive to campaign in state.

1994 again...except not that way

2008-05-15T08:10:00.003-04:00

I can't seem to keep away from these gloom and doom posts. These two choice quotes though are irresistible in that they are spot on in diagnosing the lameness of the GOP:

"This is 1994 all over again," Frank Luntz, a famed Republican communications consultant, told The Huffington Post. "I was there. I saw it firsthand. The Republicans of 2008 are behaving exactly like the Democrats of '94 and making exactly the same mistakes. It's pathetic."

Indeed it as. The Dems of 1994 were in complete denial as to their fecklessness. They proudly scoffed at the notion that Gingrich and a handful of rabblerousers would take the majority. In short, they were complacent, comfortable and they refused to acknowledge the depth of the desire of the country for change at their expense. Reverse that scenario and you are in 2008.

Luntz, to his credit has at least been trying to wake Republicans up. But the ones who control the levers of power hate him and his message as much as they love hording and consolidating power, so he has hit a wall. It is a beautiful and proper irony that their love of power is likely to be what in the end causes them to lose it.

Another GOP strategist, Craig Shirley, pinpoints the problem, "Ultimately voters want to know what a politician is going to do for them. What has happened with the Republican Party over the last eight years is that some of the consultants have decided it is too hard to define what we stand for so we are just going to paint Democrats as worse than us."

The case for freedom -- civic evangelicalism, part 2

2008-05-14T10:34:00.007-04:00

This is part 2 of an ongoing series. To read part 1, go here.

It has become fashionable to criticize conservative evangelicals on moral or biblical grounds for our commitment to free markets. So-called "progressive" evangelicals make the claim that statist and collectivist solutions to social ills are moral imperatives. So, we are told that health care is a moral issue and that Obama's (or Clinton's) single-payer insurance proposal is a moral imperative. We are told that climate change is a moral issue and that a cap-and-trade policy is a moral imperative. The same tune is sung to different refrains about poverty, AIDS in Africa, the number of blacks in prisons, and a host of other societal ills. Liberals slap the malleable label "injustice" on these problems, then foreclose debate on the prudential question how best to solve these serious issues by declaiming the putative indiference of conservatives to the plight of the vulnerable and marginalized.

This reasoning (if such sophistry can rightly be dignified with that appellation) is as flawed as it is illiberal. These are not moral issues. We do not have moral disagreements about poverty, health insurance, or crime rates among blacks. We have prudential disagreements about how best to solve those problems. Invariably, liberal evangelicals propose greater government intervention as a final solution. Having adopted the secular progressive cause, liberal evangelicals believe, in spite of a century's worth of contrary evidence, that government has it in its power to end poverty, cure AIDS, and keep blacks from committing crime.

By contrast, we conservative evangelicals defend individual freedom, which thrives when government is small and the polity is ruled by law, rather than men. These also are prudential claims, in particular, political claims. However, I believe that a compelling case can be made that the political case for freedom is far more consistent with Christian conviction that collectivism.

Here again, we need not reinvent the wheel. The Dutch Reformed thinker Abraham Kuyper gave evangelicals a model for viewing political problems, which is consistent with practical reason and Scripture. Kuyper's principle of sphere sovereignty holds that different institutions -- the church, universities, familes, financial markets, etc. -- have sovereignty over different realms of civic life. Kuyper rejected the Hobbesian notion that rights and obligations originate with the state. Indeed, in Kuyper's view, the state is not competent to maintain most cultural commitments. (Catholics endorse a similar concept, known as subsidiarity.)

Christians reject the idea that the state is omni-competent and the author of rights. We endorse the scriptural view that God authorizes different institutions to perform different functions and to solve different problems. The state is peculiarly gifted at securing its borders, punishing crimes, and defending against foreign enemies. Churches are adept at ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of the marginalized. Families are best at producing, training, and raising children, and at meeting psychological needs for unconditional love and stability.

When the state is confined to its sphere of sovereignty, other cultural institutions become stronger, freedom expands, and individuals flourish. This is contrary to the progressive line. Progressives see cultural institutions, such as marriage (for example), as impediments to freedom. They think this way because they equate freedom with licentiousness. To progressives, freedom means liberation from institutional and cultural restraints upon their choices. But this is neither a Christian nor an accurate conception of freedom.

Prudence recognizes, and history teaches, that the failure of institutions such as marriage correspond to a diminishing of human flourishing, and of freedom. As cultural institutions fail, the state steps into the breach, taking on duties it is not competent to discharge. As the state grows in power and influence, individual freedom diminishes. As freedom diminishes, humans become dependent upon the state and cease to flourish.

Freedom, then, is not something to be pursued for its own sake. Rather, freedom is a by-product of keeping the spheres of sovereignty in proper balance. Freedom -- not autonomy, or licentiousness, or toleration -- promotes human flourishing as a constituent aspect of a society in which the state cooperates with, rather than usurps, other cultural institutions.

GOP loses...again, prepares for permanent minority

2008-05-14T08:14:00.004-04:00

Maybe the third shocking loss will prove a charm in the effort to get the GOP to pull its collective head out of its rear. But don't bet on it:

A Democrat won the race for a GOP-held congressional seat in northern Mississippi yesterday, leaving the once-dominant House Republicans reeling from their third special-election defeat of the spring.

Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat who serves as Prentiss County chancery clerk, defeated Southaven Mayor Greg Davis by 54 percent to 46 percent in the race to represent Mississippi's 1st Congressional District, which both parties considered a potential bellwether for the fall elections.
Democrats said the results prove that they are poised for another round of big gains in the November general elections, and they attacked the Republican strategy of tying Democrats to Sen. Barack Obama, the front-runner for the party's presidential nomination, saying it had failed for a second time in 10 days in the Deep South. Democrat Don Cazayoux won the special election for a GOP-held House seat in Louisiana on May 3.

"No one could have imagined the tsunami that just crashed on Republicans in Mississippi," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview after the victory. "There is no district that is safe for Republican candidates."

House Democrats now hold a 236 to 199 majority, up from 203 seats they controlled two years ago.

It is not as if nobody has seen this coming. The warning signs have been evident for almost three years. The pathway back to the majority is evident as well, but GOP leadership can't seem to actually lead their caucuses in that direction.

No recession

2008-05-14T08:09:00.000-04:00

Good news:

A funny thing happened to the economy on its way to recession: It's taken a detour.

That, at least, is the view of a growing number of economists -- including some who not long ago were saying a recession was all but inevitable. They note that stock and credit markets have steadily improved since the Federal Reserve intervened to keep Bear Stearns Cos. from bankruptcy in early March, while a series of economic reports have been stronger than expected.

Obama and Israel

2008-05-12T17:50:00.003-04:00

The Atlantic website is carrying an interview with Obama concerning his thoughts on Israel. What I found is that Obama is evasive and is choosing his words very carefully. Here are some of the highlights (I've provided emphasis and comment on certain parts that leave open the question of his Israel policy. I recommend reading the full interview.):

Q: I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?

A: ...And then that mixed with a great affinity for the idea of social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement and the kibbutz, and the notion that not only do you find a place but you also have this opportunity to start over and to repair the breaches of the past.

Q:Why do you think Ahmed Yousef of Hamas said what he said about you?

A:My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization and I’ve repeatedly condemned them. I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements....(And then comes the panderer alert ala Hillary Clinton. Do you really think this was a conversation he had in Ramallah? Hopefully some reporter is on the ground vetting this stuff.) When I visited Ramallah, among a group of Palestinian students, one of the things that I said to those students was: “Look, I am sympathetic to you and the need for you guys to have a country that can function, but understand this: if you’re waiting for America to distance itself from Israel, you are delusional. Because my commitment, our commitment, to Israel’s security is non-negotiable.”

(But Barak's not done yet). He goes onto say:

So I welcome the Muslim world’s accurate perception that I am interested in opening up dialogue and interested in moving away from the unilateral policies of George Bush, but nobody should mistake that for a softer stance when it comes to terrorism or when it comes to protecting Israel’s security or making sure that the alliance is strong and firm. (So wait are you or aren't you talking to Hamas?)

Q:Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

A:No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.

To sum up: Obama may and/or may not talk to Hamas. He will not pursue the 'most' hawkish stance, whatever that means. He even went to Ramallah and told the Palestinian kids they were delusional. He is fond of the early Zionist movement; not too sure about this new one.

Another point is that Barak tries to tie himself to the Holocaust through Slavery and then at the same time identifies himself as someone that Muslims are able to identify with. To me, much of the cocktail he is trying to brew involves mutually exclusive ingredients.

Cap and What?

2008-05-12T17:22:00.002-04:00

Today John McCain unveiled a cap n' trade system that he would implement if elected. Like Kudlow, I'm not quite sure of it.

I can envision issues similar to the current problems with AMT; where the government fails to account for economic growth and we have these fixed units of pollution that eventually penalize the broader economy.

Here's an example, say we start with a 300 million tonne carbon emission system (this is the Cap). Hereafter 'polluters' and greenies trade these 300 million units so that polluters have to pay up to pollute more and greenies make money off of their conservation (the Trade part). If ,for instance, the US economy grows by an average of 5% per annum for 10 years this fixed system would not only create vast new costs for 'polluters' but in effect it would limit future growth because there are only a fixed number of units and so the economy can only grow up to the ceiling.

Certainly, I think there is a way to create a functioning market but its probably one that won't be created by the Federal government.

Obama's vision for an activist judiciary

2008-05-12T15:35:00.003-04:00

Ed Whelan has been carefully documenting the evidence -- thus far unrebutted -- that an Obama presidency would result in a dramatic increase in the number of liberal activists in the federal judiciary. Today he adds to the pile.

There's nothing too surprising here. Any reasonable reading of Obama's and McCain's speeches, votes, and campaign commitments leads to the parallel conclusions that a McCain presidency would at least marginally improve the federal judiciary and that an Obama presidency would cause significant deterioration in the third branch of government. Federal judges have difficult, lonely jobs. And the vast majority of them are talented, virtuous public servants. Obama's vision of a qualified federal judge is depressing, and is one more reason why an Obama presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States.

The Beauty of Capitalism

2008-05-12T14:22:00.003-04:00

During this political season politicians are quick to point out job losses that are the result of the current financial crisis. For once, they are correct. However its not you and I that are losing our jobs its those very bankers and Wall Street types that politicians love to vilify. According to a recent article, the Financial Services sector has lost the most jobs in 2008 at nearly 50,000. This number does not include more announcements that are expected to come from Wall Street in the coming weeks.

The take away? The time honored principle of living by the sword and dying by the sword. The recent correction has brought pain to the very people who engineered Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) that fueled sub-prime lending. I know your thinking that "this guy is really insensitive to the plight of people losing their jobs." Its hard to be too concerned seeing that most of these guys made $5 million or more last year.

Catching up on the economy

2008-05-12T14:06:00.004-04:00

I had the chance to catch up on reading this weekend and found a couple tidbits I thought needed to be passed along.

Many of the talking heads suggest we are in recession I'm not convinced just yet but do recognize that there are a set of conflicting forces at work that could push us off the cliff to a deep and painful recession. The WSJ outlined a few of these on Friday. On the plus side we have a depreciating currency which bolsters exports and reduces our trade deficit. These exports translate into job stability and potentially economic expansion. The complication is that as the dollar depreciates the cost of inputs like oil goes up, hampering expansion.

The WSJ argues that a global expansion is needed to keep the US out of recession. This I agree with wholeheartedly. The most recent global growth is the result of the US consumers resilient spending. Its about time that the rest of the world pick up the slack as our consumers have reached capacity. If the rest of the world economy can continue growing without the US consumer we are likely in for a period of trade balance corrections and stability. If not, we can expect recession with a capital 'R'.

A robust civility -- civic evangelicalism part 1

2008-05-12T10:41:00.015-04:00

At the urging of those who think I was too hard on the Evangelical Manifesto, I have read it over again. My view is unchanged. Each time the document says something true and important, it immediately backtracks to counter a (often exaggerated) stereotype about "fundamentalist" or "conservative" evangelicalism. In a conversation yesterday about the document, someone described the content as "unrelenting moderation." I think that sums up the document perfectly, and explains its central failing succintly. A growing number of evangelicals mistake moderation for civility. That is wrong and dangerous.

Am I opposed to moderation? Well, when it comes to the Christian faith and civic life, yes I am. Does that make me a radical or extremist? Perhaps. Does it make me a fundamentalist or uncivil? I don't think so. Allow me to sketch out an evangelical case for civility in public discourse that is premised upon both (1) universally-accessible principles of practical reason and (2) Christian convictions revealed by special revelation, and is in addition uncompromising on the political substance of Christian conviction. Herewith I begin a series of posts on what I will call "civic evangelicalism," inspired by, but not directly responsive to, the Evangelical Manifesto.

An evangelical case for civility must necessarily begin with the observation that what we believe is true. That is, Christian conviction is not true for us, it is not true in our opinion, it is simply true. The divinity and humanity of Christ, His death and resurrection, the creation of all human persons in the image of God -- these and the other fundamental tenets of evangelical faith are universal principles that are both descriptive and instructive. These principles are descriptive in that they state facts, which are true whether or not any particular person chooses to believe them. The sun rises in the east whether or not I choose to think that it rises in the west. Human life has intrinsic value whether or not I choose to believe that life ceases to be worth living when burdened by physical suffering.

These principles are instructive because we humans have free will, and thus have the freedom to choose not to live our lives in conformity with the truth. We are free to live lies. When we choose lies over truth, our lives become less life-like. We choose, in short, death. In some instances we choose death in its most obvious form -- abortion, euthanasia, suicide. In other cases we do not choose immediate cessation of physical life, but we choose some portion of death -- marital infidelity, fornication, hubris, gluttony, laziness. All the vices are really direction of the human will away from life and toward death.

And here we pause to make an important observation. Because the choice of truth leads to life and the choice of lies leads to death, we Christians have an obligation to lead others to choose truth, what we will generally call "the good," so that they may truly live as they are created to live. That is the end, the goal: leading others toward the good. That project is infinitely more important than the goals of leading people out of poverty, or giving them health insurance, or even providing them with medicine. One can truly live even when one is afflicted with illness or poverty. On the other hand, many people have no material needs but are walking dead.

So the end is to lead others to direct their wills toward the good. What means do we use to accomplish that end? In short, any means that do not destroy the good end toward which we are trying to lead. And here is our next important observation. There is nothing inherently or morally wrong with coercion. Indeed, coercion is often a very effective and morally permissible means of preventing harm and directing people toward the good. Parents rightly use coercion to discipline their children. Adults rightly coerce other adults to prevent them from committing suicide, homicide, rape, or other harmful acts. The State rightly coerces individuals -- juveniles and adults -- to prevent harms, including moral harms, by criminalizing and punishing a wide array of conduct, including narcotics use and possession, speeding, and perjury.

Evangelical Christians often come under attack for being coercive. We putatively attempt to "legislate morality," to create a "theocracy," to "impose" our "beliefs" on others. (The EM beat this straw man rather thoroughly.) Perhaps at the margins some evangelicals are guilty of trying to creat an evangelical nation, where those who do not bow the knee to an evangelical Jesus are punished or otherwise coerced. I know a lot of evangelicals. I don't know any evangelicals who have that vision for America.

So if coercion is not morally impermissible, is there ever any reason not to use it to accomplish good ends? Yes, but that reason is not a moral reason, it is a prudential reason. The Catholic philosopher Robert George has explained that some good ends are "reflexive," which means that they are goods only if freely chosen. The reflexive goods include friendship and religious practice. Coerced friendship is not friendship at all. Coerced religious practice is barren, devoid of true belief and adherence. The prudential reason to avoid coercion in defense of reflexive goods is that coercing someone to choose the good destroys the good itself, and is thus counter-productive.

Other goods are non-reflexive. These goods, which include beauty and human life, are good whether or not they are freely chosen. A beautiful symphony or sunset does not cease to be good simply because no one chooses to enjoy it. Human life has intrinsic value even when the person living that life wants to die. Sometimes it is permissible to engage in coercion in defense of non-reflexive goods. It is perfectly acceptable, morally and prudentially, to use coercion to prevent or punish murder, for example.

These observations suggest one reason why evangelicals ought to be civil in their civic speech and conduct. We want to persuade others to choose good ends, and only use coercion where necessary, morally permissible, and prudentially advisable. There are other reasons to be civil, including the rule that we ought to treat others as we would want to be treated. But the point here is that civility is important not for its own sake, but because civility is instrumentally valuable to accomplish an important evangelical goal: leading others to acceptance of the truth, and thereby helping them direct their will toward the good.

Millenials going for Obama

2008-05-12T10:12:00.003-04:00

More on a trend that we have observed here before:

Michael Dudley is the son of a preacher man.
He's a born-again Christian with two family members in the military. He grew up in the Bible Belt, where almost everyone he knew was Republican. But this fall, he's breaking a handful of stereotypes: He plans to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.

"I think a lot of Christians are having trouble getting behind everything the Republicans stand for," said Dudley, 20, a sophomore at Seattle Pacific University.

Dudley's disenchantment with the GOP isn't unique among young, devoutly Christian voters. According to a September 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 15 percent of white evangelicals between 18 and 29, a group traditionally a shoo-in for the GOP, say they no longer identify with the Republican Party. Older evangelicals are also questioning their traditional allegiance, but not at the same rate.

Read it all.

GOP must reinvent itself

2008-05-09T18:25:00.004-04:00

The high profile GOP losses in this week's special elections has the GOP looking for answers.

"The conference was shaken by the two losses," one House GOP leadership aide told Real Clear Politics. "We just couldn't get it done." The fallout has encouraged a brewing feud between House Majority Leader John Boehner and National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Tom Cole, two top Republicans who have spent much of the past year fighting. And while other Capitol Hill Republicans are almost unanimous in agreeing the trouble is not all Cole's fault, someone has to take the hit. "The two offices are positioning themselves to avoid blame or to lay blame," the aide said.

As I noted this week, there will be a changing of the guard post-November. It looks from the GOP aide quote above that the blame game is already amongst leadership circles is already in full effect. But lost amidst the positioning is the fact that there are answers for the here and now that the GOP should be able to see.

The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel points out that the big GOP loss in Louisiana should have been predictable. The GOP candidate was uninspired to say the least. The GOP needs to sell a different message. What message?

Strassel points to another election that took place this week in Louisiana. This was received no attention, but its importance for the GOP could be incalculable if the message could be adopted:

The 43-year-old Republican, Steve Scalise, had pinpointed today's GOP vulnerabilities, and ran an anti-status-quo campaign. His focal point was wasteful spending, and he touted his legislation to reform Louisiana's earmark process. Another hallmark was ethics reform and his fight against public corruption. He talked up competitive private health care, lower taxes and school choice.

Republicans looking for an Obama doppelganger would have been better served by his Democratic competitor, Gilda Reed. She campaigned on immediate withdrawal from Iraq and "universal" health care. Trade came in for a bashing, as did secret ballots in union-organizing elections. Ms. Reed explained she was personally pro-life, but felt abortion needed to remain legal. Her cause became that of the liberal left, with the Daily Kos hosting an online fund-raiser on her behalf. Mr. Scalise won 75% of the vote.

This is how the GOP should redefine itself.

More on the Evangelical Manifesto

2008-05-09T13:31:00.012-04:00

Well, I read the whole thing and I am as ambivalent about it as before. Not unmoved or apathetic, but ambivalent. There is much truth there, and much to commend. Civility in civic discourse, one of the main admonitions of the paper, is an under-valued virtue. Also, as the Manifesto teaches, evangelicals are defined not by political affiliations but by their commitment to the Gospel and to its Christ.

However, these admonitions respond to caricatures of evangelicals that are largely inaccurate or exaggerated. The truth is that most evangelicals (though certainly not all) are civil when discussing important issues with their intellectual opponents. The truth is that evangelicals do primarily define themselves theologically and not politically, especially conservative evangelicals.

So, the document ends up beating a straw man, scolding evangelicals for sins of which we are occasionally guilty but often innocent. Indeed, self-flagellation is the most prominent exercise of the authors. The list of transgressions (pages 11-13) is long: trumpeting a diluted Gospel; hypocrisy in our lifestyles; hypocrisy in our proselytization; hypocrisy in our fractiousness; hypocrisy in our (lack of) reliance upon God; hypocrisy in our materialism; hypocrisy in our environmental stewardship; syncretism; anti-intellectualism; racial segregation; catering to the rich and powerful; capitulation to postmodernism.

I am not suggesting that evangelicals are sinless. But that we are human, and therefore sinful, is not an instructive observation. Most of us gather that knowledge simply by looking around us.

Furthermore, by conceding stereotypes of evangelicals, succumbing to self-flagellation, and reducing our convictions to the lowest common denominator, the document in places celebrates all that is worst about evangelicalism. For example:

Yet far from being unquestioning conservatives and unreserved supporters of tradition and the status quo, being Evangelical means an ongoing commitment to Jesus Christ, and this entails innovation, renewal, reformation, and entrepreneurial dynamism, for everything in every age is subject to assessment in the light of Jesus and his Word. (page 10)

Well, yes. But why pick on conservatives? For every unquestioning conservative evangelical one can identify at least one unthinking liberal evangelical. Furthermore, tradition (and even the status quo) has enormous value. Indeed, evangelical aversion to tradition got us into this mess in the first place. There are so many disparate voices within evangelicalism, and so many evangelicals being blown about by winds of change, in large part because we have no Evangelical Magisterium, no unbroken chain of tradition and authority stretching back to the Apostles.

The "light of Jesus and his Word" means something very different to Os Guinness than it does to Jim Wallis. Indeed, notice that the Manifesto makes no attempt to define what that phrase means. If it did so, you would not see both of those signatures on it. I'm not being a papist here (okay, maybe a little), I'm merely observing that tradition, whether or not evangelical, or even Christian, or even theist, has significant meaning and value.

The Manifesto further disappoints by equivocating where it should stand firm. It commends our "biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn" and affirms the "holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman." (page 13) Those statements should precede a full stop. End of story. Shut off the lights on your way out.

However, in the same paragraph the document calls "for an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life." In particular, it lists the "global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emptiness."

This is extremely unfortunate. The fact is that almost no one other than Christians is today willing to defend the intrinsic value of human life and the intrinsic value of conjugal marriage. Abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, and polygamy are all significant, current moral issues about which Christian conviction is clear and on which Christians have something valuable to say qua Christians.

By contrast, nearly everyone in contemporary America is vehemently opposed to "conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emptiness." Our difference on those issues are not moral disagreements. Rather, liberals and conservatives (and others, such as libertarians) have prudential disagreements about how best to address those problems.

Disease, for example, is not a moral issue in America. Reasonable evangelicals all agree that Christians have a moral obligation to help the infirmed and, where possible, to prevent disease. We disagree about the best means to accomplish those goals. Those of us who adopt conservative views on these prudential questions are not guilty of carelessness toward the poor and the sick, nor are we engaging in single-issue politics merely because we distrust government. With this sort of language, the Manifesto renders itself impotent. The drafters had an opportunity to strike a blow for Christian principle, and they blew it.

On the other hand, the Manifesto is not completely watered down. It condemns in unequivocal language the "evils" of "genocide, slavery, female oppression, and assaults on the unborn." (page 18) It scolds reactionaries for their fundamentalism and "progressives" for their failure to conserve "what is true and right and good." (page 10)

So, as I stated at the outset, I am ambivalent. On balance, the Manifesto does not, in my mind, accomplish much, and it has the potential to do much harm, serving the relativism to which Wallis and his disciples have succumbed. After careful consideration, I have decided not to sign it. And that disappoints me, because I wanted to sign it. I have great respect for Guinness, Mark Noll, Alvin Platinga, and other signatories to the Manifesto. However, it appears that those voices were lost during crucial moments in the document's creation.

UPDATE: Scanning the list of those who have signed the document since its public release anneals my resolve not to sign. An Evangelical Manifesto that can command the assent of self-described wiccans and atheists is a document capable of infinite interpretations, so watered down as to have no real meaning.

Courts behaving like courts

2008-05-08T15:03:00.006-04:00

Imagine a state high court charged with interpreting a state constitutional amendment that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Imagine the court concluding that, under that provision, marriage is the union of one man and one woman. In other words, imagine a state supreme court interpreting the law, rather than legislating from the bench.

That is precisely what the Michigan Supreme Court did yesterday, when it ruled that a state constitutional amendment, which enshrines conjugal marriage in state law, prohibits state employers from providing marital benefits to same-sex couples. The court demonstrated how elementary is the judicial role. It began its analysis by observing, "The primary objective in interpreting a constitutional provision is to determine the original meaning of the provision to the ratifiers, 'we the people,' at the time of ratification."

Kudos to the high court of Michigan for its exposition of, and faithfulness to, originalism. Is it possible to require Justices Souter, Ginsberg, Breyer, and Stevens to sit under the tutelage of the Michigan Supreme Court for a term or two? The experience would benefit them immensely.

Preparing for a changing of the guard

2008-05-08T07:21:00.005-04:00

On Tuesday former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sounded the alarm. In a memo to Congressional Republicans Gingrich pleaded for a change of course. Without "real change," Gingrich wrote his colleagues, the GOP was sure to suffer "real disaster" at the polls this fall.

To his credit Gingrich outlined a legitimate agenda that he believes could be a rode map to electoral success. A moratorium on earmarks, promoting nuclear energy and promoting judges who will uphold the constitution were some highlights of the conservative agenda. Absent bold action on big issues, the GOP is toast.

Yesterday a round of stories popped up about the impending disaster with speculation about who may replace the current leadership team in the House. The Politico piece described "dark clouds hovering" over the current team of Boehner, Blunt and Cole. As their prospective replacements The Politico offered Eric Cantor, Adam Putnam, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. How Cantor and Putnam would not be tainted with the failures of the current team is beyond me. But perhaps they are far enough down on the totem pole that that can make a good argument to their colleagues that their advice was not heeded.

Interestingly no stories brought up the potential for new leadership in the Senate. If House leadership has been uninspired, Senate leadership has been downright counter productive at best, nefarious at worst. It seems to me that any significant GOP losses in November (which there will be) is a strong argument for housecleaning in both chambers.

The strongest argument for new leadership in November is being made right now. Newt Gingrich's plea has not been alone. Since the 2006 election conservative voices have been making the exact case that Gingrich did repeatedly. But the pleas have all fallen on deaf ears in leadership circles. To Boehner's credit, he has been somewhat more responsive than his Senate counterpart, but he still has lacked the courage to shake things up the way they must be.

So the continued denial of reality on the part of GOP congressional leadership should be damning in a post-2008 GOP bloodbath world.

As for Gingrich's very public scolding...I suspect this has more to do with laying the groundwork for a post-election coup than it does with actually changing course right now. Of course Gingrich would be happy if leadership took up his agenda and pushed it. But he knows full well that conservatives have been agitating within Congress for this kind of push for over a year. He also knows full well that there is zero desire within the House and Senate GOP caucuses to adopt a bold agenda. So putting the agenda out there now, along with the warning, is more about winning the argument in November.

Speaking of that argument, don't think the forces of the status quo are not preparing right now to win it as well. They will blame the Gingrich's of the world for causing division and detracting from the "message" (which has been, "we may be bad, but those evil Democrats are way worse." This doesn't exactly work in a political landscape where a generic Republican loses to a generic Democrat 55-32). They will point the finger at reformers in Congress too. All those pesky conservatives who forced the GOP to take votes on issues of conservative principle, thereby highlighting GOP abandonment of their foundational issues, will be blamed for losses.

Of course it is all insane, but they will do it.

It is imperative that conservatives be ready with their best arguments. The GOP cannot suffer through another congressional session with uninspired leadership. The Party cannot afford it. More importantly, the country cannot afford it.

The Manifesto manifests itself

2008-05-07T12:16:00.005-04:00

To much pomp and circumstance, it is released. Hugh Hewitt is less than enthused, calling it "pride going before a snooze." Between Two Worlds, which deems the document "imperfect" but "remarkable," has a summary.

We will no doubt comment once we have had the opportunity to read the thing. 7400 words is a lot of words and we have other work to do. Judging from the executive summary, there is not much to object to, but not much in particular to get excited about, either. We shall see...

McCain's advisors on judges

2008-05-07T10:27:00.004-04:00

One of the frequent and, I think, reasonable criticisms of John McCain is that he has not yet demonstrated a commitment to putting originalist judges on federal benches. In fact, with the Gang of Fourteen deal and his unfortunate comments about Justice Alito, McCain gave conservatives real reason to doubt his judgment on judicial picks.

I, for one, feel a little better now that McCain has announced the membership of his Judicial Advisory Committee. Chaired by Ted Olson and Sam Brownback, the Committee also includes pro-life and/or originalist stalwarts Gerry Bradley, Steven Calabresi, Rick Garnett, Robert George, Fred Thompson, and Eugene Volokh.

But wait! Is that Lindsey Graham I see in there? The Lindsey Graham who abetted McCain's abandonment of qualified, competent Bush nominees and undermined deployment of the Constitutional Option?

Let us hope the Committee makes its decisions by majority vote.

Professor Defarge

2008-05-07T09:57:00.005-04:00

This hilarious story appeared on the Journal Online a couple of days ago, but a friend just brought it to my attention. As often happens when American professors open their mouths or put pen to paper, Professor of "French Narrative Theory," Priya Venkatesan, made herself a laughingstock when she threatened to sue her former students because their anti-intellectualism allegedly violated her civil rights. A sample, a soupcon, if you will, of her comedy routine:

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways."

I work in academia. Yes, these people really exist and no, we conservatives don't have to make them up. I recently received a draft program for a scholarly conference I will soon attend. With genuine anticipation I opened the program scanning for workshops in my subject area. To my chagrin, I found them. The description of one workshop began by denying that gender is biological and declaiming that social science has now proven "that gender is not fixed; rather, it is variable and negotiable." It went on to complain, "The hegemonic masculinity is the culturally dominant masculinity."

Um, yeah. As a friend is fond of pointing out, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.

"Religious Right" still integral

2008-05-06T08:37:00.002-04:00

An interesting read from USA Today:

With the deaths of prominent evangelical pastors Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy last year, funeral bells began tolling for the Religious Right. Political columnist E.J. Dionne wrote Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, and theologian Jim Wallis offered The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. Even religious and civil liberties attorney John Whitehead, who assisted Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, joined the chorus with an article titled, "The Passing of the Christian Right."
These reports are at the very least premature, and in all likelihood dead wrong. High-profile leaders will come and go, but the strength and commitment of conservative Christians on the front lines of parish life are as strong as ever.

Jihadists: Legal Division

2008-05-05T18:12:00.002-04:00

Brooke Goldstein has a great piece detailing the "legal division" of the jihadist movement.

Here's a taste:

The Islamist movement has two wings – one violent and one lawful, which can operate apart but often reinforce each other. While the violent arm attempts to silence speech by burning cars when cartoons of Mohammed are published in Denmark, the lawful arm is skillfully maneuvering within Western legal systems, both here and abroad.

Islamists with financial means have launched a "legal Jihad," filing frivolous and malicious lawsuits with the aim of abolishing public discourse critical of Islam and with the goal of establishing principles of Sharia law (strict Islamic law dating back to the 9th Century) as the governing political and legal authority in the West.

Islamist Lawfare is often predatory, filed without a serious expectation of winning, and undertaken as a means to intimidate, demoralize and bankrupt defendants. The lawsuits range in their claims from defamation to workplace harassment and they have resulted in books being pulped and meritorious articles going unpublished.

Goldstein is right on point. The jihadists are sharp and perpceptive. As long as the surest way to end political debate in this country is to yell "racist," or "sexist," the jihadists will use that same tactic against us. The reaction to this movement needs to be measured but forceful. It need not--and should not--turn into a barrage of anti-Islam rhetoric. However, the contrast between the Islamist vision for the world (coereced adherence to Islam) and the West's vision (renewed commitment to religious freedom and pluralism) needs to be made again and again. If only so we don't forget the stakes.

The Catholic divide

2008-05-05T16:20:00.002-04:00

Meanwhile, there appears increasing evidence that a substantial bloc of the Catholic vote will follow Doug Kmiec into Obama's camp this year. That would be a shame. Unlike evangelicals, Catholics have recently stood firmly for orthodoxy and the intrinsic value of human life and marriage.

If these trends continue, and Obama wins the presidency, a lot of evangelicals and Catholics will soon regret the part they played in his election.

Manifesto Destiny

2008-05-05T15:39:00.004-04:00

It is not worth speculating on the contents of the so-called "Evangelical Manifesto" that Os Guiness, Richard Mouw, Rick Warren, and other evangelical leaders will release later this week. Various accounts portray the document as either a call for evangelicals to withdraw from political engagement on behalf of conservative causes or an attempt to pull evangelicalism even farther left (and therefore away from orthodoxy) than it has drifted in recent months. Until the mysterious missive is made public, the fragmentary evidence of its argument will not support fair inferences.

However, the advance marketing of the Manifesto itself raises questions. Whether Guiness et al have intentionally created an aura of exclusion and secrecy or merely done so clumsily and unintentionally, they have created a distasteful impression. Like a self-appointed college of cardinals of the evangelical church, they meet in clandestine quarters choosing who will receive an invitation to join their deliberations. Apparently they expect evangelicals to wait with bated breath for the white smoke and the declaration, "Habemus Papum!"

If that was the intent, the effect on this evangelical has been the opposite. I am growing increasingly skeptical and will greet the document not with jubilation but with a critical eye.

On being a permanent minority Party

2008-05-05T08:23:00.003-04:00

The feckless Republicans are still at it:

Operating outside public view, the House Democratic majority is taking extraordinary steps to maintain spending as usual while awaiting the arrival of a Democratic president. Remarkably, the supine House Republican minority hardly resists and even collaborates with its supposed adversaries.
There has been little public Republican protest over the seizure of the appropriating process by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her clique. For the second year, no appropriations bill other than defense is scheduled for passage. Instead, spending details are crafted in the speaker's office, negating President Bush's veto strategy. In a little-noticed maneuver on April 23, Pelosi won passage of a bill preventing billions from being saved through Bush administration Medicaid regulations. Despite the GOP leadership's nominal opposition, House Republicans voted 2 to 1 for higher spending.
Adding in Pelosi's unprecedented tactics in blocking the Colombian free trade agreement, she has in 16 months established herself as one of the most powerful speakers ever. The stunning aspect of Czar Nancy's rule is the degree of Republican acquiescence. Neither the loss of their House majority in 2006 after 12 years nor the prospect of more losses this November has toughened the Republicans.

House Republicans had another chance last Thursday to demonstrate interest in restoring their anti-waste credentials. Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona offered a proposal to keep the individual limit on direct farm payments at the current $40,000 instead of raising it to $60,000, as the House did earlier. The state of the GOP is indicated by the fact that even though Flake's proposal failed, the 104 to 86 supporting vote by Republicans was seen as progress. Voting against it were Blunt, Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam and Republican campaign chairman Tom Cole.

Sadly, this is par for the course in Congress. It is why I keep saying their must be wholesale change in personnel. New faces with new voices need to be elected to Republican leadership. The current leadership structures within the GOP are incapable of putting forth a compelling vision for conservative governance. They are incapable because they are part and parcel with the old regimes that have been part of the corruption and complacence that the American people now overwhelmingly associate with the Republican Party.

As much as I bristle at the thought of strengthened majorities for liberal post-2008, I do think (hope is probably the better term) the GOP congressional bloodbath at the polls will provide a window of opportunity for conservative reformers to push the Party in the right direction.

More bailouts

2008-05-05T08:15:00.001-04:00

The Wall Street Journal has been all over this:

Congratulations! You and your fellow taxpayers will soon be the proud owners of a multibillion-dollar portfolio of student loans. And a leading Member of Congress promises that this pretty bundle of debt comes to you with no cost and no risk. President Bush apparently agrees.

St. Thomas and Planned Parenthood

2008-05-02T10:29:00.007-04:00

Thomas Mengler, the dean of St. Thomas Law School, has rightly decided not to extend volunteer credit to a student for working at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

"I view myself as responsible for promoting and protecting our institutional identity, including but not limited to our Catholic identity," Mengler said Thursday. "Our law school clearly has a faith mission."

Two aspects of this story, which the author brushes past, seem worth remarking upon. First, note that St. Thomas requires its students to perform volunteer service. The Star-Tribune attempts to bury this telling fact. Service is as prominent a component of the school's Catholic mission as its defense of innocent human life. However, it is a component for which liberal MSM outlets like the Trib are not prepared to give credit.

Second, Mengler's decision is unlikely to earn him friends in the legal academy. Most legal scholars disparage defense of the unborn, as they disparage defense of traditional institutions such as conjugal marriage, as theocratic, dogmatic, and irrational. Kudos to Mengler, who unlike a certain wimpy element within Christendom (against which I often inveigh), cares much more about unborn humans than he does about receiving an invitation to the cocktail party.

Add St. Thomas to my ealier list of law schools for aspiring conservative lawyers to consider. (And while we're at it, throw in BYU in the Mountain West.)

McCain's Health Care Proposal

2008-05-01T15:55:00.005-04:00

Today on NRO, John McCain sets out his health care proposal. To my inexpert eye, the proposal seems to incorporate the best learning on this subject from the last several years. (I am curious to know what our resident economists think.)

The centerpiece of the proposal is individualized tax credits, which would supplement the credits currently granted to employers who insure their employees. A taxpayer who chooses the individual credit would be free to choose an insurer, to whom the credit would be paid on the taxpayers behalf. The system is designed to increase competition, with its attendant increase in quality and decrease in cost, while also increasing access.

Tax credits, which directly reduce tax liability, are more valuable than tax deductions, which reduce taxable income and thus only indirectly reduce tax liability. However, neither a credit nor a deduction is much use to someone who pays no taxes. Many of the poorest Americans have no tax liability. It is not clear how McCain's tax credit might benefit them. On the other hand, the poorest Americans are often eligible for Medicaid, and have their basic health care needs covered through that federal welfare program.

Kudos to McCain for a promising proposal. The man looks more conservative by the week.

Time to rebrand

2008-05-01T08:42:00.002-04:00

Nothing short of wholesale change will turn this around:

Only 27% of voters have positive views of the Republican Party, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the lowest level for either party in the survey's nearly two-decade history.

The leadership in the Republican Party has driven it into the ground. New leaders across the board need to be put forward. The House, the Senate and the White House...they have all failed the Party.

There are some up and comers in the Party with good ideas. The problem is their ideas are stifled by leadership structures and actors who exist to perpetuate the corrupt and tired status quo. Maybe after Congressional Republicans get their rears handed to them in November there will be some movement to shake things up.

A one-of-a-kind sucker

2008-04-30T10:55:00.004-04:00

Powerline has a great summary of the interview Wolf Blitzer conducted yesterday with our Elder National Disgrace, Jimmy Carter. Incredibly, Carter admitted that Hamas double-crossed him, promising to him in private one thing then declaiming the opposite in public. Yet somehow Carter still managed to blame it all on Israel.

The first line in the post is the best line in the post. "There's a sucker born every minute... but a sucker like Jimmy Carter comes along only once or twice in a century."

Where has this been all along?

2008-04-30T08:17:00.003-04:00

This video of President Bush pushing back against MSM idiocy on the war is solid. If only he could show these colors more often.

Hat Tip: Hot Air

Republicans and Crime

2008-04-29T10:01:00.004-04:00

William Stuntz has posted some interesting data he uncovered during his research into the growth in prison populations that has occurred in the U.S. over the last thirty-five years. Contrary to type, Democratic governors tend to oversee disproportionately large (relative to national averages during the same time periods) increases in prison populations, while Republican governors tend to preside over disproportionately small increases or even decreases. Stuntz concludes that the common explanation for the putative over-population of America's prisons -- it's the fault of evil conservatives -- is wrong. Stuntz allows that he has not completed his research and that additional data might turn out to run contrary to this trend.

(Stuntz begins his post with the assertion, "Pretty much everyone—Republican or Democrat, right or left—familiar with America’s criminal justice system agrees that our prison population is far too large." That assertion simply is not true. Perhaps Stuntz means to say that everyone in his elite circle of acquaintance who is familiar the criminal justice system agrees with that proposition.)

The data is not self-explanatory, and causation in this case is necessarily a matter of speculation. Stuntz offers his own explanation. He posits that Democrats hoping to appeal to swing voters, who are mostly white and working-class, must appear tough on criminals, and black criminals in particular, and so must put more blacks in prison. Meanwhile Republicans, who are reputed to be tough on crime, must merely pay lip service to law enforcement.

This explanation rests in part on the supposition that at least some, if not most, imprisoned persons do not belong in prison. Stuntz, like many liberals, seems to assume that some large portion of prison residents in the United States are not at all culpable. This is unlikely, to say the least.

Another intepretation of Stuntz's data, at least equally as reasonable, is that Democratic policies result in higher crime, and therefore result in higher prison populations. This interpretation is consistent with studies that demonstrate links between welfare dependency and crime, fatherlessness and crime, and divorce and crime. Democrats are the champions of welfare entitlements, higher tax burdens, and regulations that retard economic development. And they are doing everything in their power to undermine the traditional family, advocating for same-sex marriage and no-fault divorce, and opposing parental consent prerequisites to abortion.

In any event, kudos to Stuntz for conducting this research, which is sure to rub many in the academy the wrong way.

McCain's Faith

2008-04-29T09:20:00.003-04:00

The LA Times writes today about John McCain's faith:

Not long after he became the presumed Republican nominee, John McCain flew to New Orleans to face a skeptical audience -- conservative leaders of the Council for National Policy.

A questioner zeroed in on a topic McCain rarely addresses on the campaign trail, asking him to explain his faith in God.

McCain, an Episcopalian who attends a Baptist church in Phoenix, turned to a well-worn tale of the guard he met when he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The man once loosened the ropes binding McCain, and later shared his Christian faith with McCain by silently sketching a cross in the prison yard with his sandal.

The story played well in an ad before the New Hampshire primary, but it was deeply disappointing to many at the New Orleans gathering, conservative activist Richard Viguerie recalled.

"He blew that question off by telling us about the faith of his jailer," said Viguerie. "It was very obvious to those three or four hundred conservative leaders there. . . . The vast, vast majority of them were either sitting on the sidelines or unenthusiastic about his impending nomination and he didn't move a single person."

McCain's reticence about raising the subject of his faith in public is all the more noticeable as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have spoken up about their beliefs as they campaign for the Democratic nomination.

The secular language of McCain's speeches, often rooted in patriotic themes of duty, honor and service, is also a striking contrast to that of President Bush, who bonded with evangelicals by threading religious language through his speeches and speaking about how faith rescued him from his struggles with drinking.

I am torn here. I don't think there is anything wrong with weaving the language of faith into your policy speeches like Bush did. If that is who you are as a candidate fine. On the other hand, we see where some of this language led in real policy terms. "Compassionate conservatism" became nothing more than big-government conservatism that spent way too much while achieving far too little (typical of anything big government-related).

If McCain shies away from that, good for him. And unlike some evangelicals, I do not feel the need to be placated by the stump speeches of political candidates.

Champions of self-aggrandizement

2008-04-28T10:43:00.005-04:00

Prominent Catholic statesmen, euphemistically called "pro-choice," who support a right to abort unborn human persons have no business ingesting the transubstantiated body of Christ at mass. That is not my polemical assertion but rather the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Bob Novak notes today that the archbishops of New York and Washington DC, eager not to cause offense, have violated this prohibition, serving communion to Ted Kennedy and Rudy Guliani, among others.

Many non-Catholics read Catholic teachings through their own consequentialist lenses. They wrongly attribute to the Catholic Church the intent to exact vengeance on pro-choice pols, or to dissuade them from voting in favor of reproductive "rights." The Catholic view of communion is that the elements actually become Christ's body and blood. Abortion is a moral issue, on which there is a correct position and a clearly wrong position. To support the destruction of innocent human life is to live unrepentant in sin, and to reject Christ's grace. Thus, denying Ted or Rudy communion is not pursuit of a vendetta but rather an exercise in holiness.

Meanwhile, Ted and Rudy like to pretend that they are still Catholic, that their Catholicism means something to them, as it does for their constituents. To be invited to the Pope's mass and given a seat of honor there is to be acknowledged as an important American Catholic. It is to receive the imprimatur of a Church whose compassion, defense of truth and life, and righteousness Ted and Rudy despise.

Trampling the grace of Christ for personal aggrandizement should be unthinkable for prominent Catholics. Did Ted even pay heed to the Pope's admonition to cultivate an intellectual culture that is truly Catholic?

Rebate checks coming soon

2008-04-28T08:14:00.004-04:00

What will Americans spend their tax rebate checks on? NBC news investigates (click image to watch):

In the meantime, who could not have seen this coming. Retail outlets are already starting their "stimulus" sales. Here is a screen grab from the Restoration Hardware website:

CNN shows its bias

2008-04-25T12:37:00.002-04:00

Kudos to the group Americans for Prosperity for catching CNN on this one: