Andrew Tallman Show Articles

The Real Solyndra Scandal: Government Throwing Billions at Loser Technology

2011-09-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Everyone is focusing on how Solyndra wasn’t overseen properly or was an example of government corruption or business mismanagement. That’s not the big point. The real issue is that the federal government is a terrible platform for funding new technology.

First, the reason Solyndra failed was because Chinese production has radically driven down the price of photovoltaic cell solar systems (PV). Solyndra’s projected savings from their innovative cell design weren’t enough to keep up, so they went bankrupt.

Second, the entire solar industry knows that the PV price drop is vital, which is why they are all abandoning the much more costly “solar-thermal” approach (ST) which uses mirror systems to concentrate light on water storage of heat. At current rates, ST systems can generate energy at 27 cents per kilowatt hour versus just 17 cents for PV systems.

That’s why in the past two months, two of the largest loan guarantees offered by the Department of Energy have been abandoned or declined. Solar Millenium AG (Germany) walked away from a $2.1 billion guarantee because they wanted to pursue PV instead of ST, and Solar Trust declined to accept another $2.1 billion guarantee because the CEO (Uwe T. Schmidt) knew that accepting it would require him to keep working on ST at a time when he saw the future for that technology imploding. So he sought private financing instead to preserve the flexibility to switch to PV.

Then, just yesterday, the Department of Energy announced it is giving $737 million (Solyndra was only $535) in guarantees to Tonopah Solar (subsidiary of Solar Reserve) to develop a solar-thermal field in Nevada! Bloomberg even went so far as to say it’s like they’re having a solar Betamax moment, supporting a potentially superior technology that the market is abandoning.

In part, this is because the tiny DoE is overwhelmed with processing these applications. In part it’s because government is not nimble enough to adapt to shifting market situations, especially since the approval process takes a long time. And largely this is because their $40 billion funding mandate expires Sept 30 and they’re rushing like crazy to get the funds out the door before they go away.

So the big story here is how incompetent and wasteful big government funding of new technology looks. The Solyndra thing is a drop in the bucket compared to everything the DoE is hurriedly doing right now.

Links:

Bloomberg 09/20/11: “Obama $8 Billion Solar ‘Betamax’ Undercut as China Backs Rival Technology.”

Washington Post 09/26/11: “Some clean-energy firms found US loan-guarantee program a bad bet.” My headline…The Solyndra that wasn’t…

The Hill 09/28/11: “Energy Department approves $1 billion in solar energy loan guarantees” …to solar-thermal companies.

Business Week 09/22/11: “Real Solyndra scandal is US approach to energy subsidies.”

BusinessGreen.com 09/29/11: “DoE hands out $1 Bn in loan guarantees, as Solyndra scandal rumbles on.”

If Only He Were A "Do-Nothing" President!

2011-09-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

According to the New York Times, one part of President Obama’s new jobs proposal will make it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of them being currently unemployed. This is perhaps the epitome of Obama’s liberalism: A heartfelt kindness that can only produce disastrous results.

Imagining that this absurd rule actually passes Congress, what would it look like in the real world? When unemployment status becomes a protected category, how would a company which failed to hire an unemployed person disprove a claim they discriminated against him on that basis? Typically, when something is a protected status, the way you defend yourself against lawsuits is by making questions about that topic forbidden in any format. But how would that flesh itself out in the application process?

Would resumes now become impossible because they tell the history of a candidate’s employment? Would all application forms need to be revised to avoid requiring work history or current work status? Would interviewers no longer be allowed to ask any question in this direction? Will failure to get a job as an unemployed person become prima facie grounds to file a lawsuit?

The real boon to jobs from this requirement wouldn’t be all the new jobs for the unemployed, but all the new jobs for unemployed lawyers which the flood of lawsuits generated will inevitably create. In fact, given the dangers, this looks to be one of the most counterproductive laws imaginable as firms which might be teetering between hiring or not will opt against it simply because of the legal dangers involved. Just ask yourself whether this new rule increases or decreases the risks and costs involved in choosing to hire a new person. If it increases them, what effect on new hiring will it actually have?

This is a classic example of a well-intended idea that cannot possibly work in the real world of actual employment. That’s why in politics there are always at least four basic questions a federal legislator must ask:

1. Do we have a legitimate and decent goal?

2. Is it Constitutionally permitted?

3. Do we have a practically feasible way to make progress toward it in a way that won’t cost more than it’s worth?

4. Will our particular solution be politically viable with the electorate?

And if the answer to any of these questions comes out wrong, you don’t do it. But again, we see this President’s unbelievably arrogant approach to the economy which says that the biggest problem with it is a lack of sufficient tinkering by him, when in fact the one major economic problem right now is precisely the neverending tinkering which Mr. Obama just can’t seem to stop himself from doing.

Every new twist only compounds the already skittish mood of businesses who don’t know what unexpected wrinkle to expect next, and hence, in reaction to Obama’s overactivity, they remain static. If he would just sit still and do absolutely nothing for about six months, they might come out of their shell and start taking some risks again rather than being driven even farther into them by yet another terrifying risk for choosing to expand with new hires.

Please, Mr. President, won’t you seriously consider simply doing nothing...absolutely nothing…for at least half a year? It’s the only approach to this economy which you have been unwilling to actually try yet. And as such, it may be the most radical proposal you could embrace.

One Nation Under NBC?

2011-06-30T20:34:00.000-07:00

Published 07.03.2011 at Townhall and Crosswalk.

Let me begin by saying that although I enjoy playing golf, I don’t generally watch it on television. So, I didn’t personally see NBC’s double-butchering of the Pledge of Allegiance last week during the US Open broadcast. But having since watched it, I believe I see this fiasco a bit differently from many of my fellow religionists.

For the unaware, NBC began its coverage of the event with a montage of children saying the Pledge interspersed with military-patriotic imagery, the final version of which aired twice and without the phrase “under God.” The Web erupted with indignation, and three hours later NBC interrupted the program to issue this apology:

“We began our coverage of this final round just about three hours ago and when we did it was our intent to begin the coverage of this U.S. Open Championship with a feature that captured the patriotism of our national championship being held in our nation’s capital for the third time. Regrettably, a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance that was in that feature was edited out. It was not done to upset anyone and we’d like to apologize to those of you who were offended by it.”

Despite the quick turnaround, some Christians were still not impressed, noting ruefully that even the apology refused to identify the words “under God” as the linguistic casualty. They have responded with blog posts, petition drives, and the customary hand-wringing laments about hell and handbaskets.

So, should we be outraged? Should we see this as yet another attempt by the “vast secular conspiracy” to suppress religion in America? I think not.

First, the most obvious task preceding any response is a genuine effort to understand the event itself. What really led to this happening? And as I see it, there are three possibilities:

Scenario 1: The evil, godless Satan-worshippers at NBC concocted this scheme to eradicate religion by desecrating America’s Pledge of Allegiance before a worldwide audience.

What is the evidence for this scenario? Well, obviously, the fact that for years secularists have been trying to remove “under God” and any other theistic reference from the Pledge and every public space. Moreover, we know that TV people are all evil and hate Jesus and anyone who loves Him. That’s why they manipulated these children (children, mind you!) into saying the Pledge in their twisted One World Government atheistic way.

There are at least two problems with this argument. The first is that the version as aired didn’t only remove “under God.” It also removed “indivisible.” The children said, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation…with liberty and justice for all.” In the second version, they also omitted “one nation.” And if we are going to believe these alterations were deliberate, we have to decipher the other secret agenda for NBC: a radical plan to divide America back into separate, more easily-conquered States by extinguishing the concept of unity from our public consciousness! The big defect with Scenario 1 is that it fails to comprehend how truly extensive the scope of NBC’s secret plot really is….or not.

The other problem is that NBC came back on the very same broadcast with an apology, which is where Scneario 1 gets dicey from a logic perspective. On the one hand, its advocates believe there is some evil and elaborate anti-religious agenda manifesting itself. But if so, why the apology? I mean, if you’re going to announce your anti-God vision of America by deliberately changing the Pledge in this way, why the quick retraction? And, to belabor the point, why deliberately omit the other phrases, too?

Would critics have us believe that NBC did all this on purpose to be noticed and yet also have us believe they are so cowardly as to run away at the first Tweet of danger? Or perhaps NBC just underestimated how many people would respond angrily? What did the conversation in this meeting sound like?

NBC 1: “Hey, you guys wanna edit out ‘under God’ from the Pledge Sunday?”

NBC 2: “Great idea. Let’s take out ‘indivisible’ and ‘one nation,’ too. I hate unity.”

NBC 3: “Do you think anyone will notice?”

NBC 1: “I hope so. That’s the whole point. We need to get God off the airwaves once and for all. I think Americans will love our new, edited version of the Pledge.”

NBC 2: “We should definitely use children to do this. That won’t anger anyone.”

NBC 1: “And besides, those religious freaks who want ‘under God’ in the Pledge never get angry about anything anyhow. We want them to notice, and those weaklings will just go away quietly like they always do.”

NBC 3: “This is a really good plan, you guys. I’m psyched.”

Needful to say, this is much easier to imagine in my head than to believe occurred in reality. Thus, to accept Scenario 1 (given the quick apology) we have to believe NBC is led by people who are simultaneously bold subversives, total fools, and terrific cowards. To be honest, such enemies (if they are) don’t frighten me much.

Scenario 2: A small secret cell of evil, godless Satan-worshippers within NBC somehow smuggled this video into the broadcast booth and aired it on their own initiative.

If so, I find the quick apology for their misbehavior by NBC officials far more reassuring than any worry I draw from the behavior of their insubordinates. And remember that the level of ineptitude shown by omitting “indivisible” in addition to “under God” and then “one nation” in the other version should reassure us about the overall danger from activists with such weak technological skills.

Scenario 3: Somebody made two really unlucky editing blunders that weren’t caught until after the broadcast went live. Then, it took about three hours on a Sunday for the chain of command to be apprised and implement a coherent response.

I work in broadcasting. I make editing errors. Not all the time, but it’s amazing how easy it is to snip the wrong piece out of some production piece and not catch it until it’s too late. It just happens. And it happens more when you’re under time constraints and deadlines…the sort of pressure which I can only presume might have been involved here. Again, knowing how broadcasting often works, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone came up with the idea for the kids only a day or two prior, then decided it would be cool to mix them with the other images Saturday evening, and the whole thing just got botched by final air time Sunday morning. Not only would this explain the omission of “under God,” but it obviously does the best job of explaining the curious omission of “indivisible” and “one nation” as well.

I know this scenario isn’t very satisfying to the well-cultivated appetite some of us have for finding a demonic conspiracy under every hint of irreligiosity. But it certainly seems to fit the totality of the facts better than either of the other two.

But let’s imagine for just a moment that we can’t be so sure. Hypothetically, let’s suppose the montage had in fact cleanly omitted only “under God” rather than the other words, rendering the demonic conspiracy view much more viable. How should we as Christians respond then?

My Bible has a simple rule for situations like this. It says, “Do undo others as you would have them do unto you.” And one of the most obvious-but-neglected applications of that moral injunction is to give other people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. If we can interpret them charitably, we should do so until we must go the other way. We should leap to generosity, not to condemnation.

I know one of the most discouraging things I experience as a broadcaster and columnist is the feeling that critics haven’t merely disagreed with me, but deliberately, even maliciously hunted for any and every opportunity to do so. Some people seem so itchy for war that any flicker of movement elicits a fire mission.

Knowing how unpleasant it is to be treated this way, I always try to understand the people with whom I disagree and represent them fairly. Oh sure, I routinely fail at this, but when I do, the shortcoming is with me, not with the core moral principle of my faith.

You see, it isn’t just a matter of kindness to prefer believing that some unlucky video editor at NBC made the blunder of a lifetime. It’s also a matter of making civilization function. Society requires people to be flexible and forgiving, not strident and contemptuous. Who wants to live in a world where people routinely presume the worst about you? But it’s even more important than that.

As a Christian, my response to events like this reflects directly on my religious cause. If I accuse someone of too little, I can always come back later with a stronger response if I must. But if I overreach with a nuclear blast at the outset and it turns out he merely blundered, I don’t merely look like a fool. I also shame the God whose generosity and grace are widely known emulative obligations of His followers. We can either present ourselves as petulant, impossible-to-please brats, or we can walk in the peace and mercy of Christ. We cannot do both.

And so as a matter of moral principle, as a matter of social necessity, and as a matter of representing my faith honorably, I choose to forgive NBC for a mistake they immediately apologized for. Even if it wasn’t a mistake, I side with the Manhattan Declaration blogger who said, “When a company makes a bad decision and immediately apologizes for it, we should recognize the apology more so than the offense.”

But there is one final morsel of public relations insight here which I think all too many of my fellow Christians will miss if I don’t mention it.

We live in a culture which is not persuaded best by anger and outrage. Instead, we live in a culture which is moved by compassion for those who are hurt. This means that if you really want to have traction with America today, the most effective response is to display anguish, not fury.

Anger may feel better, more self-righteous, more authentic. But you really must ask yourself whether your response to some (even serious) offense is meant to make you feel better about what you have said or to actually have persuasive impact with those Americans who don’t already agree with you. If the former, then outrage away with the same lack of results we’ve come to expect. But if the latter, then condition yourselves to show vulnerability and sorrow. Instead of saying how angry you are about the Pledge being distorted, say how much it hurts you to have something you love so dearly be mistreated in this way. Twitter rage may have generated an apology, but online sadness would have gotten real media attention.

When Tracy Morgan recently said some quite horrendous things about gays, the media response was amazingly hegemonic. Every outlet seemed on instinct to do the exact same thing. They found people (celebrities, gays, ordinary citizens) and asked them “How did his comments hurt you?” No one got angry. Everyone was sad. Hurt. Downcast. And I don’t for a moment mean to imply this was staged or not genuine.

But I do want you to notice that people listened. That’s because our culture responds to sorrow more than to indignation. And if I have to be honest, I find this praiseworthy. If anything, it means that sympathy is our surplus. A dangerous, easily manipulated, emotion-driven surplus, to be sure. But that’s the reality. You can ignore it, try to change it, or accept it and work within it to make yourself effective. Despise President Clinton all you like, but he beat all the angry Republicans with a simple show of public sadness.

You see, Americans despise bullies, and angry people always give off the aroma of a bully. Sad people, on the other hand, are victims. And victims get sympathy. This observation itself may make you angry. If so, that’s alright. Just don’t bother expressing it. No one will pay attention if you do.

To Whom Does Gail Collins Pray?

2011-03-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

Published 03.22.11 at Townhall.

Gail Collins began her March 9th column by saying, “It’s been nearly nine weeks since that tragic shooting in Tucson, and you may be wondering whether there’s been any gun legislation proposed in the aftermath.”

I hadn’t been, actually.

But I do find it illuminating that Gail Collins had been and that she clearly thought this so normal as to assume her readers had been as well. “Of course we should expect stricter gun laws after a shooting like this. A bad thing happened, and every bad thing should be solved by government, in this case government censorship of guns.” And our collective obstinacy against passing such laws is terribly frustrating to her.

I think I understand why.

Even though I haven’t read enough columns by Gail Collins to say whether she believes in God, I have read enough to be absolutely certain she believes in Government. And her vision of Government is of an entity so powerful and wise that if only we shaped It properly, there would be no problems in the world, at least not serious ones like mass shootings.

You see, for the Governmentist, bad things only happen when the Law isn’t right yet. Consequently, when a really bad thing like the Tucson murders happens, her first response is to cry out in anguish, “Why, Government? Why did You let this happen?” Then, she instinctively seeks to add new laws so that such a thing will never happen again.

So when other (less devout) believers in Government don’t cooperate, she turns to her newspaper column in anger at their impurity of doctrine. In essence she scolds, “How dare you keep Government from creating heaven on Earth? Where’s your faith? You should be ashamed of yourselves!” Because Government is her functional God (promising to save her and the rest of us from whatever ails), she can’t help but instinctively react to a major crime this way.

Conservatives and libertarians, however, approach things differently.

We know that history teaches a simple lesson: bad things happen. They have always happened. And they always will happen so long as people are sinful. Even really bad things like mass murder and poverty and letting conservatives host radio shows will always be with us. And this isn’t necessarily evidence that government is too small or not functioning properly. Oh, to be sure, it can be evidence of that in some cases. But it usually isn’t.

That’s because there are far more factors involved in any serious crime than just a failure of government. Moreover, as hard as it may be for Governmentists to comprehend, there may have been no failure of government at all!

Any crime is the result of a variety of causes including but not limited to: education, genetics, parenting, social treatment, friends (or lack thereof), religion (or lack thereof), internalized sense of virtue, financial hardship (or excess), altered brain chemistry, peer pressure, dangerous ideas, a weak moral culture, psychological disorder, access to the instruments of crime, failure of others to notice warning signs and/or intervene, and (my own personal favorite) individual free will.

It’s incredibly rare that any one of these factors is solely or even mostly to blame for any particular crime, and you’ll notice that government isn’t even featured on the list. But if we do include government, it offers two main entries: inadequate police prevention and permitting too much freedom. Since police are primarily punitive rather than preventative, the remaining big governmental “defect” factoring into most crime is the existence of freedom.

And that’s the real point Governmentists miss: Just like any other problem in society, crime is primarily the result of people misusing their freedom.

I’ll say it again because it’s really important to grasp this point.

Just like any other problem in society, crime is primarily the result of people misusing their freedom.

See, there are only two ways to have no crime. The first is to have morally perfect people. History and theology tell us this is not a reasonable expectation because such people exist only in theory or the afterlife. The second is to give real, morally flawed people very little or no freedom. But this means taking freedom away from everybody, since it’s notoriously difficult to know precisely which ones are dangerous until after they’ve actually done something bad.

And what makes matters worse is that the government itself is made up of people: real, morally flawed people. Since bad people with power are capable of far greater evil than bad people without it, our country is predicated on the belief that we have more to fear from sinners in government than we do from sinners with personal freedom.

Remember, the government has guns, too. And their misuse of them in history has been exponentially worse than anything private individuals have done. But because Gail Collins has unshakeable faith in the inherent goodness of Government, she doesn’t mind trusting It’s guns. As for me, I’d rather take my chances with the Jared Loughners of the world.

Because we advocates of limited government know that some people will often misuse freedom and that all people will sometimes misuse it, we aren’t really all that surprised by the occurrence of evil in our society, even serious evil. Nor is our first impulse to respond by taking action through government to solve a problem that may not be solvable at all, let alone by government.

Our first impulse is to lament the evil that occurred. But our second impulse is to remember that the occurrence of evil is the evidence of freedom. Problems in society, while bad, are the one unequivocal proof that freedom has been given to morally flawed citizens. Therefore, even though we hate seeing people suffer, we know that problems, even major problems, are a normal part of the human condition.

That’s why only coming in third for us is the impulse to ask whether something needs to be done to prevent future, similar evils from occurring. And even when we eventually ask that question, we always keep in mind that there are many, many, many, many factors that contribute to evil, only one of which is the lack of proper legislation.

And if, at the distant end of a long process of consideration, we do finally get to the place where it seems like new laws might be the right response, we first check ourselves to be sure we aren’t fantasizing that better laws can solve all evil AND we force ourselves to ask whether the solution might not create more problems than it cures.

Any doctor will tell you that medicine always carries side effects. So the trick is to prescribe a remedy which makes the body healthier enough to offset any sickness that the medicine itself will cause. Sadly, sometimes, there’s just no available drug with greater net benefits than taking no drug at all. Knowing this, a good doctor will often respond to even severe symptoms by saying, “Go home. Rest. Drink plenty of fluids, and wait a few days. It’ll probably take care of itself. Even healthy people get sick sometimes.”

Failing to understand this, the Governmentist in Gail Collins responds to any major crime by demanding the better legislation which can finally turn our society into the happily-ever-after place proper Government always creates. Their political malpractice thus comes from an inability to distinguish between the sort of disordered freedom which does lead to many serious problems and the far more common perfectly healthy freedom which also inevitably leads to at least some serious problems. And since freedom is always by definition the casualty of more government, sometimes (but not every time) the best new law is to make no new law at all.

Who Is Most To Blame For The Shootings?

2011-01-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

Published 01.17.11 at Townhall and 01.18.11 at Crosswalk.

This is the right question.

Sadly, it’s the one few people are answering in columns and on the radio in the past few days. This is an understandable mistake, since the question I’ve asked has only one all-too-obvious answer: Jarred Lee Loughner is most to blame.

Since that doesn’t leave much pretext for unending hours of comment and coverage, it’s not the most saleable question. Hence, the not-quite-articulated one you are hearing and reading a lot about is, “Who else can we blame for the shootings?”

But before we invest time addressing that question, wouldn’t it make sense to estimate its real significance? If the murderer is mostly responsible, then how big is that mostly?

Despite the natural difficulty of quantifying such things, I’ll take a foolish shot at it: 95%. I propose that the man who read the political manifestos, attended a Giffords event in 2007, tuned his radio knob, browsed the Internet, nurtured his frustrations, used drugs, acquired a gun, and used it to kill 6 and wound 14 is 95% responsible for this tragedy. (I’m including within that 95% whatever mental illness, whether biological, chemical, or spiritual, from which he may have suffered, since these things are still “in him.”)

This means that if you put everything else together (gun laws, political climate, inadequate security, talk radio, friends, family, video games, police dereliction, and any other factor you’d care to mention), I contend it amounts to at most 5% of the total responsibility for this tragedy. Now 5% isn’t zero, to be sure. But if I’m right, then even perfecting that 5% to any ideologue’s wildest utopian fantasies would still not have mattered enough to change the outcome.

The frustrating truth is there’s just no clear or workable solution to the fundamental problem of a single, highly-motivated, wicked person in a free society.

But there’s a difficulty with accepting this analysis. Despite its obvious truth, it’s not very satisfying. (And, look, it took me only 300 words to say. How will you sell ad space around such brief analysis?) So if we all know where 95% of the answer is, why do we have such a heated national discussion about the other 5% right now? It’s simple. We hate to feel powerless.

As a Christian, I have no problem saying that evil exists and will continue to cause horrible events in our lives for as long as this world persists. When evil strikes, whether human evil (this case) or natural evil (such as Katrina), I’m not surprised. Nor do I seek an explanation beyond the fact that I live in an ugly world. Evil will continue for the foreseeable future, and I can’t ward it off with my very good behavior or my very smart theory. God is in control, and I don’t need to be. If He protects me, great. If not, so be it. This was the essence of Jesus’s answer to the question about the Galileans Pilate slaughtered in Luke 13:1-5.

But to the secular mind (even when it happens to be in the head of a churchgoer), the most important issue is power. It’s vital to have an explanation for tragedies in order to perpetuate the myth that my knowledge is adequate to predict (and therefore control) the universe and protect me from it. So, instead of focusing on the 95% truth that this man’s actions were well outside my control, I will emphasize how my plan for things would have prevented this, if only others would listen. When they do, it bolsters my terribly fragile sense of my own power, temporarily reinforcing the delusion that I would make a decent deity.

“I can stop murders through gun control.” “I can stop murders through video game and television censorship.” “I can stop murders through talk radio civility.” “I can stop murders through better mental health infrastructure.” Or even (think Columbine here, but not this case just yet, oddly), “I can stop murders through holding parents responsible for their children’s behavior.”

“And if only I talk about these things long enough and loudly enough (to paraphrase the infamous Hitlerism), eventually I’ll believe it.”

In other words, all the discussion about other causes and targets of blame is really just a con game to distract ourselves from contemplating the disheartening reality of a world we cannot control…and the implications.

However, this is only one of the con games in town. Sure, it’s the one most often run by liberals, but they certainly have no monopoly on self-delusion.

With all the recent talk about, well…talk (among other things), you probably didn’t notice the other big self-scam. But if you listen to the discussions, you’ll hear certain terminology from conservatives used to describe Jarred Loughner, terms like madman, deranged, nut-job, crazy, druggie, anarchist, and lunatic, just to name a few. On occasion, someone might verge on kindness by only calling him unbalanced. (But note that “unbalanced” serves the first con game. “Maybe society’s 5% is enough to keep him from tipping….”)

As I said, you probably didn’t even notice, and that’s because this seems perfectly normal. He is all of these things, right?

Sure. But why is it so important for us to say so?

Because establishing that Mr. Loughner is somehow distinctly and radically different from me is vital to my belief that I would never do anything like this. And the more often I can reinforce that he is different from me by kind rather than merely by degree, the safer I can feel from the other source of evil in the world: me.

See, we all want to be safe from the evil “out there.” But we all also know that there is just as much, if not more, personal danger (guilt, consequences, e.g.) from the evil “in here,” a knowledge we bury as deeply as we possibly can. And the biggest shovel conservatives use for digging is their faith in moral rectitude. “I would never do something like that because I am better than he is, more self-controlled than he is, less deranged than he is, etc.” Yet isn’t, “I never thought I would do anything like this,” a proverb among the fallen?

When Jesus tells us that murder begins by hate, He’s not saying they’re the same. But He is saying they’re both on the same road. And if you strip off the veneers of legal deterrence, social control, self-discipline, and God-bribing, none of us are good. We’re just well-restrained. And since our sense of personal worth as well as (usually) our sense of entitlement with God depends on believing we really are good, admitting we’re not much different from Mr. Loughner is unimaginably threatening. This, too, is a very sophisticated con game we run on ourselves.

So the liberal con says that evil can be stopped by fixing society. Hence, the moral nation-improvement project is the one that counts. “If I get government to be right, things will be better and God will owe us.” In contrast, the conservative con says that evil can be stopped by fixing individuals. Hence, the moral self-improvement project is the one that really counts. “If I get you and me to be right, things will be better and God will owe us.” But the reality is that you can’t end evil. Both the “out-there” kind and the “in-here” kind are way too strong for you.

Realizing this, by the way, is the beginning of seeing the need for a Savior who actually is strong enough to beat both kinds. But I don’t want you to get the idea that I think “I can stop murder by getting people to become Christians.” I can’t stop all evil with my project any more than you can with yours. God controls evil, not me. That being said, I suppose it is worth pre-empting a likely criticism.

“Are you saying that neither social structures nor personal morality should be worked on?”

Not at all. I really believe in these things, both of them, by the way. But believing first in a sovereign God gives me the freedom to admit fixing them won’t solve everything or even most of the thing and then to work on them vigorously, but with realistic expectations. It also gives me the ability in the event of a tragedy like this to avoid the distraction of laying blame and do the most important things: grieve and pray and comfort others.

I can’t solve it. I can’t prevent it. And I probably can’t even understand it. Therefore I don’t waste very much time trying to do any of these. And if I have one goal in writing this column, it would be to help free you from them so you can do what really matters, too.

The Worst Christmas Gift Givers

2010-12-24T15:21:00.000-08:00

Published 12.28.10 at Townhall and Crosswalk.

“Christmas is just commercialized materialism. Nobody even thinks about Jesus anymore because all they’re doing is putting up lights, decorating some pagan tree, and watching nonsense like Santa and Frosty on TV. Besides, Christmas isn’t even endorsed in the Bible. It’s only in two of the Gospels, the date isn’t given, and Jesus never tells us to celebrate it. It’s a holiday created by the Pope to broker a political deal with 4th Century pagans. And worst of all, on top of all this, you don’t even have the decency to say, ‘Merry Christmas,’ on the birthday of our Savior, instead kowtowing to political correctness with your inane, ‘Happy Holidays!”

Christmas has a funny way of bringing out some people’s inner weirdo. And if you’ve ever heard some Christian critic of Christmas, then you’ve certainly heard these and perhaps other, related complaints.

So, on behalf of my fellow idiot Christians (or at least in their stead), I’d like to apologize to the secular culture for our behavior at Christmas. We’ve been dumb and mean, and I’m sorry. Please forgive us. There’s absolutely no excuse for our behavior, precisely because it’s so completely out of line with what we actually believe.

Allow me to explain.

At Christmas, of course, we celebrate the gift God made of Himself to us in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ. In the Bible, this occasion was proclaimed by angels, was celebrated by all of heaven, was attended by the wealthy and the poor, and induced people to poetic outbursts (Mary’s Magnificat and Zacharias’s Benedictus). It’s an event of such unique historical significance that we actually base our calendar on it. The nature of the gift was that God condescended to become human, live a perfect life, and die in our place so that we could be in right relationship with Him. That’s what we Christians are celebrating.

But over time, that story and gift have been frequently misunderstood, neglected, and even twisted and distorted so that it’s barely recognizable to those of us who cherish it. None of this surprised the Giver, and He still gave it freely. This is because God is an extremely good gift-giver. He knows that if you give a perfect gift to a widely diverse group of humans, everyone will play with it differently, especially over centuries of time.

On the other hand, most Christians in America can’t say the same thing about ourselves. Christmas has evolved. Once banned by the Puritans, for a brief time in the 20th Century it became a decent, religious holiday for most observers. But in the last 50 years or so, the transformation lamented above has taken place. For most Americans, Christmas is lights, trees, songs, shopping, food, gifts, and family. And this drives my fellow Christians nuts because our God gave you this awesome gift of Christmas and you’ve ruined it by removing Jesus and replacing Him with all this other claptrap.

And so what?

Completely devoid of Christ, Christmas for millions of people is a wonderful time of year focused on family, fellowship, and generosity. If the only things that happed every December 25th were that people sent cards, wrote emails, and got together with loved ones for a big meal and some movies, why would that be such a bad thing? It’s far better than nothing at all, right? It’s a second Thanksgiving. And who doesn’t love Thanksgiving?

But for my critic friends (and perhaps myself in former years, I must confess), we’ve allowed the fact that you played with our gift in your own way and for your own purposes to terribly rankle us. Why? Because we’re very bad gift-givers, the sort of relative who gives a child a toy and then stands over him brooding at every little miscue in his own unique way of playing with it. “You’re not doing that right! Stop that right now! You’re ruining it! I’m going to take it back if you don’t use it the proper way!” Ah, there’s nothing quite like the joy created by the self-indulgent tyrant’s “gift.”

Everyone knows there’s something inherently contradictory about the Christian who claims to love the Prince of Peace and serve the Spirit of Joy but then runs around belittling everyone who doesn’t do things just his way. In our silly efforts to fight off the ACLU with our cultural pitchforks, we’ve become the most alienating Grinches of all, inspiring resentment and despite everywhere we go. And worst of all, just like good little Pharisees, we usually then sit back to bask in the afterglow of our handiwork, pleased as Pyrrhus.

Nevertheless, our God is patient with us, too. Just as He is patient with sinful non-Christians distorting His gift, He is also patient with sinful Christians reacting foolishly to that misuse. He just keeps on blessing us, in spite of our stupidity, hoping that one day we will learn to imitate Him in simply being glad to give a gift to people who might not use it exactly the right way.

So, if I may be so bold, here again is our gift to you. Enjoy Christmas any way you like. There’s much more to it than you might understand or even care about at this moment, and if you ever want to know more about that, I’ll be glad to explain it to you. But in the meantime, have fun, eat good food, and spend time with your loved ones. My Daddy is just glad you’re enjoying His gift so much.

How Big Should Government Be?

2010-12-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

Published 12.17.10 at Townhall.

Where do you find the largest, most intrusive and liberty-violating form of government?

You may be tempted to answer North Korea, Cuba, or (possibly) San Francisco, but none of these answers is correct. The most totalitarian forms of government are found in two much less exotic places: prisons and nurseries.

Say whatever you will about any despotic government on Earth, even in their wildest dreams they can only fantasize about having the sort of control wardens and mothers exert routinely. To put the matter another way, what convict (or toddler) doesn’t dream of acquiring the sort of freedom experienced by ordinary citizens in Burma or Iran? But if, as we’ve often been told, totalitarianism is so intrinsically evil, why do we embrace it in these situations?

The answer is obvious.

In the nursery, a child is incompetent and must be constantly shepherded away from self-destruction. This entails controls of every sort. He is told what to eat, when to sleep, and with whom to associate. He is subject to corporal discipline (depending on his age) and is continuously told what he will and will not be doing with his life. When his pursuit of happiness conflicts with his mother’s agenda, she regularly violates it…as has every parent since the dawn of reproduction.

In the jail, a convict is not so much incompetent (although it may be so) as immoral. He is more incapacitated than shepherded, depending on the goals of the particular prison system. Like an infant, however, he is told what to eat, when to sleep, and with whom to associate. He may not be subject to corporal punishment, but restraint and harsher flavors of confinement are certainly common possibilities for misbehavior. Again, his ideals about the pursuit of happiness are never paramount and are violated on almost every level.

So this prepares us for an important question about both of these very intrusively governed municipalities: would either of them function better with less oversight? Although there may be particular ways in which a specific jail or nursery’s governance might need tinkering, the general premise that both demand highly regulated environments is undeniable.

But since it has become fashionable for libertarians and (sadly) conservatives to say that reducing the size of government is always a good to be sought in itself, I thought it might be useful to see whether this is so. And as these two rather extreme cases clearly demonstrate, shrinking the scope or intrusiveness of government must at best be a contextual goal, not a universal principle.

When the level of government is reduced in a prison, you anticipate riots and/or escapes. When it’s reduced in a nursery, we call it parental negligence. That’s because the correct size and shape of government depends essentially on the character of the people being governed. Ten-year-olds get less government than toddlers, and minor felons get less than murderers. But the advocates of “smaller government always, everywhere” seem to not grasp this rather basic political fact.

They are fond of saying that government is at best a necessary evil, with most of the emphasis on the evil and barely any on the necessity. But as someone who appreciates roads, police, clean water, and competent doctors, I think government is often a tremendous force for good. If a citizen stopped others from polluting or practicing fraudulent medicine, we wouldn’t call him a necessary evil. We’d call him a hero. So when government does what would be heroic if individuals did it, at least some of the time we should applaud it.

But still, how big should government be?

It’s a silly question.

Two better questions must be asked instead. First, what sort of society do we want to live in? Second, how good at creating it on their own are the people who live here?

The “government-is-bad” folks don’t usually like either of these questions. They seem to think that a nation can exist without a collective notion of what it means to be a good or bad society. Usually, they will mouth some cliché about how freedom is the only meaningful political good. But this is absurd. Freedom is a means to an end, not an end in itself. More freedom in the hands of virtuous people is a source of great good. But that same freedom in the hands of stupid or evil people (as in the nursery or the jail) only leads to chaos, a very bad thing.

The faith that people left to their own devices will magically and consistently manufacture a vibrant, stable society is pure mythology. Our country was founded by much more practical men who so deeply distrusted human nature that they built our government around the assumption of human depravity by carefully dividing power. But they all came from states that were wildly intrusive by modern standards because they knew that order and prosperity are not the spontaneous result of mere maximized freedom. As they knew, limited government presupposes good people.

So, before you bother discussing what size government is best, you must first consider what sort of society you’re trying to construct. This will help you know in what direction that government’s policies should aim and also frame how to answer the second question: what caliber of people are being governed?

If they are very competent and moral (in producing the sort of society we collectively agree is desirable), then they need very little regulation. To the degree and in the areas they are either incompetent or immoral, government must be made larger to combat the problems arising from their deficiencies. Where the people are good, government can be small. Where the people are bad, it must be large. And, sadly, the average virtue of the society can be easily pulled down by only a few bad actors.

This is why when teenagers misbehave, most cities institute curfews, despite the fact that the percentage of miscreant teens is actually fairly low. Nevertheless, a few ruin it for all by inviting such restrictions. The “government is evil” theory would have you believe that merely rescinding the curfew would fix everything because more liberty is always its proposed solution. But that alone would do nothing to address the underlying cause of the problems: irresponsible youth.

It’s true, there are some social arrangements in which almost no government (or truly none) is necessary. These always involve small groups of morally decent adults with similar values (families, friends, churches, and social organizations, for instance). But any large society with varying degrees of virtue and differing concepts of the good life will require much more external limitation. Simply reducing those restrictions for the sake of reducing them is as foolish as granting more liberty in a nursery or a prison. (Expanding them for the sake of expanding them is also quite foolish, by the way.) But carefully reducing government in areas where people are relatively good and carefully expanding it in areas where they are not is the wise way to constantly adjust the government to fit the people being governed and to maximize the societal ideals we want to see realized. It’s what every good parent and every competent warden already knows.

Did Prohibition Fail?

2010-11-13T13:26:00.001-08:00

Published 11.16.10 at Townhall and Crosswalk.

“Well, since we all know Prohibition failed….” This assertion is widely taken as the starting premise to many discussions on such modern social issues as prostitution, drugs, and gambling. In reply, the advocate of enforcing moral norms through the law must either explain how his plan differs from Prohibition or else admit defeat. In fact, the reliability of this premise is so widely taken for granted that even raising the question of whether it’s true rings absurd. But if a thing is both widely held and true, there shouldn’t be any real danger in exploring to verify it, right?

Of course, being widely held does not always guarantee truth. Most Americans believe that the people of Columbus’s time thought the Earth was flat. Sadly, they don’t realize this myth sprang from anti-Catholic propaganda and was cemented in the 19th Century by two unreliable histories and Washington Irving’s fictionalized account of Columbus. Even common sense would tell you that lesser-educated people in a society (sailors) are unlikely to risk everything on some novel academic hypothesis. They knew the Earth was round (you’d have to be a special fool not to grasp the meaning of a horizon), they just didn’t know how big it was. Columbus thought he had reached the “West Indies” because he didn’t know the Americas existed, thinking that the Earth was perhaps only 10,000 miles around.

Another widely held myth is that the colonists came to America because they wanted to establish a land of religious pluralism. The reality is that most of them came here to flee cultures they viewed as too corrupted in order to establish more rigorous religious societies than those they left behind in Europe. This is why so many early states had explicit religious identity. (“Mary”land was Catholic and surely no one thinks Puritans were renowned for their lax ideas about public morality and religion.) It’s also why it was so necessary to have a First Amendment and the Constitutional ban on religious test oaths: not to protect Muslims, but to insure that the Federal Government wouldn’t squelch the States’ devout religious identities.

So is it possible that the failure of Prohibition could be yet another widely held historical/political myth? Well, it seems that two questions need to be answered. First, what were the harms of Prohibition? Second, what, if any, benefits came from it?

The harms are fairly well known. Prohibition led to bootlegging, death or blindness from consuming adulterated alcohol, loss of tax revenue, loss of business activity, and crime as the mob expanded from gambling and theft to liquor. It also was the first period in American history when the law was so widely broken that disrespect for the authority of the law became its own social evil. As I said, all of this is well known.

But here’s something a little trickier: Can you name any of the benefits of Prohibition?

To hear the tale most people believe, Prohibition was such an unmitigated failure that it’s scarcely believable it was passed in the first place. “How on earth could the wise people of 1933 have just 14 years prior been the imbeciles of 1919?” But if the 18th Amendment was so foolhardy, why did it come when 19 states had already banned alcohol (starting with Kansas in 1881), when roughly 65% of the country was already dry, and when the margin of “dries” to “wets” in Congress more than 2:1? And if it was so obviously a mistake, why did it take until 1966 for Mississippi to repeal it and until 1987 for Kansas to allow “by the drink” alcohol sales?

Again I ask you, can you tell me any of the benefits of Prohibition?

The reason I ask is because it’s generally unwise to be dogmatic about anything without at least some knowledge of the other side of the discussion. Although believing there just isn’t one feels like certainty, it’s really the precarious security of ignorance.

So what was the benefit of Prohibition? Here’s a hint: It’s the one thing people arguing against current behavioral taboos don’t like to acknowledge. The main benefit of Prohibition was…you guessed it…people drank a lot less alcohol. But to hear the tale often repeated, Prohibition either had no effect on consumption or, more amazingly, actually increased it!

The reality is that average consumption of alcohol in the years prior to most legal restrictions (1906-1910) was 2.60 gallons per year. In 1934, when it was again possible to accurately measure, the number had dropped below one gallon, and it didn’t return to the pre-Prohibition level until 1973! During Prohibition, admissions to psychiatric facilities for alcohol-related issues dropped 60 percent, arrests for drunkenness decreased 50 percent, cirrhosis deaths for men dropped over 70 percent, and welfare agencies reported tremendous drops in alcohol-related family problems. Also, although crime is widely cited as the result of Prohibition, organized crime was actually well-established in cities by 1920. And until the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, most voters believed Prohibition was succeeding, if imperfectly.

Temperance movements have been around since at least the founding of the country with Dr. Benjamin Rush and other religionists. Consumption was so high in the middle 1800s that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln all urged abstinence for the good of family and country. Long advocated by wives, mothers, and Christian groups, Prohibition was the “final straw” solution to rampant alcoholism. And if you asked those victims, they would have told you that their lives were better off because of the effects Prohibition had on their husbands.

I’m not saying Prohibition was a complete success, or even that on balance it was a success. I’m just saying that it had the most direct success at its intended goal: reducing alcohol abuse. And in discussions about other socially harmful behaviors, it’s important to at least be honest about our past efforts to regulate such things.

One final note is worth mentioning. Alcohol was widely used long before Prohibition, which means the culture had a longstanding acceptance of it. In a sense, then, it’s amazing this same society banned it at all. The legal restriction of it brought a significant reduction, which isn’t all that surprising, and those who wanted it eventually got it back, thankfully at lower levels of abuse.

But it should be obvious that restricting a thing people are already long accustomed to having is much more difficult than simply keeping a thing restricted they have long viewed as forbidden. The cultural shift on contraception and abortion (both universally despised just 60 years ago but now widely accepted) should serve as an illustration of what would happen if currently illicit behaviors were decriminalized.

Marijuana: No Worse Than Alcohol?

2010-10-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

Published 11.2.10 at Townhall and Crosswalk.

One of the hardest things with any complicated topic is to deal with just one particular slice of the discussion on its own merits. Instead, we usually try to handle the whole pie all at once, which usually leads to handling each bit quite poorly. With that in mind, let’s look at one limited aspect of the debate over legalizing marijuana: the premise that since marijuana is no worse than alcohol, it’s only fair to give it the same legal status as alcohol.

I think most people fight this idea by trying to show how much worse than alcohol marijuana is. Instead, I’ll grant the assertion for argument’s sake and show that even if marijuana advocates are right, there are still good reasons to not treat it the same as alcohol.

As I think anyone will agree, consuming alcohol in large quantities is bad. It’s bad for marriages. It’s bad for children. And it’s bad for simple health concerns. I also think anyone will agree that numerous Americans consume alcohol in precisely such quantities. Thus, I think reasonable people would agree that our current situation with regard to alcohol overuse is undesirable. If only there were some feasible way to fix it, we would want to.

Furthermore, the current efforts to control alcohol are an abject failure. Teenagers have virtually as much access to it as they would like, and this is certainly true of underage college students. Although drunk driving has been the focus of intense legal and media attention, the number of accidents and fatalities in which alcohol is a factor is still absurdly high. And of course alcohol is a major contributor to domestic assault. All of this is common knowledge.

But that’s the point. Even if marijuana is no worse than alcohol, why would we want to permit people to use yet another drug when the problems from alcohol abuse are so obvious?

If I may rephrase the argument a bit uncharitably, marijuana advocates seem to be saying the following: “Even though our society’s handling of alcohol has been abysmal, we think it’s only fair to let us start handling yet another drug just as badly. We know the social and personal problems from marijuana abuse are likely to be similar to those with alcohol, but it’s just not fair that we’re only allowed to have one substance that harms people, families, children, and society.”

Also, keep in mind that unlike alcohol, marijuana is not ordinarily consumed in moderation by anyone. The point of having access to it is to get high, the rough equivalent of being drunk. Nobody smokes a little pot with dinner for the flavor. So the effect of legalizing marijuana would be to replicate only the worst parts of having alcohol be legal.

It seems to me that a smart society, like a smart person, learns from it’s mistakes. And although I haven’t mentioned tobacco, a cursory exploration should conclude virtually the same problems exist there, albeit replacing drunk driving and domestic violence with more mundane issues like lung disease and cancer. We as a society simply don’t handle recreational drugs very well, particularly when it comes to their overuse and use by young people.

Taking that observation in hand, it seems beyond strange to me that some people want to add another similar substance to those already available. And just to reiterate, the single, simple argument we’re dealing with is that of fairness, as in, “It’s unfair to prohibit marijuana since you permit alcohol.”

Unfair? Perhaps.

Unwise? Not so much.

Some analogies may help clarify at this point.

Imagine that I have hired two employees at different times from the same college. Although each looked quite good on paper and in interviews, both turned out to be much less excellent than hoped for. Even though I can’t figure out a practical way to fire either of them, does that mean I’m obligated in fairness to hire the next applicant from that college who applies to me for a job? “But you hired both of them!” “Yes, and look how that’s turned out. I don’t intend to be so naïve a third time.” It’s a sadistic philosophy which holds that individuals or societies are beholden to the standard set by their worst decisions for any future choices.

Again, imagine some woman who picks up a man at a bar, dates him for awhile, and then finds herself being abused by him. She breaks up with him and returns to the bar to pick up a new man. She dates him for awhile and finds the same thing happening again. So she ends the relationship. Amazingly, she returns to the bar, but this time, she explains to the man who chats her up how she’s a bit wary of being abused by yet another guy from a bar. “Well, honey, don’t you think you owe me the same opportunity you gave those other two?” Please tell me our public policy advice is better than this.

Yet again, imagine that we as a nation involved ourselves in a failed war such as Vietnam but from which we actually couldn’t extricate ourselves. Then imagine we found ourselves on the verge of another war with similar-seeming difficulties. Would we really believe that consistency required us to engage in it because advocates assure us “it isn’t any worse than Vietnam?” Fool me once, shame on you….

Yet a fourth time, imagine that you have before you a heavy drinker who smokes two packs a day. I don’t imagine you would ever dream of saying to him, “I think you’re being inconsistent. Don’t you realize that marijuana isn’t as bad as either of the drugs you already abuse? And since you already smoke and drink a lot (even though you wish you could quit both), don’t you think for the sake of consistency you should add weed to your unhealthy regimen?” But how is this different from the argument at hand?

“So are you saying you favor prohibition of alcohol and tobacco?”

Nothing of the sort. I’m simply saying that the obvious problems we already have from both of those drugs being legal is the best reason to avoid embracing any more recreational drugs.

Now if you offered me a hypothetical society in which neither alcohol, nor tobacco, nor marijuana was in use and asked me to choose which of the three to permit, I can’t really say what I would pick. But it should be pretty clear we don’t have such a fantasy society in front of us. We live in a real one with a real past and a truly entrenched familiarity with alcohol and tobacco. If we add marijuana to the list, there will be more use of it than there is currently, which means more young users, more occasional users, more regular users, and more impaired driving. Needless to say, none of this will make our country stronger.

It seems to me that a wise society is the kind which learns from its mistakes rather than feeling obliged to repeat them out of a misguided sense of consistency. Our standards should improve because of our prior errors, not be permanently held back because of them. “It’s-no-worse-than” thinking is simply not the guiding light toward great personal or public policy.

Of course, as I mentioned at the outset, I know this is only one particular piece of the marijuana discussion, albeit an ubiquitous one. But I hope at this point you agree that this one invalid argument can safely be discarded. Naturally, we might choose to legalize marijuana for other reasons, but we certainly aren’t obligated to do so on the principle of fairness.

You Call Yourself A Firefighter?

2010-10-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

Published 10.28.10 at Townhall and Crosswalk.

Imagine one calm afternoon while you sit on your patio reading a book that your phone rings. On the other end is your 33-year-old firefighter son sounding rather anxious. “Dad,” he says, “I don’t know what to do. We’re out at a fire in the county, and it’s about to reach this guy’s house, but we’ve been told not to stop it because he didn’t pay his service fee. Some of the guys are feeling a little unsettled about all this, and I told them I’d ask you, since you’re the deacon of a church and you always have the right answer for me. What do I do?”

Reply 1: “Well, son, this is a difficult world where people need to learn personal responsibility. I know it seems callous and harsh to let this man’s house burn, but it’s not your fault he didn’t pay. This country is falling apart because everybody wants to be a freeloader, and sometimes you just have to make an example out of someone. If people don’t think they have to pay in advance, no one will pay at all. Don’t worry, God will understand. This is how He deals with us, after all. He only protects us if we do what we’re supposed to do.”

Reply 2: “I understand what you’re struggling with because I know part of the reason you became a firefighter was you thought it was a way to help people and serve the community. But sometimes the only way to be a hero is to obey orders. You can’t just go around doing whatever seems right to you. If everybody acted on their own conscience, there’d be no order in the world. God tells us to obey authority, even if they’re wrong. So you just have to trust in the fact that it’s not your decision to make.”

Reply 3: “How can this even be a question for you? The Bible says that if we refuse to help someone when we can, we don’t have the love of God in us. I know I raised you better than that. If you want to call yourself a firefighter or a Christian, you’d better get off the phone with me and go put out that fire, son.”

So, which answer would you give him?

On September 29th, a group of Tennessee firemen first refused to respond to a fire at the rural home of Gene Cranick and then did show up to sit and to watch the fire consume his house, his possessions, his three dogs, and the family cat. Only when it eventually threatened to spread to a neighboring property did they finally act to put it out. The reason for their neglect? Mr. Cranick hadn’t paid his annual $75 protection money for rural fire service. He says he forgot this year, despite paying in the past, and he had offered to pay the department whatever amount they named if they would only save his home.

Having read a number of commentaries about this outrageous event, I’m torn which is more scandalous: the behavior of the firemen or that our country seems to be full of people who think that anything other than answer 3 is morally or theologically plausible.

See, I can comprehend a city so incompetent that for 20 years it never came up with a simple proposal like, “Rural fire calls will be charged to the property owner at a rate equal to 120% the actual cost up to a maximum of $20,000, secured by a lien against the property if necessary. In lieu of this, $75 may be paid as annual fire service insurance.” But politicians are notoriously stupid. So such a total failure of legislative imagination isn’t inconceivable. The part I can’t wrap my head around is the firefighters refusing to stop the fire, even to the absurd point of sitting idly by watching it burn.

I’ve known a few firemen in my life, and I can’t imagine any of them doing nothing while a fire destroys someone’s home. The ones I’ve known would have told anyone issuing such an evil order to either step aside or be thrown aside while they put out the fire. Most firefighters are heroic and humble, viewing their jobs as nothing more than the duty of a decent citizen. That’s why the contrast between these thugs in firefighting gear sitting on the sidelines refusing to stop destruction and actual firemen rushing headlong into catastrophes like the World Trade Center is so stark.

Our culture treats firemen as heroes, and rightly so. But heroes have to behave heroically in order to deserve the label, and the sort of person who would watch a fire and claim he was only obeying orders is certainly no hero. By definition, he’s not even a firefighter.

I have three young boys, and I simply can’t imagine coming home to tell my wife or my sons that their daddy let a family’s home get destroyed over something as petty as $75 and a ridiculous city policy. Moreover, I can’t imagine what it would be like to go to church the next Sunday and try singing praises to God standing between the guy whose house I watched burn to the ground and the city manager who defended that decision.

“But if we put out this fire, then no one will ever pay their $75, and we won’t have the funding to fight any rural fires.”

Are Americans really this despicable? Or does such a claim end up saying more about the people making it than it does about the real people of rural Tennessee?

“Well, the ones who pay would have to pay more, and the others would just sponge off of them.”

It’s hard to quantify the scope of such cynicism, but here’s an indicator of how misguided it is. The Cranick’s neighbors (you know, the ones who paid their fees) were begging the firemen to fight the fire. Begging!

See, my theory is that Americans are better than the cynics give us credit for. Part of that betterness is that most of us will pay in advance anyway and then rejoice that our contributions made it possible to save someone else’s home.

But the other part of that betterness is that we want to live among people who behave as if we’re a community with values like neighborliness and cooperation. We want to be people who act more nobly than the cynics predict and who can then look each other in the eyes with civic pride. We want to be the Tennesseans who came together after the Nashville floods, not the Tennesseans who stood by indifferently as a man’s life went up in flames.

We want to pay our dues, then go to church with the guy whose house was rescued when he didn’t, the firemen who fought the fire they didn’t get paid for, and the city manager who told them to help a guy even though he didn’t really deserve it. And I want us to sit there, grateful for such wonderful neighbors, listening to a pastor tell us, “Praise be to God that I don’t need to preach a sermon on the importance of loving your neighbor as yourself in this county because we’ve got that one down pat.” That’s the sort of community I want to live in. Truth be told, don’t we all?

As Edmund Burke almost said, “All that is required for evil to flourish in the world is for good firefighters to do nothing.”

Articles Index

2010-05-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

Who Cares About “the Will of the People?”

2010-01-27T13:31:00.001-08:00

Published 01.28.10 at Townhall and Crosswalk.

It’s currently in vogue among conservatives to argue that health care reform should not pass because it is unpopular. The argument sounds like this: “Public support for Obama’s plan has dipped to just 36%. Nevertheless, Democratic legislators bull ahead, ignoring the will of the people in a mad dash to plant their ideological flag on the hill of political ambition, no matter how many Congressional bodies it costs.”

I could attribute this basic idea to any of a dozen of my fellow conservative authors, and now, with the stunning election of Scott Brown, the pleading has turned to shouting: “How dare you turn a deaf ear to the clear, express sentiment of the electorate! Will you so flagrantly disregard the people you’re supposed to represent?”

As you may already have surmised, I am not impressed by these lines of argument. In fact, I’m writing this column because their use disturbs me so greatly. To put the point bluntly, conservatives who denounce the Democratic leadership in this way have either forgotten what we believe or else are willing to sacrifice what we believe on our own altar of political persuasion.

Make no mistake, this particular appeal to the “will of the people” works with an audience. If it didn’t work, no one would use it. But effectiveness alone is not enough. The strength of our political position is that our arguments flow from a clear and consistent set of principles. Unless our party is very badly named, we don’t believe in direct democracy. We believe in a republic. In a democracy, the people decide what policies are followed, whereas in a republic, the people elect leaders who decide what policies are followed. This is far more than a trifling difference.

The question is simple: Are our leaders obligated to do what the majority wants, or are they obligated to do what seems right to them? Although an ideal world would allow both outcomes, that world and ours don’t always coincide. In the present case, we have an overwhelming Democrat majority in Washington pushing an overwhelmingly unpopular health reform plan. And so what?

Although many journalists may shudder to acknowledge the fact, political authority in this country does not flow from opinion polls, even reliable ones. Zogby, Rasmussen, Pew, Harris, and Gallup all combined have zero Constitutional authority. Even if it could be reliably known that 85% of all voters opposed some proposal, it would mean precisely nothing in terms of the authority to abandon that proposal at this moment. The only opinions that count are those of the 535 members of Congress and the President.

That being said, there is one poll that matters. It’s very rigorously conducted and involves 100% sampling with no statistical projections whatsoever. All adult citizens without felony convictions are allowed to participate, and we conduct it every two years. It’s called an election, and the winners get to make the decisions for the next two, four, or six years. Once those offices are granted, there is simply no Constitutional authority to impeach for the offense of unpopularity, as un-Californian as that may be.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I like the idea of legislators listening to their constituents. But that’s because I want them to be aware of all the viewpoints on a particular proposal and its impact on the people they serve. However, there is a gulf of difference between listening to the people and being led by them. I want Congressmen to think deeply and then do what they believe is best, even if it’s unpopular. Even if they disagree with me. The word for that is leadership.

In contrast, I suppose a Congressman could simply count the number of in-district calls he gets on a particular issue and then vote according to that tally. Another approach might be to see what actual polling data in his district indicates. As idiotic as both these suggestions are, notice that they at least restrict the sample taken to the particular district. A USA Today poll of 1500 random Americans should be of no consequence whatsoever since no Congressman represents that district. But in any of these approaches, we still have the same basic flaw: political opportunism, which is simply a euphemism for cowardice.

When President Clinton was in office, conservative commentators regularly said he had only one core principle: benefit Bill Clinton. The oft-leveled criticism was that he would stick his finger in the wind to see which way things were blowing and then do the popular thing. This description of his Presidency has become almost core doctrine for most of us. But it should be obvious by now that we can’t coherently criticize him for governing by the polls and then also criticize President Obama (or Congress) for ignoring them.

Consider another case. President Bush did many things that either were at the time or else later became very unpopular. For those of us who liked them, however, we supported and even praised him for showing the “courage of his convictions” and “the willingness to do the right thing even if it’s unpopular.” Fine. But we simply can’t say that a commitment to unpopular policies we support shows leadership and a preference for principle over politics and then turn around and say that a commitment to unpopular policies we oppose is a flagrant disregard for the clear will of the people. Such arguments of convenience eventually make us sound like we really are just opposed, rather than being opposed on principle.

Besides, let’s be honest for a moment. Our opposition to these reform plans wouldn’t be one bit weaker if we happened to not have the majority on our side, nor would any of our arguments change. Why then do we think this bandwagon appeal is likely to persuade those on the other side?

Moreover, since it is our arguments which have been moving the marker rather than this ad populum fallacy, let’s stick with what we really believe and leave bad arguments to the foolish. The simple fact is we do not want to open ourselves up for the future criticism that some idea we oppose is popular and therefore we should embrace it. Yet if we are going to build our house on the shifting sands of public opinion, future battles will either force us to embrace that chaos for consistency sake or reject it by recanting our current emphasis on popularity.

All this being said, there is one nuanced shift which could make this argument work. Instead of feigning outrage that the Democrats are ignoring public opinion, we Republicans might instead simply allow this to prove that they are not the “ear of the people” party they claim to be. In this approach, we aren’t acting like we truly care that they are more committed to their agenda than to public sampling. We are simply showing that Democrats are guilty of the one thing they relish alleging about us: hypocrisy. Failing to live up to their own professed responsiveness to majority viewpoint, we’ve caught them in this one most culturally unacceptable sin.

A final note. Out of consistency, I think it’s fair to give one bit of credit where it’s due. Though I disagree vehemently with President Obama’s health care agenda and though I deeply hope he fails to pass it, I have to respect his courage in pursuing it despite such widespread public opposition. He’s wrong and he may lose his majority in the process, but I respect a man who stands by his convictions. Let’s also stand by ours and not embrace the tar baby of pretending to care overmuch about “the will of the people.”

Who’s Legislating Morality Now?

2009-11-18T18:42:00.000-08:00

Published: 11.20.09 at Townhall.

When I argue that abortion under most circumstances should be illegal, I am charged with trying to legislate morality.

When I say divorce ought to be harder to obtain, not easier, I am said to be trying to legislate morality.

And when I say states should be free to make laws concerning adultery, homosexual behavior, contraception, or premarital sex, I am accused of trying to legislate morality.

Yet when Barack Obama and the Democrats propose making it a crime to not carry health insurance, no one seems to notice that they are very aggressively trying to legislate morality.

In fact, the same people who object to my proposed legislations of morality seem to think it’s a wonderful virtue that he wants to do so many “good” things for the poor people who can’t currently get health insurance. And if that plan entails criminalizing the decision to forego such insurance, well, why wouldn’t we fine people or put them in jail for refusing to repent of their obstinate immorality in obstructing such a virtuous social project?

We have been told that poor people, children, and people with pre-existing medical conditions are all being mistreated by our current health care system. We have been told that it’s embarrassing to be the only developed nation in the world to not provide universal health coverage to its citizens. And we have repeatedly been told, “The status quo is unacceptable.” The only possible meaning here is that it is “morally” unacceptable.

But President Obama hasn’t merely claimed that “we must” (read, “it’s morally necessary that we”) help people get insurance, he’s actually gone a significant step further by grounding his moral vision in arguments from the Bible. The President has said that opposition to his plans comes from people who are unwilling to obey the Biblical mandate to “be our brother’s keeper.” He’s not just legislating morality. He’s doing so on the basis of religion. If a conservative dared to offer such rationale, “Republicans Seek Theocracy” would be the Newsweek cover, not some picture of a former governor in biker shorts.

Now, before misunderstandings take root, let me make one thing perfectly clear: None of this bothers me in the least. Hearing Obamacare sold with moral and even Biblical language is perfectly fine with me. What irritates me is the hypocrisy of people who accuse their enemies of legislating morality and then blithely resort to making moral arguments in favor of their own political agenda. So in the name of clarity and finality, I suggest we all admit one simple, obvious fact:

All laws legislate morality.

To clarify, a law is nothing more and nothing less than a piece of codified intolerance. A society, through whatever mechanism it makes such decisions, agrees that some behavior is not just bad, but so bad it must be prevented by force, and that’s how you get a law. Whether that behavior is abortion, adultery, divorce, speeding, marrying more than one woman, using heroin, or refusing to purchase health insurance, the point is that all laws prohibit behavior society deems evil enough that force “should” be used to discourage and punish it.

Furthermore, if morality did not precede and underpin legislation, there would be no basis for criticizing “unjust” laws. Slavery was banished, women were given the vote, and interracial marriages were finally allowed for supremely moral reasons. Not only is morality the basis for “good” laws, it is the vital motivation for rectifying “bad” ones.

“But legislating morality doesn’t work.” Really? Well, I know there is truth in the claim that you can’t change hearts by coercing the body, but there is also truth in the claim that laws create taboos which influence both behavior and hearts over the long run. Laws have a stigmatizing effect on behavior, thus being both the result of and the reinforcement for the culture’s moral codes.

Also, even though law is an admittedly clumsy instrument of moral influence, it does tend to make people behave as if they are good even when they are not. And so far as the public interest is concerned, getting people to act good is nearly as useful as getting them to truly be good. Although I’d prefer you not stab me because you are a decent person, I’m still willing to stand in line next to you at the baseball game so long as I know you’re merely (but vividly) afraid of what will be done to you if you do act on your violent impulse. Simply put, we legislate morality because it’s the only way to get some people to behave.

Oh, to be sure, many legislations of morality are unwise. But the notion that there could ever be some amoral legislation which is preferable to the moral sort is pure nonsense. There is no other kind of law besides that which coerces a particular vision of morality. After all, what besides a strong moral argument could ever justify taking people’s liberty or property away? Yet somehow, in a linguistic masterwork fit for the propaganda hall of fame, some (usually conservative) proposals are decried as “unjust” moral legislations, whereas other (usually liberal) proposals are just good ideas whose time has come.

“But your conservative proposals infringe on individual liberty.” Agreed. Just like your liberal proposals infringe on individual property (and often liberty as well). And I really don’t mind, just so long as you recognize that we are all making laws on the basis of our vision of morality and a “good” society.

So the next time someone complains in print, in person, or over the air that some proposal is an illegitimate legislation of morality, I suggest booing him. If you have a newspaper nearby, whap him on the nose…twice for good measure. Short of a self-induced epiphany, this may be the only way he finally notices that saying it’s “wrong” to legislate morality is itself an overtly moral position.

Finally, just to be sure the point is made rather than implied, I have no problem with Barack Obama phrasing his moral ideas in Biblical language. I don’t generally agree with his interpretation of Scripture, but I certainly have no objection on principle to him amplifying his case this way. However, I just want to be sure that the next time I refer to the Bible in explaining what I believe, I don’t have to endure another hypocrite claiming that I’m injecting religion into the public arena. Let’s make sure the strike zone is the same for everyone.

If people are going to be allowed to legislate their morality (remember, there really isn’t another option) this means religion is going to be in play in these discussions. If such reasons are unpersuasive to you, so be it. But please don’t give me any silliness about how it’s fundamentally wrong to mention religion in the public sphere. For the vast majority of people, including both the President and me, our morality flows from our religion. Hence our political views are ultimately going to be religious views, even the ones about freedom and tolerance.

This means that all laws not only enforce a moral vision, but they also all represent some sort of religious vision as well. Even the complaints that one religious viewpoint is being “unjustly” overemphasized or that some religious principles “ought” not be codified in law are both themselves byproducts of particular ideas about the place of freedom in God’s world. If this final step seems like simply too much for you to embrace in a single column, that’s okay. I understand. It can be painful to suddenly discover yourself ravaged by so much previously undiagnosed hypocrisy.

Hence, I’m quite satisfied merely to see us all agree that morality is, in fact, the only source and justification for law. Restoring tolerance for religious talk may be one cognitive bridge too far for today. But you can’t blame me for trying. After all, I’m only following the lead of my President.

Is Obamacare Like Mandatory Auto Insurance?

2009-11-13T15:12:00.000-08:00

Published: 11.17.09 at Townhall and 11.17.09 at Crosswalk.

Teaching introductory logic for ten years made me vividly aware of the low average quality of reasoning among college students. It also showed me how little improvement can realistically be accomplished by only one semester’s training in the art of thinking clearly. By all rights, then, I should have severely pessimistic expectations about public discourse in this country. Nevertheless, whether I suffer from my own strain of bad induction or just unquenchable naïveté, pandemic outbreaks of illogical memes still catch me by surprise.

That’s why I’ve been so shocked at the widespread assertion that a national mandate requiring individuals to carry health insurance is legitimate (and even Constitutional) because we already require everyone to purchase auto insurance. There’s just one small error this idea seems to forget: the federal government does not actually have a law requiring individual drivers to carry such insurance. Only states do.

And since federalism is at the center of the Constitutional concerns surrounding Obamacare, I find it stunningly bold to claim the federal government has authority for a project because of something similar the states currently do. The argument seems to be, “Congress can do it because it’s just like something else that Congress doesn’t do.” Now, obviously, if we were debating whether individual states could mandate health coverage, at least the levels of government being analogized would be the same. But the leap from what states do to what Congress can do betrays vistas of ignorance concerning our system of government. A college freshman would be embarrassed to make such a weak argument, yet members of Congress have said precisely this.

Senator Burris, for instance, recently told CNS News that it’s okay to make individuals purchase health insurance because, “Under state law, we have every one required to have automobile insurance…so, that’s the same thing proportionally to automobile insurance. I mean, it’s comparable.” The good news here, of course, is that the former Illinois Secretary of State (hence, overseer of the DMV) rightly situated the law at the state level. The sad news is that this United States Senator has taken an oath of office to uphold a document he apparently has not read. But perhaps we can forgive his lapse, seeing as how he’s the Senatorial equivalent of a baseball September call-up put into office by a now-deposed criminal of a governor. What excuse do his colleagues have?

See, in some sense, those of us who live in states (like Illinois) which require minimum coverage might understandably forget that not all things “the government” requires are things “the national government” requires. But I’m especially surprised that inhabitants of New Hampshire and Wisconsin haven’t immediately exposed this line of reasoning since their states have no such requirement at all, a barely publicized truth which underscores the fact that there is no national car insurance law.

Still, let’s put aside the equivocation between federal and state authority and investigate whether the analogy would hold even if mandatory auto insurance actually were a federal law. In so doing, I must apologize in advance for marching over slightly more well-traveled territory.

The reason states require car insurance is because of the risks to other people and their property which driving so obviously entails. The underlying legal basis here is tort law, which holds me liable for any harm I cause to others. Since driving increases both the likelihood and extent of such torts, mandatory insurance (or proof of financial ability to pay in NH and WI) “insures” that I can restore my victims to wholeness. In a world without car insurance, every accident would lead either to a court ruling or a settlement. Insurance payouts are rooted in this and are simply a more expeditious way of resolving torts. But in basing health insurance on this model, I’m naturally led to ask about the underlying rationale. Whom, exactly, should I have sued when I caught the flu or broke my leg falling down the stairs if I hadn’t had health insurance?

Unless I was deliberately coughed upon or pushed, there is no one to blame. So there simply is no parallel with tort law to draw upon here. Moreover, the two possible types of auto insurance which would fit fairly well with a health insurance mandate (collision and medical payments) are specifically not ever required by the states.

Additionally, you should note that no state requires you to have liability insurance until you positively engage in some enhanced risk activity, like driving, performing surgery, or opening a restaurant. Even though any of us at any time could harm another person (bicycling, playing softball, or even just tripping on a crowded escalator), no one is required by law to carry bodily motion insurance.

Taken together, all of this means that, far from being a good example to draw upon, current auto insurance laws are actually quite a robust counter-analogy to mandatory health insurance because the two are so starkly asymmetrical. The similarities between the two types of insurance seem to begin and end with their shared name.

But wait, there’s more.

One of the most debated aspects of current health care reform proposals is the “public option,” or government delivery of health insurance. Once again we find a glaring disconnect in the comparison with auto coverage. Although 47 individual states make insurance a precondition of driving (Virginia will allow you to simply pay a $500 annual fee in lieu of having it), no state to my knowledge actually supplies the required insurance to anyone. Geico, Allstate, Country Companies, and State Farm do not have to compete with “Vermont Casualty Group” or “The Florida Collision Underwriting Consortium.” Thus, if auto insurance is a good object lesson, it seems to urge us to specifically not involve the federal government as a provider.

Is there anything else we can learn from mandatory car insurance to guide us in the current debate? Well, one thing is that the presupposition behind such mandates (where they exist) is the recognition of driving as a privilege rather than an entitlement. Driving prohibitions can’t be litigated as deprivations “without due process of law” because there is no fundamental right to endanger others through the operation of a motor vehicle. But what privileged behavior am I engaging in before I must carry health insurance?

I must breathe.

Since I’m forced to take Congress seriously when they make their arguments, I am driven (sorry) to conclude their use of the auto insurance analogy means they consider some aspect of my behavior to be a privilege rather than a right. The only contenders are existence and breathing. Since they don’t appear to be meta-physicians (sorry again), I have to infer that Congress views breathing as a privilege rather than a right. And since they want to insure all breathers, should I also anticipate the parallel institution of breathing licenses for which we must visit the DMV and pass a proficiency test? Perhaps I should begin studying now. I’d hate to have to refrain from breathing pending a make-up exam.

Furthermore, the actual car coverage levels requires by most states are extremely low. Although I suppose some people are satisfied with $25,000/$50,000 coverage (a common benchmark), most drivers understand that $100,000/$300,000 is much more prudent. But if the more robust protections are so obviously smart, why aren’t they required? It’s simple. Because all of the states recognize the need to balance the wisdom of carrying insurance against the restraint all levels of government must exercise when infringing upon the core value of individual liberty.

Since the right to property (in this case to not pay insurance premiums) is so fundamental in our system, it must be violated only for the most extreme of reasons and only to the most humble of extents. Thus, basing health care reform on this same pattern would require at most only some sort of minimum catastrophic coverage. Suffice it to say that current proposals which cover every form of health care down to the most routine are not modeled on the same recognition of liberty and property rights.

So, having taken a more diligent look at whether mandatory automobile insurance justifies the imposition of health insurance, we now have a much better sense of its validity. In order to make the comparison justify current health care proposals, Congress (not the states) would have to currently require that all people (regardless of personal wealth or actual car ownership) owned an insurance policy provided by Congress itself that covered routine maintenance, periodic breakdown, and collision repair to their own cars, even ones they acquire with pre-existing defects (like from a junkyard).

Since not one single element of this hypothetical currently exists, and since breathing is not a privilege, my request is simple. During the two weeks that are fair to allow this column to circulate through society, simply boo anyone who makes the car insurance argument in public. Thereafter, I recommend noogies. It’s what one does to recalcitrant freshmen.

What’s Racism Got To Do With It?

2009-10-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

Published: 10.06.09 at Townhall and 10.07.09 at Crosswalk.

Are those who strongly oppose President Obama racists? President Carter and Maureen Dowd think so. But President Clinton and even Mr. Obama himself don’t think so. Who is correct?

Two questions should guide us in finding our answer. First, how do we tell who is and who is not a racist? Second, what is the causal connection between racism and strong opposition to President Obama’s policies (SOTMOP)?

1. Who is a racist?

The biggest hindrance to identifying racists in America is the nearly universal suppression of racism in public. Since openly expressing racism immediately entails being ostracized, very few people are willing to do it, which means that racists quickly learn to talk like non-racists. Thus, evidence of racism is hard to acquire and often fairly thin, sometimes so thin that no amount of squinting will reveal it.

For example, Maureen Dowd recently became convinced Rep. Joe Wilson was a racist because he rudely shouted, “You lie!” during the President’s health care address to Congress. Such words do not normally indicate racism. Tens of millions of people have called President Bush a liar, and few, if any, of them are racists. But Obama is black, Wilson is white, and racism is heavily closeted in America. So perhaps Dowd is just a better detective than others. Let’s look further.

Consider language Mr. Wilson might have used to more clearly identify his views. If he were openly racist, for instance, he might have said, “You lie, you dirty, knuckle-dragging Negro!” But if he were a true egalitarian who yet believed himself to have been lied to, the most likely thing he would have said was, “You lie!” By contrast with the open racist, Mr. Wilson clearly doesn’t sound racist at all. And in contrast with the non-racist,…well, there isn’t any contrast, is there? In other words, the evidentiary difference between what Rep. Wilson actually said and what a non-racist who felt lied to would have said is zero. Nevertheless, this non-evidence is offered as indicating his racism.

All this begs the question of how Mr. Wilson could have expressed his frustration without running the risk of being called a racist by Ms. Dowd. Perhaps a real egalitarian who felt lied to by the President would have said, “You lie, you beautiful black genius!” Ironically, I suspect this too would have been taken for racism, which indicates there is no safe language for a white Congressman to use when claiming a black President lies. I’m not at all defending Mr. Wilson’s disrespectful outburst. I’m just saying that it strikes me as particularly weak evidence of racism.

2. Is racism the root of opposition to Obama?

But even if Ms. Dowd is a bit over-zealous in her racism super-sleuthing, perhaps President Carter is still right that the “overwhelming portion” of SOTPOP is still inspired by racism. In considering how to validate this claim, we yet again find ourselves hindered by the severe difficulty of separating political opposition rooted in racism from the sort that is not.

Clearly, strong animosity is possible even in the absence of racism. Again, observe President Bush’s treatment by the left during his term. Further, even when Clarence Thomas was being castigated by whites on the left, I think we were all willing to agree that this was not racism in action, but mere political disagreement. Since we have no trouble imagining liberals being so furious without being racists, it should be possible to imagine opponents of Obama being equally furious regardless of racism.

But we needn’t speculate. Everyone knows that people on the right have expressed opposition to white liberal politicians every bit as ferociously as they have toward Mr. Obama. I’m sure that Secretary Clinton, the late Senator Kennedy, and Vice-President Gore would all be eager to dispel the allegation that conservatives are uniquely antipathetic towards our President.

And even if there is racism among some or even many who express SOTPOP, the right question is whether they would be any friendlier to a white President who pursued his same agenda. No less a commentator on race issues than President Clinton himself has answered this, saying, “I believe that 100 percent of those who are opposing him now would be against him if he were a white Democrat.”

And that’s really the point. Are there any people in America who would be for Barack Obama if he were white but who are against him now because he is black? In what can only be labeled a tremendous bit of irony, for this to be true would require that the supposedly racist conservative backlash against him isn’t coming from conservatives at all. Conservatives are already disposed to SOTPOP on purely ideological grounds. If racism is creating opponents to Obama, it can only be creating them among white moderates and white liberals who would gladly follow a white President along Obama’s path, but just can’t stand it happening under a black man. Perhaps it’s just my lack of imagination, but I have some trouble believing the Tea Party protestors are secretly liberal racists temporarily cavorting with conservatives out of racial animosity toward a black President of their own ideological stripe.

I wonder whether it’s even plausible for racism to overwhelm political opinions. If this train of reasoning is true and there are liberal racists who now oppose Obama because he’s black, are there also conservative racists who would oppose a black Republican? The conservatives I know are quite fond of Clarence Thomas, JC Watts, Walter Williams, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice. Yet if any of those people became President, I shudder to imagine the opposition they would draw. Still, I doubt anyone would say it was rooted in racism. Perhaps it’s only because we’ve been so conditioned to think that liberals are incapable of racism whereas conservatives are incapable of escaping it. But with all the deep animosity people on the left have toward anyone on the right based entirely on ideology, why is it so incomprehensible that people of equally strong conviction on the right would react vehemently to a liberal President who just happened to be black?

Conclusion

On some slightly more careful analysis, then, things seem fairly simple. Identifying racists is difficult at best, and strong political opposition seems to be completely unconnected to the presence of racism. So maybe the best way for us all to proceed is to treat “racist” and “racism” as words which themselves have no place in civilized political discourse anymore.

And what should we do with those angry white protestors who are expressing anything but fondness for our first black President? I say we celebrate them, even if we don’t agree with them.

See, America won’t be racially healed until we’re willing to accept a world in which whites sometimes hate blacks for reasons completely unrelated to race and in which this hatred isn’t misdiagnosed as racism. The right to be hated for reasons other than skin color, as weird as it sounds, might just be the key test of a truly equal society. We’ve finally elected a black man President. The question remains whether we’ll truly fulfill this amazing accomplishment by allowing white Americans to openly and fearlessly oppose him without being called racists.

An Open Letter To President Obama About Health Care

2009-09-19T15:54:00.000-07:00

Published: 09.23.09 at Townhall.com and Crosswalk.com.
Note: I have directly submitted this letter to the White House, details are below the colum.
Reference: To read up on the health care debate, go here.

Mr. President, I want you to understand two things about me. First, I like my current health plan, both the health care itself and the price I pay for it. Second, I am a conservative, which means I fear large government.

I tell you this at the outset so you understand that the current state of health care in this country suits me and my family just fine. Thus, in asking me to support your plan to revolutionize that status quo, you must realize that you’re asking me to jeopardize a good thing I already have and to deny my deepest political instincts about the dangers of large government. I might be willing to do both, but only if you give me the right answers to a few questions. This means that I’m the conservative you want to talk to. And I’ve got to tell you that, so far, I’m not impressed.

All your adamant hand-wringing and bold asserting about the necessity to do something has not convinced me. I’ve heard you talk about the importance of clear, simple language in financial instruments (which I like), but then you offer me a thousand page document and ask me to blindly trust you that’s it’s exactly what we need. You tell me that it’s important to set a civil tone in Washington, but then you accuse pediatricians of being vicious money-grubbers who perform elective tonsillectomies on children. And when I or the people I respect raise what seem like legitimate concerns about your plans, you accuse us of bearing false witness and resisting the Biblical mandate to care for our fellow man.

As I conservative, I should tell you that I do, in fact, want all people to get the best health care they can. If it were up to me, I would probably run a hospital into the ground by giving away too much of everything I have. If it were up to me, I would gladly provide health care to illegal immigrants and even export health care to other countries because I don’t believe that the only people who matter are the ones who happened to be born within our borders. And although I am often accused of the opposite, I care deeply about children and their needs. I have three of them so far myself, and I’m the guy who cries when I hear stories about parents who can’t give their kids everything they need because I can’t imagine what it would be like to suffer that pain myself. Also, I don’t believe health care in this country is perfect. It cost me around $400 to have our first child and $4,000 to have each of the other two, all three of which were perfectly normal without complications. They’re well worth the price, but that price seems outrageous to me.

So with all this in mind, I have a few simple questions for you. If you answer them adequately, I can’t promise I’ll be with you, but I can promise that I’ll feel much less like I’m in a fight to the death to preserve my way of life and the principles that I have long believed this country stands for. In short, I won’t feel like you’re betraying this country any more, even though I may still be hesitant about this particular agenda item. I don’t believe that the only way for my country to be secure is for me to always have my way. I didn’t vote for you, but I did go on the air the day after the election to proclaim that you were my President-elect. But if you want me to continue being the loyal opposition rather than an organizer of the revolution, I need some answers, and I need them fast.

1. Bad ideas to avoid.

First, I want to know whether you think there are any ways government could make health care worse and, if so, precisely what they are in contrast with your plan. See, I’m worried you might actually believe the federal government will make things better in health care merely by getting involved in it, regardless of what it actually does. I get the sense you think government is a magic wand that can fix anything if only we’ll wave it fast enough at the problem. And if you can’t show me you’re aware of the danger areas and unwise options for health care reform, then I’m left thinking you do believe government will improve things no matter what it does.

A big part of knowing how to succeed in anything is knowing what mistakes not to make. This is true in warfare, business, relationships, lawn care, whatever. Show me that you understand the distinction between bad government involvement in a field and good government involvement in a field by telling me the health care changes government intervention must not make. I know you’re convinced the status quo is unacceptable, but please reassure me you understand there are ways the federal government could actually make things worse.

2. Commitment and Criteria

Second, since I believe government is so woefully capable of making things worse than they already are, I need some collateral to secure this loan of my faith in your program. Since I’m not yet convinced you and your idea are a good credit risk, I need something more than just sweet words and heartfelt promises. Here are my two requirements.

I need you to show me you believe in this plan so much that you’re willing to impose it upon yourself and all the members of Congress. The only possible reason not to sign up for it yourselves is that you’re only willing to risk my family’s health care, but not your own. (Ideally, I’d even love to see you try your program only on government employees for a year or two just to be sure you’ve got the kinks out of the thing before you enroll a few hundred million people.) You see, the rule of law requires that the people making the laws be subject to them. Otherwise their personal interest incentives are lost and all we have remaining to impede foolish lawmaking is trust in the nobility of our political leadership. Surely you can understand that I’m not quite that deep a believer in the overall virtuosity of those inside the beltway.

Even more important, I want some criteria so we can measure whether your system is working or failing after we try it out. And I want a guarantee that if these indicators aren’t being met, that your system will go away immediately. See, one of the great lessons this country learned from the war in Vietnam was to have clear, measurable objectives so we can know whether to persist with any endeavor after we’ve started it. If you’re so confident that your plan will make health care better in all sorts of particular ways, then it should be easy to provide a list of the specific numerical criteria we can refer to over the next two or three years to verify that it’s working properly or not.

3. Exit Strategy

Third, since I believe government should always be the solution of last resort, I want to know what sort of an exit strategy you have for the federal government regarding health care. Again, Vietnam taught us very clearly that we not only needed to know how to get into a major entanglement, but we also needed to know how to get out both in defeat and in victory. You have repeatedly said that you don’t want to own a car company and you don’t want to own banks. I believe you.

I presume you think that the auto industry and banking are only temporarily troubled and will eventually become strong enough to stand on their own. In these two cases, you presumably view your interventions like a cast applied to a broken leg. The fracture needs time and protection to heal, but eventually the cast must come off. Based on your argument that the private sector will benefit from some honest competition, you clearly believe that private health insurance is an arena which must not simply disappear into the ocean of government. So, if you can lay out your plan for a government exit of the health care market once the adjustments and healing you think must take place have occurred, that would assure me that you aren’t secretly intending to permanently nationalize one sixth of our country’s economy.

So these are my requests. They don’t cover all the issues raised in the course of the past few weeks, and I’ll probably have other questions along the way. But answering these three simple questions will make me much more willing to live with whatever plan you propose. I will know that you are aware of the dangers to be avoided in government intervention in health care. I will know that Congress must live under its own law and that measurable objectives will definitively show whether their plan is working. And I will know that you have a clear but temporary plan for getting our health care industry back on track. If you can answer these three requests, I might even be willing to forgive your suspicious haste in doing all of this. I understand the importance of timing in politics, and providing these assurances, I’m willing to believe you’re acting in haste for this reason rather than because you know that a thorough inspection of the house will reveal sagging ceilings and foundation cracks.

I am a conservative. I do fear big government. And I do like my health care. But I’m willing to take your health plan more seriously if you can answer these questions the right way.

Correspondence:
On Friday, September 25, I submitted the following email through the contact form at whitehouse.gov If I receive any feedback from the White House, I will post it here.

Text of email:
I am a talk show host on a Christian radio station, and I've written an open letter to President Obama on health care which was published at Crosswalk, Townhall, and on my own website (all three links are below). I did not write it just as a column for editorial readers. I wrote it to genuinely be a letter for the President, and I hope you will read it and recommend it to him. If you would, please email me to confirm that you received this, and I would very much prefer to know who actually read the letter/saw the column in the White House. I know Mr. Obama cannot read most things sent to him, but I would still like to know who did read it, especially if he actually does.
(Here, I included the three links.)

Their form response to the submission on the website reads:
Thank you for contacting the White House.

President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history. That begins with taking comments and questions from you, the public, through our website.

Our office receives tens of thousands of messages from Americans each day. We do our best to reply to as many as we can, but please be aware that you may find more information and answers to your questions online.

We encourage you to visit WhiteHouse.gov regularly to follow news and updates, and to learn more about President Obama’s agenda for change.

For an easy-to-navigate source of information on Federal government services, please visit: www.USA.gov

Thank you again for your message.

The Office of Presidential Correspondence

A Reminder to Pro-Life Christians

2009-01-22T13:01:00.000-08:00

Published 01.21.09 at Townhall.com and Crosswalk.com

Today is the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling which essentially decriminalized abortion for our entire country. Those who endorse Roe are holding celebrations, while those who condemn it are holding protest rallies. Yet, like so many other issues, there are valid warnings for people on both sides.

For the moment, however, I want to speak exclusively to those of you who consider yourselves pro-life and Christian. The rest of you may follow along as you see fit.

For starters, we live in a country that is made up largely of self-identified Christians. This means that most pro-lifers follow Christ (though not all, importantly). But it also means that most pro-choicers identify themselves as Christians as well. Though many of us would prefer to marginalize their faith by claiming that they are merely nominal Christians or some other derisive comment, we should be very careful about implying that saving faith can only reside in members of our own political persuasion.

Now, lest you worry that this will degrade into an argument for moral equivalence or even for keeping silent, I want to assure you that I agree with you that abortion is the single greatest moral evil of our day. Nothing else even comes close. Yet, precisely because of our zeal to save babies, we run the very real risk of forgetting that Christ is more important than our cause. And though correcting our pro-choice brothers and sisters is appropriate, condemning them is not.

See, just like any atrocity, a serious view of abortion’s awfulness can easily jeopardize our Christian joy and happiness. “How dare you smile in a country where over a million defenseless lives are extinguished every year!” Furthermore, we can feel extra guilt over enjoying anything frivolous while age-based genocide surrounds us. “How dare you enjoy sushi or ‘American Idol’?”

But we must strive to remember that our joy comes—or ought to come—from being loved by Christ, not from making the world a more desirable place, including the prevention of abortion. And it is vital to maintain some humility in the midst of this particular evil.

Such humility comes from remembering that God cares more about the unborn than we do … infinitely more. After all, is there any one of us who has been humiliated, flogged and crucified on a cross in order to save them?

Furthermore, God knows the awfulness of this practice far more deeply than we do. Your pain at the destruction of life is but a passing whim compared with the deep grief felt by God any time one of His children loses their lives.

And yet, God smiles. He rejoices. He dances. He sings. He is radiant in happiness over the reclamation of any one sinner, and He is overjoyed to see those so recovered live out the simple joy of deriving every ounce of their identity, satisfaction and significance from Him. God smiles.

But how could He?

How dare He?

Does He not know?

Does He not care?

Oh, yes. Far more than either you or I do.

And one of the subsequent pains He experiences at the very real evil of abortion is the compounded evil of allowing our own interest in this issue to interfere with the joy we should have in Him and in Him alone. If we are not extremely careful, we can (almost without noticing the transaction) allow our passion for this very right and noble cause to fuel a bitterness over the death of children which will poison our passion for God … a God who is capable of smiling in the midst of the very thing we both ferociously despise.

If we act as if only the ending of abortion will allow us to be joyful, we are essentially acting as though Christ is inadequate for us—telling God that He is not enough. We must have our way as well.

Thus, we must be diligent daily to not let our pro-lifeism become an idol which we worship by seeking our real delight from what it can never deliver and has never done for us.

God loves abortionists. God loves women who abort. And God loves pro-choice politicians. And God even loves pro-choice Christians … just as He loves you in the midst of whatever known and secret sins He has paid to forgive.

How dare we hate whom God loves? And how dare we put our own judgment above His by allowing this particular issue to acquire more importance than the real Love of our lives.

“But I’ve never done anything so awful as those people ...”

Ahhhh. Now we see the real issue. Maybe you think that you are saved in part by Christ and in part by your own righteousness. And so maybe we are humble, grateful, loving and forgiving to the extent that we think we owe Him—but no further. The real problem is not in how much better than them we are. The real problem is not recognizing that, in and of ourselves, we are not better than them.

Until we realize that we are absolutely no better than anyone and that Christ still absolutely loved each of us enough to give up everything and come rescue us by His own sacrifice, we will always treat with contempt those who violate the rules we think are out of reach of our own depravity. And even if we succeed at getting this particular abomination stopped, we will have done two even more awful things in the process.

First, we will have alienated from Christ anyone who encounters our wrath. And second, we will have failed to heal the alienation from Christ in us which is the only malignancy that can produce such wrath.

And lest I be misunderstood, I should re-state something very simple: It would be the worst of all shames if you read this article and somehow sought to simply stifle your anger and behave more decently in your fight to end abortion.

You can’t.

But even if you could, that would be worse because then you would be oh so proud of yourself for fixing this heretofore unexamined sin.

Just as with every other element of your salvation, it is Christ alone and our pondering of just how much He has loved us that will transform us into the kind of people who can safely be entrusted with carrying the pro-life message and honoring God at the same time.

Take this to Him. Ponder His love for you. Allow Him to heal you. And from that, watch as your actions become completely different—finally running the risk of winning souls in addition to merely winning lives.

A Christmas View of Abortion

2008-12-17T12:29:00.001-08:00

Published 12.19.08 at Townhall.com and Crosswalk.com.

“The Bible says nothing directly about abortion.”

Have you ever heard this claim before? I know I have. And the uncomfortable truth is that, in a certain sense, it’s accurate. The deliberate termination of a pregnancy is not directly addressed anywhere in Scripture.

On the one hand, this could mean that the practice is merely a matter of personal choice, having been left alone by even God Himself. On the other hand, this could also mean that the culture for which the Bible was written was so deeply affirming of childbearing that the idea of aborting a baby would have been literally inconceivable to them. After all, there are no commands in the Bible to breathe, presumably because Jewish culture is staunchly pro-air.

But even if the Bible doesn’t quite give us a definitive proclamation on the overall question of abortion, that doesn’t mean it says nothing relevant at all. One of the key points of contention in this debate is whether the fetus is a person and, if so, when in gestation this occurs. Most pro-lifers believe it’s at conception, but those who believe abortion is morally acceptable think this happens at some later stage of pregnancy such as implantation, quickening, viability, or birth.

Until the other day, I would have said the Bible was indeterminate on this issue. But now, I would be as bold as to say that it plainly teaches us that a fetus is a person at most within the first four weeks of gestation and more likely within even the first few days after conception. If so, then Christians who haven’t previously realized this would have to acknowledge that even early term abortions end the life of a person. And this would, in turn, affect the advice they give to others who might currently be contemplating abortion, even perhaps their own daughters. So let me show you what I found for the first time the other day.

I was reading the Christmas story in Luke 1 and 2 when I noticed some things. First, I noticed that Luke (a doctor and scholar) specifically tells his audience (Theophilus) that he has thoroughly investigated everything he is about to write and that he has decided to “write it out for you in consecutive order.”(1:3) Unlike the other Gospel writers, Luke will tell us his story in the form we modern readers best comprehend: chronologically. This means we can rely heavily on the order of things in any of our conclusions. I know this may not seem very important, but stick with me for a moment and you’ll see why it matters.

Reading on, we learn that Elizabeth (Mary’s cousin) has become pregnant and secluded herself for five months, hiding her very late-in-life first pregnancy from everybody, even her close family.(1:24) Then Luke tells us that the angel Gabriel makes his famous visit to the engaged virgin Mary in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy.(1:26) These time references are no coincidence.

Continuing to read, Gabriel tells Mary that she is going to give birth to the Messiah and name him Jesus.(1:31-33) In the process of answering her rather understandable question about how this may be so, Gabriel uses the not-quite-as miraculous pregnancy of her elderly cousin Elizabeth as evidence that this can really happen. And once more, as if for emphasis, we have the time reference as he declares that Elizabeth is in her sixth month of pregnancy.(1:36)

After his departure, Mary immediately went as fast as she could (1:39) to the hill country to see her cousin, presumably to both verify the news (remember Elizabeth’s seclusion) and to share her own story. When Mary comes close enough to greet her, Elizabeth feels her baby (John the Baptist) leap in her womb with joy at the presence of his Messiah and Mary.(1:41-44) By any reasonable standard, this shows that the fetus, John, is a person at this moment and nothing less.

But John is close to his third trimester by now, and even the most strident pro-choice person will usually concede that third trimester abortions are heinous for essentially this reason. Roe v Wade even affirmed this idea. So nothing observed thus far is particularly persuasive on the subject of abortion. But that’s when I saw this other thing that I hadn’t ever considered before.

Whose presence is John leaping at? Well, obviously the (much younger) fetus, Jesus. Yet Jesus must be only in his first trimester when John recognized him through the Holy Spirit.

But perhaps the trip from Nazareth to the hill country took a while. A terrain map of ancient Israel would lead us to think this journey take a few days at most, plus the text clearly says she went “with haste” (1:39) But perhaps some longer time frame is involved here that might extend the likely age of fetal Jesus. Luckily for us, we needn’t guess. The text itself answers these questions if we just keep reading.

After Mary sings the Magnificat (1:46-55), Luke tells us she stayed with Elizabeth for about three months before returning home.(1:56) Immediately after she departs, John the Baptist is born.(1:57) In the following chapter, the much more famous narrative of Jesus’s birth is told. But the key facts have already been laid out with the precision that only a medical doctor would include.

Working solely with the calendar of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Luke has told us that Jesus was a person with sufficient individual identity that His cousin could recognize him through the assistance of the Holy Spirit.(1:41-44) But Luke has also told us that when this occurred, Jesus could only have been a maximum of four weeks old and probably was much younger than that.

Gabriel announced the conception to Mary in Elizabeth’s sixth month.(1:26) Thereafter, Mary traveled to the hill country (1:39), where she stayed for about three months (1:56) before leaving prior to John the Baptist’s birth (1:57). This means that fetus Jesus must have been less than four weeks old when she arrived, a maximum given the parameters. But, given the fact that she went immediately and in haste (1:39), a much more likely reality is that He was only a few days old (perhaps not even implanted yet) when John recognizes Him. Mary certainly wouldn’t have even been able to know by ordinary means that she was pregnant yet.

So the pressing point of all this analysis is not that John in his third trimester was a person in the womb when he leapt for joy. The unavoidable and much more forceful point is that Jesus was in the very earliest portion of His first trimester when He was recognized by John as a person. And unless Jesus is not a human child, this means that all children are people at this early stage.

I realize that all of this will be of very little interest to those of you who either do not care about the Bible or else do not care whether the fetus is a person. I also know this doesn’t really do much to address the question of the legality of abortion, since the basis of my investigation is a faith text.

But for those tens of millions of Christians who every year celebrate this story and also believe that early term abortion is compatible with their faith, the point seems embarrassingly clear. It is no longer honest to say that we can’t know whether the first trimester fetus is a person.

So as we prepare to celebrate Christmas and the birth of our Savior this year, I have a simple question. Since we now know that Jesus was somewhere between a few days and a few weeks gestation when He was recognized in Scripture as a person, then who or what is it in a young woman’s womb today if not a person…and somebody’s grandchild?

Do the Rich Owe Us?

2008-10-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

Published 10.31.08 at Townhall.com and Crosswalk.com

Do The Rich Owe Us?

People who are otherwise quite smart become suddenly stupid when the subject is money. I don’t mean they manage their own money poorly, although that is often the case. I mean that they don’t actually understand what money is.

For instance, we are all now painfully aware that Barack Obama believes in some degree of socialism, given his predilection to favor “spreading the wealth around.” The idea is simple. Wealthy people have a lot, and poor people don’t. Money solves problems, so why not take some from the rich to give to the poor? Robin Hood was a hero, and that’s what he did, right? After all (and this is the vital part), those who are rich owe back to the society that’s given them so much.

Wait, what was that last part again?

People who make a lot of money owe a debt to society to use their money for good, and that’s why it’s okay to tax them more heavily in order to do the good things that need doing. This error is the source of the biggest errors people make in thinking about money and government.

In truth, it’s simple. The wealthy don’t owe us. Literally, we owe them. That’s what money means.

If I have $50,000 in a bank somewhere, that means that society OWES ME goods and services in the amount of $50,000. If I spend $20,000 of it on a car, society doesn’t owe me as much anymore because they’ve compensated me in the form of that car. Everyone collectively still owes me $30,000, which I can collect on in a variety of ways.

Money is an IOU from society that we give people when they give us things we desire or do things for us we want. So when a person makes a lot of money, it means that he has done beneficial things for a lot of people. If he accumulates these IOUs in a storage facility somewhere, he is amassing wealth not because he owes society, but precisely because society owes him the value of all those accumulated and uncollected debts.

To put the point a little more bluntly, people who have debt are the ones that truly owe back to society. That’s what debt means. You’ve enjoyed goods or services that you haven’t yet earned. And when you’ve created enough value in the eyes of other people, they’ll trade their stored-up credit to you and you can be debt-free, neither owing society nor being owed by society.

The thing about money is that it measures value. When I pay you $100 for an item, I am admitting that it is worth about twice as much to me in my life as something else I only pay $50 for. When people pay $12 to see a movie, they’re saying that a movie is worth four gallons of gas. And when someone sells a million people movie tickets, he makes a lot of money because he did a million favors.

In what sense, precisely, should someone who delivers the finished experience of watching a movie to a million people then be obligated to those people to give them back any portion of the money they freely paid him? In reality, because he has worked while they have leisured, they now owe him. That’s why he can go back to them and let them cut his hair, change his oil, and weed his garden in exchange for some of those dollars.

Here’s a quick test to see whether you are grasping this idea. Who contributes more value to society: a person who makes $100,000 or a person who makes $20,000? If this question is at all difficult for you, it’s because you’re secretly at war with yourself. You despise people who make a lot of money, yet you daily affirm the social value of making a lot of money when you pay more money for the things you want more.

Also, just to admit the obvious, one may also do beneficial things without receiving money. Friends, parents, and volunteers do this all the time. But when someone gives you money, you know one thing: you have benefited them.

“But what if the man who earns 100K does so through pornography and the 20K guy teaches kindergarten?” Alright. “But what if the 100K guy is a doctor and the 20K guy sells cigarettes?” Don’t cherry-pick your examples. Of course people make bad decisions about value, but other people make good decisions about value. That’s the idea of letting people make and spend their own money. The alternative is socialism.

But here’s one final error that may be plaguing some of you. When people make a lot of money, doesn’t that mean that other people become poor?

No.

Never.

Not even a little bit.

As long as the transaction is voluntary (i.e. not taxes or theft), then both people become better off every time money changes hands. That’s because the thing being purchased means more to the person buying it than the money he spends, and the money being paid means more to the person receiving it than the thing he sells. The magic of a free market is that every single transaction (EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION) makes the world a better place because it benefits both parties involved. (By the way, I’m sorry for screaming, but I had to overcome a Master’s Degree in grasping this elementary concept.) This means that the free market is NEVER a zero sum game where one person gains and the other person loses. It is ALWAYS a positive for both, achieving a more efficient distribution of desirable items through a totally voluntary process. The economic pie is not fixed, but can grow or shrink based on production, consumption, waste, and exchange.

When you buy a haircut, your life gets better because you prefer shorter hair to the $15 you paid. Similarly, the barber’s life gets better because he used his time and talent to help you, and now he can go out to lunch. Who is worse off because you got a haircut? Nobody. Who is worse off because a barber starts hair salons and earns $450,000? No one. That’s just 30,000 little events where both parties improve their lives. That’s the nature of a free market.

So when you imagine that the guy who made it possible for thousands of people to have haircuts suddenly owes those people for having the audacity to have already given them a benefit, you’ve inverted the very meaning of money. And when you then tax him more because he’s been so effective at helping people, you’re teaching him that helping people is a bad thing and disincentivizing good behavior. But regardless of whether he is deaf to your foolish instruction, you have still stolen from him what was rightfully his entirely on the premise that being very good at helping people somehow puts you even more in their debt, a patently absurd concept.

For the sake of clarity, allow me to repeat myself. The rich do not owe us. In reality, we owe them. That’s what money means.

The way we say, “Thank you,” in the modern world is we give you money. The more we give you, the more thankful we are for the thing we’ve received. There is no voodoo threshold at which a pile of thank yous suddenly becomes a pile of “you owe us”es. And there is, therefore, no justification for telling people who accumulate the biggest pile of thank yous every year that they are obligated to give back to all the people that have already thusly thanked them.

In as short a way as I know to explain it, this is basic economic reason why Barack Obama should not be President. He simply does not understand what money is.

Teaching a Four-Year-Old

2008-10-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

Published November 2008 in the Greater Phoenix Christian Chronicle

We recently discovered just how far a little bit of child psychology could get us in our parenting. We had started to notice that our four-year-old seemed to be misbehaving more than usual and also failing to good-behave as much as he should. Since our goal for our boys is virtue rather than merely the absence of vice and since we also believe that the best way to displace bad behavior is with good substitutes, the latter deficiency concerned us far more than the former.

After a lengthy discussion, we settled on a plan to correct this: we made a behavioral report card chart for the refrigerator. We listed the ten or so bad things that we would like to see him stop doing and the ten or so good things we keep encouraging him to do. Then we started keeping score. After each day with more positives than negatives, we put a big smiley face and gave him a reward the following day. After seven days of smiley faces in a row, he got an extra special reward.

Here’s what happened. At first it was just monitoring and scoring to get a realistic picture of where he stood, which intrigued him. Then we started reminding him about marks on the chart whenever opportunities arose, which usually made him change behaviors accordingly. But in just the last few days, something extraordinary has happened: he has actually begun initiating the good behaviors himself and reminding us that he’s done something worth a good mark.

See, the one thing we knew for a fact about our oldest is that he really thrives on approval. And where corporal discipline, scolding, and time-outs had failed, a simple bit of organized incentivizing based on our knowledge of his personality has transformed him into a boy who actively tries to find opportunities to do good things.

Literally the flicking of a pen on a piece of paper has had more influence on him than anything else we’ve tried. It’s amazing what a little insight can do for cultivating such essential habits. And though we obviously want him to eventually do the behaviors for their own sake, we also understand that he has to get accustomed to the taste of virtue somehow or other before he will ever start ordering the dish for himself.

Why Do They Hate Sarah Palin So?

2008-09-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

Published 09.09.08 at Towhnall.com and Crosswalk.com.

I assume it is unnecessary to answer the logically prior question of whether they hate Sarah Palin. The level of vitriol flung at her in the past week and a half by critics in every liberal outlet ranging from the New York Times to Air America is particularly awe-inspiring given that this is all the longer they’ve even known her name. Ordinarily, such hatred takes years to cultivate. The force and acceleration of their vehemence virtually demands psychoanalysis. Since this sport is in vogue, I’ll give my diagnostic skills a shot at the trophy.

Preface: There is a pathology

The natural first reaction of a Palin-hater to this column is to deny the hatred. They will say it’s her politics, her religion, or possibly the whiff of scandal some have managed to ladle upon her. But if they’re honest with themselves, they’ll have to admit three simple facts.

First, the reasons they give aren’t the reasons they hate. If they didn’t have these, they’d manufacture others. There’s an old story about a man asking to borrow his neighbor’s lawn mower and being told, “No, I’m making potato soup.” “What does that have to do with me borrowing your lawn mower?” the incredulous man replies. “Nothing, but if I don’t want to loan you my lawn mower, one excuse is just as good as another.” Likewise, Governor Palin is not hated because of whatever reasons they offer. These are afterthoughts to an animosity which is embarrassed to admit it was born prior to reason. Hence, refuting them will prove futile.

Second, even those who persist in asserting such reasons as their motive will have to admit that all of them put together still can’t justify the disproportionate vigor of their attacks upon her. To use an aging phrase, this is the politics of personal destruction; a nuclear response to what their own arguments admit is a merely conventional threat.

Third, no one can hate this deeply this quickly. Conservatives generally despise certain political figures such as Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, and John Paul Stevens. But it’s taken us years, sometimes decades to detest these people. Similarly for liberals, contempt only begins to describe their feelings toward George W. Bush, Rick Santorum, and Antonin Scalia. But, again, at least such a sentiment has developed over time. It took Sarah Palin less than a week to receive treatment these men have taken years to earn. Such an immediate mauling of someone’s character says far more about the predators than about their prey.

So, what explains this pathology? I have two mutually compatible theories.

Theory 1: The Cult of Personality.

Barack Obama is the left’s Messiah. Their hopes, their dreams, and even their patriotism are at this point invested in him. He cannot be criticized. He cannot be joked at. And he most certainly cannot be mocked. All such response to him (perfectly normal with any other politician) is viewed as blasphemy rather than politics. Not only is the left salvifically invested in him, they fear they have been too rash to the altar call. Calm reflection proves Barack Obama isn’t ready to be President yet, but who can resist the hope beyond hope that he’s more than just a golden voice reading a teleprompter?

So when little Sarah Palin comes along and castigates him with condescending satire, they react as any devastated schoolgirl with a crush would. Her speech stated every major flaw with his candidacy. Not just honestly, but with Reagenesque comedic flair. And since their deepest fear is that everything she said about him is right, the only option to reconsidering their betrothal was to destroy her.

It’s pretty simple. If we disagree, you correct me. If I am silly, you ignore me. But if I articulate your own fears in attacking something you cherish irrationally, you excoriate me…as cover. As Robert Pirsig explained in his lovely novel on motorcycle maintenance, no one jumps up and down screaming that the sun will rise tomorrow. Highly emotional responses indicate fear and uncertainty, not the opposite.

Sarah Palin’s on-target reductio of Barack Obama turned their Messiah into a joke, earning the very predictable treatment a heretic deserves. Disabusing people of a savored fantasy always does.

Theory 2: Her non-feminist feminism.

I used to marvel at the rudeness so often publicly shown to parents with many children. But then I saw how the very existence of such families exposes the guilt and self-doubt others feel about their own decisions to stop having children. The surest way to avoid dealing with these stifled concerns is to assault the character or intelligence of parents who dare to expose them with their large families.

So, too with Sarah Palin and the left. Her very life rebukes them.

She has five children, two of them after the age of forty. When her infant son was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, she chose life. And when her own daughter was discovered pregnant (a hypothetical commonly urged against pro-lifers), she helped her choose life, too. Without ever saying a word about being pro-life (to say it would have been superfluous), she demolished all the common arguments used in favor of abortion and family planning, totemic doctrines of the left.

But it’s more than just doctrine. It’s that so many people on the left have condoned abortions, helped others obtain abortions, or even had abortions themselves in the very same circumstances under which Sarah Palin chose life. Honest people are an affront to liars. Law-abiders are an affront to criminals. And the woman who has made pro-life “choices” is a stinging affront to modern feminism, which has spent decades trying to convince women that pregnancy is a disease and children parasites.

They must demonize her because her choices so clearly condemn their own. Make no mistake, when your example disproves someone else’s deeply internalized rationalizations, they will try to destroy you. After all, the only other option would be to repent.

Conclusion

In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche said, “Anyone who has looked deeply into the world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men….let nobody doubt that whoever stands that much in need of the cult of surfaces must at some time have reached beneath them with disastrous results.” His critique of religion so perfectly fits probamaism that one is forced to conclude the latter is but a new flavor of the former.

There may be other pathologies at play here, but these explain both the left’s tsunamic response and why it struck last Thursday morning. It was the speech, stupid.

Perhaps Homophobia Isn't A Choice Either

2008-08-19T13:32:00.001-07:00

Published 08.20.08 at Crosswalk.com and 08.21.08 at Townhall.com.

As a Christian who takes the Bible seriously, I believe that any sexual activity other than that between a man and his wife is illicit. This includes adultery, premarital sex and, of course, homosexuality.

But I’ve also been doing what my parents always taught me to do: listen to those who disagree with me. And I think I’ve discovered something rather shocking: opposition to homosexuality must itself be genetic.

For as long as I can remember, homosexuals have been explaining why gay people have no choice about their orientation. And it finally dawned on me that their arguments explain why being anti-gay is also not a choice but an innate predisposition beyond our power to restrain. This led me to embrace my convictions and stop trying in vain to repress who I am.

Since millions suffer from this same condition, I’m hopeful that my epiphany will help others accept themselves and their convictions, too. Here are insights that helped me, in no particular order.

Insight 1: You cannot control whom you love.

Although there are different kinds of love, some of which involve choice and some of which do not, this realization about passion led me to a very liberating conclusion. If we can’t control whom we love, that's because we can't control our strong passions. But passions can be both for and against. And, just as gay love is a passion which is impossible to control, I now know that my passionate anti-gayness must also be impossible to control. I might wish I could change, but it’s hopeless. My judgmental tendency draws me as irresistibly as their same-sex affection.

Insight 2: People shouldn’t have to restrain acting on their innate desires.

I used to think that restraint was the key differentiator between animals and men. But then it was explained to me that sexual urges are such a deep element of real human nature that it’s wrong to suppress them. This led me to realize that moral urges are an equally deep aspect of human identity, and it must be unhealthy to try to suppress them, too. Just as someone may feel a deep desire to have same-gender sex, I often suffer the seemingly irresistible urge to espouse my views on sexual ethics. In fact, my desire to express my beliefs is so deeply human that even the First Amendment to our Constitution explicitly protects it. So it must be truly unhealthy to try repressing something as innate as opposition to homosexuality.

Insight 3: Identical twins are both gay about 50 percent of the time.

Although my instinctive reaction to this statistic is to note that even among genetically identical people still fully half of them manage to not be gay, I eventually figured out what this meant for people like me. While research has yet to confirm my suspicions, the likelihood of identical twins sharing a strong disposition to oppose homosexuality is probably even higher than 50 percent. Given the fact that one or both parents may be carriers of the traditional morality gene, it seems perfectly natural that children in some families might all express a strong disposition to denounce gay behavior. And if I inherited this from my parents, well, who can blame me for that?

Insight 4: No one would be foolish enough to choose being gay.

After all, who would choose to suffer discrimination, fear, alienation, and family discord? I used to worry that this argument would prevent disapproving of any behavior at all, since it seems to entail the unusual conclusion that the more despised something is the less anyone can be blamed for it. But then I realized that I have been ridiculed, called intolerant and fired from an academic post for my beliefs on this subject. In fact, I’ve often thought how much easier my life in this culture would be if only I could lay down the burden of believing in traditional morals and embrace homosexuality. Since no rational person in the United States in 2008 would choose to be anti-gay if he didn’t have to be, it must not be a choice.

Insight 5: Being gay isn’t a choice anyone ever actually makes.

The realization that no one (straight or gay) ever consciously flips a switch to set their sexual preference led me to the recognition that I never chose to be anti-gay. It’s not like I went to bed one night thinking supportive thoughts about gayness and then woke up the next morning committed to opposing it. It’s more accurate to say that one day I just sort of realized, almost to my horror, that I thought gay behavior was wrong. I felt like I had been suppressing my innate moral voice because of social pressure before finally coming to terms with it. On top of my parents both being pro-gay and having lots of gay friends, I had actually taken a seminar on gay theory from Richard Mohr, one of the county’s most prominent gay philosophers. I would gladly have been homo-endorsant if I could have been. But all to no avail. And I clearly can’t unchoose what I had never chosen in the first place.

Conclusion

I know this column might frustrate some people who will resist seeing how their arguments, if true, have helped me embrace my own unfashionable alternative beliefstyle. But that’s okay. I don’t blame people who criticize me. Thanks to their insights, I’ve also come to realize that their homophobophobia probably isn’t a choice either.

Five Logical Errors of Born Gay Ideology

2008-07-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

Published 07.31.08 at Townhall.com and Crosswalk.com.

It is core doctrine of pro-gay orthodoxy that homosexuals are born gay. Though science has yet failed to affirm or deny this, the vast majority of gays and their supporters are convinced of it. Sexual orientation is seen as something discovered, not chosen. Instead of debating the merit of this assertion, let’s grant the premise that sexual orientation is determined prior to birth by genetic, gestational, or other factors. The question is whether any valid conclusions flow from this. I don’t think so.

Error 1: If I was born gay, my sexual orientation cannot change.

If present at birth, sexual orientation could come from either biology or psychology. If biological, then a medical procedure may be discovered to alter it. Science gushes with the ability to change things we were born with, especially conditions which past generations considered permanent. We can treat genetic diseases, repair cleft palates, perform height-enhancing surgeries, and even change genders.

Similarly, if the issue is psychological, treatments may be possible. Many traits people believe to be fixed about themselves can be adjusted by good counseling or psychopharmacology. Simple induction concludes that if medicine goes looking for a treatment for homosexuality, it might find one.

Many gays will be outraged at this line of reasoning. But why? We’ve been told that homosexuality can’t be a choice because no one would be foolish enough to choose it. Clearly some gays would relish the power to turn their unwanted condition into an optional one. And why shouldn’t other gays be happy for those who would then be truly free to choose? After all, they’re happy for sex-change operations, which make it possible for transgender persons to undo the birth nature they think was mistakenly given them. How can gender be so fixably wrong but sexual orientation so unfixably right?

Error 2: If I was born gay, then I have no choice about how I behave.

There are two kinds of inborn behavioral tendencies: the resistible and the irresistible. Unless we are supposed to believe that homosexuality is so involuntary that every gay sex act is literally a matter of biological determinism, we are left with the more plausible alternative: the desire to have gay sex does not compel anyone to actually ever have gay sex. One may not be able to control who attracts him, but he can certainly control who he has sex with. Consider the non sequitur of a gay man offering to explain last night’s particular sexual encounter by saying, “Well, I was born gay, you know.”

Free will is precisely the capacity to resist a carnal urge. If a gay person can refrain from sex even once, he has shown such free will. Thus, his sexual choices devolve to him, not to his inborn disposition. Straight people deny their sexual impulses all the time. I would be shocked to discover that gay people lack such an elementary capacity for urge restraint.

Error 3: If I was born gay, then acting upon it must be good.

No one denies that gays have extremely strong desires to be sexual with like-minded, like-bodied others. But strong desires do not justify behavior. Otherwise the study of ethics would be nothing more than the articulation of our impulses.

Some men may be born promiscuous (and perhaps most are), but this doesn’t legitimize adultery (or polygamy, for that matter). Since morality involves precisely the question of which desires are good to act upon, gay behavior cannot be justified merely on the grounds of experienced gay desire.

Error 4: If I was born gay, then this is simply who I am.

In gay doctrine, being gay isn’t seen as an important part of one’s identity. It’s seen as the definitive center of it. But why should this be so?

I am a Christian, a talk-show host, a baseball fan, right-handed, a philosopher, red-headed, from St. Louis, and heterosexual. None of these is the sum or limit of my identity. However, the ones I’ve chosen or chosen to act upon define me far more than those I happened to be born with. Thus, though choosing to have gay sex is certainly a key part of one’s identity, being born with the predilection to do so is not.

Error 5: If I was born gay, God must have made me this way.

Of all the untenable conclusions drawn from the born gay premise, this is the most scandalous. Whereas claiming that God has His hand in the creation of every child is uncontroversial, alleging that every element of that child’s physical, emotional, and even sexual state at birth are all intended by God is quite another thing. If this pattern of inference were allowed, we would have to believe that God desires every birth defect, handicap, psychological disorder or behavioral tendency we can trace to early childhood. God may allow such things, but that is theological miles from saying that God wanted them.

Yet there is a much deeper blunder embedded in this particular claim. The idea that people have inappropriate inclinations from birth is not unique to the born-gay meme. In fact, it’s so far from unique that it’s actually a cornerstone premise of Christian theology. Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants all agree about this one key concept: mankind suffers from original sin, a polluted condition that makes every one of us desire immorality from our birth.

Thus, in a very real sense, one might say that we’re all born gay, although the historically preferred terminology is that we’re all born sinners. We are surely born with corrupt desires, but that doesn’t mean God intended us to be this way.

Conclusion

Although I have serious doubts about the claim that sexual orientation is determined at birth, the issue is largely academic since nothing important hangs on it. Being born gay doesn’t prevent change, prohibit choice, justify behavior, form identity, or implicate God. It just means your moral challenges are different from mine.

To Conservatives in a Pro-Gay Culture

2008-07-21T16:03:00.000-07:00

Published 07.24.08 at Townhall.com and Crosswalk.com.

Two different people recently contacted me for my advice on virtually identical situations that arose in the wake of California’s decision to solemnize same-gender relationships.

One woman was concerned about her job in a pro-gay workplace because a friend and co-worker had been disappointed with her inadequately enthusiastic response to his announcement that he and his lover were driving to California to get married. She wanted help expressing her real love for this man while still standing firm in her beliefs.

Another man’s company had created a pro-gay workplace initiative and then solicited employee feedback on it. He, too, was concerned about his job, but he also felt compelled to say something consistent with his conservative Christian beliefs.

Since I expect such difficulties to become far more common, I’ll share with you the principles I advised them to use.

Principle 1: Apologize in advance.

In confrontation, people mistakenly think that playing the “big fish” role will portray strength, perhaps even intimidating the other. In reality, humility best expresses strength, whereas bluster generally indicates weakness. Insecure people always get this backwards. Only the strong can control themselves enough to take the humble approach, and there is no more humble yet powerful thing to do than apologizing at the outset.

Principle 2: Say it before they do.

Generally, we try to hide anything that makes us or our position look weak. Not only is this dishonest, but such things tend to come out anyhow, and it’s always better to control the release of information than to be caught by it. Besides, it’s very disarming to have someone plainly divulge the worst about themselves. So admit anything you’re tempted to conceal, such as your religion, your personal biases, and especially your worst fears. Admitting feared reactions can often prevent them because people dislike being predictable.

Principle 3: Get permission.

Whenever you anticipate a negative reaction, soliciting permission to proceed means the other person has agreed to share responsibility for whatever difficulties ensue. Luckily, this is the easiest one of all because almost no one declines. Curiosity virtually compels their consent.

Principle 4: Be hurt, not angry.

Our instinct for confrontation is to be angry, sarcastic, and harsh. Such tactics will usually make the situation worse. Instead, recognize our culture values not hurting people above all other values. Whoever is most hurt gets the most sympathy, regardless of the legitimacy of your pain. Just consider how much more ground homosexuals have gained by displaying hurt at things they oppose than by displaying fury at them. The paradox is that by trying to be tough (usually through anger) you suffer marginalization, whereas by allowing yourself to look weak (usually through sadness) you get influence.

To understand the just how powerful the display of pain is, consider that this is the only tactic which consistently trumps the second most dominant value of our culture: being funny. When someone makes fun of you or your beliefs, you have three options. You can reply in kind and possibly win if you’re really good at it. You can get angry and lose social credit for not being able to take a joke while probably encouraging further comic attacks. Or you can demonstrate hurt, which actually makes the comedian look bad for having crossed a line and will make him look even worse if he continues without apologizing. Sadness works against sarcastic humor because it’s both honest and reveals the subtle violence of comedic attacks. Comedy makes you look vulnerable, and displaying sadness embraces the vulnerability by asking the audience to admit that your feelings matter. That’s it’s foolish to use ridicule against any group or person in our culture who has successfully positioned themselves as victims in our culture.

That being said, the best way to show hurt in this case is by referencing a pain your audience already understands: that of being forced to be in the closet. Just as gays are coming out of the closet, moral conservatives feel like we’re being forced into it. The social consequences are exactly parallel, except that for us they are rising whereas for gays they are receding. Though some in the pro-gay culture celebrate this, most who have felt this anxiety will recoil at the idea of imposing what they have suffered on others.

Principle 5: Make relationship your main goal.

Winning is nice, but relationships matter more than winning. Fortunately, the best way to have a chance of winning is by cultivating relationships and the influence that comes with them. Real relationships require honesty, vulnerability, and the sort of respect which realizes that friendship cannot be conditional upon the universal acquiescence of the other person to my values. This principle obviously goes both ways.

Example of applying these principles.

“I have something really important I want to talk about with you, but I’m worried that it’s going to offend you. If that happens, I’m very sorry, but do you want me to be honest with you, even if you might get angry?”

“Of course, what is it?”

“First, I want you to know how much I care about you, and that’s why it makes me really uncomfortable that we have to have a discussion about gay issues at all. But here’s what you don’t realize about me. Honestly, gay sex grosses me out. But it’s more serious than just that. I am a deeply religious person, and my religious tradition strongly disapproves of this behavior. Yet recently I feel like my religious beliefs are being attacked and I’m being pressured to hide them from you.

I feel like I can’t be honest about who I am because of the hostility I feel from others for what I believe. And because I’m worried that saying all of this might jeopardize our friendship or even cost me my job, I’m very reluctant to be honest even with you about who I am. If this fear of being scared to express my real identity is what you’ve experienced for your sexual orientation, then I’m so very sorry you’ve had to suffer such an awful thing.

But I’m telling you this because I hope that you’re willing to respect my beliefs just like you want me to respect yours. The only way for us to have a meaningful relationship is if we can be truly open and honest with each other, especially when we disagree, and I want that more than anything. I hope you’re willing to accept me while knowing what I believe just like I’m willing to accept you while knowing what you do.”

Final Note

This may not always work. But using these principles puts you in the best position to succeed, with one caveat. You must be sincere in your use of them. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be a liar, and it will probably won’t work for you anyway. Remember, only the truly strong can afford to appear this weak.

Should We Invade Myanmar?

2008-05-15T12:45:00.001-07:00

Published 05.16.08 at Towhnall.com.

On May 3, Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar, one of the poorest nations on the planet. With a 12-15 foot tidal wave following it and winds around 150 MPH, devastation was the only result. Current Red Cross estimates of the dead range from 68,883 to 127,999, and up to 2.5 million people have been displaced. Already skyrocketed food prices were forced even higher by the destruction of the rice crops. And, as is always the case in such scenarios, sanitation and medical concerns mean that what happens in the ensuing weeks could easily wind up making the event itself seem like only the preamble. And what is the world doing to help? Everything it can…which is to say virtually nothing at all.

Because, you see, Myanmar is ruled by a group of petty tyrants who care more about their own paranoid fears than about the lives of millions of their people. And as international aid shipments are seized or wait helplessly by because they have so far kept their borders mostly closed to outsiders, we have to ask ourselves a very serious question: Just how many lives have to be at stake before it’s no longer possible to hide behind the flimsy excuse that we are honoring the emaciated abstraction of national sovereignty?

This is more than just some theoretical question poli-sci grad students might debate over darts and micro-brews, and we enable a grave evil if we let it remain merely that. This is real people’s lives hanging in the balance in a situation where hours, let alone days, matter. And if I have one regret at this moment, it is only that I did not write this column yesterday…or the day before that.

I confess that I don’t know whether we should invade Myanmar. But that’s only because the particular facts of the military scenario, the location of the people, and the likely cost in men and materiel are well beyond the scope of my own knowledge. But I want my President to make one of two statements. I either want him to explain to the rest of America why the facts of the situation justify using military force, or else I want him to explain to me why they do not. Because when considered as a theoretical question without the input of such details, this case is beyond obvious.

When your next door neighbor swears at his children, feeds them French fries and cake, and allows them to watch Tyra on TV, you pray for him and swallow the bitter pill of parental authority. But when a tornado hits his home and you can hear his children screaming for help as he sits on his lawn telling you to mind your own business, you wouldn’t even wait for the sheriff to arrive. How else would you live with yourself at night?

Our Declaration of Independence proclaims a profound belief “that ALL people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life….” Well? Are they, or aren’t they? And if they are, why does it boggle the imagination that we would do something to save the lives of tens of thousands in a far away place just as we would to save the lives of a few or even one next door?

Unfortunately, American foreign policy hasn’t always been motivated by what it should be: our serious commitment to this simple idea that all people matter equally. And yet this is the principle which has made this country great and could serve to make our foreign policy equally great. This is a chance for us to do the right thing for no other reason than that it is the right thing, a chance to be truly proud of our ability to project force beyond our borders. Myanmar is a country with no strategic value whatsoever. It is nothing but a humanitarian opportunity, which may in fact give it the greatest strategic value of all. What will the slogan be this time: no war to deliver food in Burma?

We all know the United Nations will not act in time. Too many of the world’s governments fear putting their own oppressive sovereignty in jeopardy by setting a precedent like this. Let them rot in the guilt of their indecision. This is not tomorrow’s problem.

So what do I want? Only to force this discussion to take place and quickly. Besides, if my suspicions are correct, then real military action may be unnecessary. The mere threat of it may be sufficient to get them to relent. The Junta say they don’t want aid brought in because it will generate rebellion. Let’s change their calculus by threatening something worse than rebellion. Even paranoid fools would prefer the mere chance of insurrection over the guarantee of invasion. Thus my hope is that we’ll have to do nothing more than rattle our very loud sabers.

But if more is necessary, I submit two simple ideas. In principle, this is the rightest possible use of our military might. But in practice, I defer to the judgment of people far more informed about the particulars. Perhaps military action is impractical. Perhaps it jeopardizes the activities of NGOs already on the ground in small numbers. Perhaps the window of opportunity has already passed. Perhaps we’re just stretched too thin already. Or perhaps there’s just no good way to deliver food at gunpoint. As I say, these are questions for others to answer. But as for me, I would desperately hope that at the very least we would be willing to use our vast resources for the short time such an operation would likely last to at least have a chance at saving the lives of so many thousands of people. Lives which our most cherished documents affirm are supposed to matter as much as our own.

What Love Isn’t

2008-05-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

Publication Forthcoming in Greater Phoenix Christian Chronicle

I think I’m on safe ground saying that our culture is confused about love. In fact, people’s most common mistake when it comes to love is calling things love that are actually just examples of selfishness based on attachment to a person. Though it is natural, normal, and good to be attached to people, we must never assume that this is love. And the easiest way to see this is by comparing it with our attachment to our possessions.

I am attached to my car, which is why I would suffer if it were stolen, damaged, or destroyed. But I don’t love my car because I don’t care about my car’s needs. My car is an object, not a person, and I only care about what my car means to me by virtue of what it can do for me. This is the proper relationship of humans to objects.

The problem is that what most people call love is in fact merely this sort of attachment, just directed at a person rather than an object. It’s probably not over-simplifying to say that most people would define love as attachment to other people. Of course, love often involves attachment, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being attached to people. But whereas objects have value exclusively because of their attachment to us, people have value all on their own independently from us. That is why the destruction of a person is always a tragedy (even in cases where it is necessary), regardless of whether this destruction hurts anyone else’s feelings. Humans have value regardless of their attachments. They have value in themselves.

And that’s where the possibility of love comes in. Love means serving people’s real needs, regardless of whether doing so runs contrary to our own emotional pleasure. This is why it is so inverted that people use the word love to describe so many acts which are merely emotional self-indulgence.

For instance, when you feel like you must be around another person all the time and your heart aches in their absence, this is not love. This is just being emotionally addicted to someone. Love would ask whether you are a the ideal blessing for this other person.

When you see your child suffering pain because of his own poor decisions and your agony is so great that you intervene to spare him, this is not love. This is worshipping your own empathy. Love would recognize his need to learn discipline and consequences, regardless of how much pain watching this caused you.

And when you weep because someone close to you moves away for marriage, this is not love. This is the contemplation of companionship lost to you. Love would celebrate their joy at a union which will give the gift of new life.

It’s not that feelings are bad, but all of these examples involve placing more emphasis on our emotions than on the needs of the other. And the easiest way to tell whether we are being loving or being selfish is to ask a simple question, “Am I acting to serve my own pleasure and pain, or am I acting to do what is good for them?” When we put our feelings ahead of other’s real needs, we have discovered ourselves objectifying other people and treating them as merely means to our own emotional gratification. Thus, the most common examples of what our culture calls love wind up being incredibly selfish acts instead.

Obedience is only shown when we don’t want to follow the rules but still do so. Submission is only shown when we disagree with the leaders but follow them anyway. And love is only shown when serving another person’s real needs will cause us pain and we choose to do what is best for them rather than what feels good to us…as the Cross should remind us.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 11

2008-05-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

Published 05.09.09 at Townhall.com.

Previously, we saw how capital punishment is compatible with love, honors God’s sovereignty over life, and encourages the condemned to repent and be saved. Now, let’s finish our discussion by looking at three Biblical counter-examples to execution.

Religious Objection 6: What about Cain?

In Genesis 4, Adam and Eve’s two sons bring their offerings to God. God accepts Abel’s and rejects Cain’s. In his anger, Cain strikes and kills his brother. God discovers Cain’s violence and banishes him for life while also protecting him with some sort of Divine mark. Doesn’t this show that even God does not favor executing murderers?

One way to explain Cain’s survival is that the law against murder wasn’t given by God for another 1600 years after Noah’s flood. Even the Old Testament wasn’t written by Moses for another 900 years after that. But response fails since there is the punishment of banishing. If it wasn’t a crime because the law hadn’t been given yet, there would have been no punishment at all. Also, Cain clearly expected to be punished by God and men. Thus, his severe but non-capital banishment demands explanation, and the only Biblically plausible answer is that this wasn’t murder.

Nothing in the text indicates that Cain intended Abel’s death. Not only are there are hundreds of ways to strike a man and kill him unintentionally, but it’s even possible, seeing as how this is the first homicide in history, that Cain didn’t even understand the consequences of his assault. Furthermore, even if Cain did intend to kill Abel in a moment of rage, it’s not clear this would legally qualify as pre-meditated. God’s penal system distinguishes negligent homicide from murder. Thus, one might say we know it wasn’t murder precisely because only God banished him.

Religious Objection 7: What about King David?

In 2 Samuel 11, King David sees Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop near the palace, commands her to be brought to him, commits adultery with her, discovers she is pregnant, fails to trick her husband into sleeping with her to cover the pregnancy, and then has him killed through a complex military conspiracy. How does God respond? He sends Nathan the prophet to chastise David, who repents for his crimes and goes on living, but God condemns the bastard child to death.

If God is for capital punishment, why doesn’t David get executed? Both adultery and murder were capital crimes in Israel, and this must have been the worst-kept secret in the Mediterranean. There were even witnesses for every part of the conspiracy (a necessary component of Old Testament capital law). So why the leniency?

I believe it’s because David was King of Israel, anointed by God Himself through the prophet Samuel. Though this will sound strange to our ears; which have been trained by the concepts of law as king, the rule of law, and equality before the law; David was above the law. No matter what the anointed of God does, he is still holy because of the anointing and cannot be touched. David demonstrated this by refusing to kill King Saul, who deserved it many times over. Moreover, when David learns that an aide assisted Saul’s suicide in battle, David immediately executes him for touching God’s anointed.

So David was spared a doubly-deserved death only because he was king. Nevertheless, a life penalty was still taken: the child. Thus, the Bible gives one precedent to explain why David wasn’t killed and also a reason to think that the murder still required the compensatory death of a human. It’s certainly a difficult passage, but it’s also certainly not a clear repudiation of the death penalty.

Religious Objection 8: What about the woman caught in adultery?

In John 8:1-11, the Pharisees bring Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery to see if He will authorize her execution. After He famously says, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her,” they all depart, and Jesus sends the woman on her way, saying, “Neither do I condemn you; go your way; from now on sin no more.” Of all passages in the Bible, this one most clearly shows that Jesus opposed capital punishment.

First, we should note that this passage is textually dubious. The best manuscripts don’t include it, and both its placement and style controvert its authenticity. Even so, the Christian community has long considered this an iconic story of Jesus’s mercy. So, to merely throw it out would be inappropriate. Besides, it may well be a legitimate story, just not one included in the John autoscript. Hence, an interpretation would be more helpful than a dismissal.

The trouble is that most people wildly misunderstand this story. The Pharisees’ only reason for bringing this woman to Jesus was to put Him in a dilemma. On the one hand, He couldn’t call for her execution since Roman law prohibited anyone other than a Roman court from doing this. The Pharisees proved they knew this when they later brought Jesus to Pilate rather than killing Him themselves. On the other hand, He couldn’t oppose her execution because this would have proven He was a false prophet for contradicting God’s Law. The passage even explains this in verse 6, “they were saying this, testing Him, in order that they might have grounds for accusing Him.”

So, the Pharisees wanted to make Jesus a heretic for opposing capital punishment, but He evaded their trap. The tremendous irony is that now, two thousand years later, people who claim to love Jesus teach that He was precisely the heretic His enemies wanted to paint Him as. If Jesus was in fact repudiating capital punishment in this story, then He was neither the Divine Son of God nor even a true prophet. As I’m apparently more reluctant than others to embrace this conclusion, I can’t interpret Jesus as rejecting the Old Testament here. Had He been, His enemies would have left jubilant rather than ashamed. There are many theories on the meaning of this story, but the one thing we must not do is use it to say Jesus overturned God’s Word as His enemies intended.

Conclusion

The religious and the secular arguments agree: capital punishment is purposeful, rational, and pleasing to God. If you have read all eleven of these columns, I thank you for your persistence and your patience. I trust this has been useful.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 10

2008-05-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

Published 05.06.08 at Townhall.com

Previously, we saw that neither forgiveness nor mercy are compelling reasons to abandon the Biblical practice of capital punishment. Now, let’s continue with the religious objections people raise against it.

Religious Objection 3: Execution is incompatible with love.

God loves all people, and we are told to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) If we are supposed to love all people, this probably means not killing them.

But there’s an obvious problem here. God, Who loves all men, has killed many of them both directly Himself and also indirectly through His agents. He killed Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5). He killed Uzzah the priest for mishandling the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:3-11). His servant David famously killed Goliath for taunting God’s army (1 Samuel 17). And He seemed quite pleased for Elijah to slaughter the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18:17-40). So, here’s the quandary. Either God doesn’t actually love everyone or else it can be a very loving thing to kill someone. Either option moves execution off the list of things prohibited because we are supposed to imitate God’s love. The best solution is both simple and counterintuitive.

Is it possible to love someone and execute that person? My emphatic answer is, “Yes.” Loving someone means wanting what is best for that person. Though I obviously admit that many people advocate execution because of hatred for the criminal, it is also possible to advocate it out of love for him. Loving the murderer means honoring him as a moral agent with accountability for his actions and also allowing him to pay for them with the only payment that is proper. Failing to execute him denies him this opportunity to atone for what he has done. Loving the murderer also means preventing him from further defacing the image of God embodied in himself. Failing to execute him only enables his ability to continue his own self-destruction.

Religious Objection 4: Only God may decide who lives and dies.

Since only God can create life, only God has the prerogative to terminate life. When we execute murderers, aren’t we playing God and usurping powers reserved only to Him.

I think the best response to this challenge is a simple illustration. If a child tells the babysitter that she can’t make him go to bed at 9:30 because she’s not his mother, is he correct? No, because the babysitter has had bedtime authority delegated to her by the parent, within whose natural authority such power resides. If the babysitter walks in off the street and tries to put a child to bed, she is usurping parental authority. If she enforces the will of the parents in absentia, she is honoring that same authority. The issuance of instructions makes all the difference between improperly playing parent and properly discharging duties entrusted by the parents.

How do we know that God controls life and death? The Bible. How do we know that God assigns the authority to execute people to earthly governments? The Bible. Whatever certainty we have about the one equally enjoins us to perform the other. Executing murderers is not playing God. It is obeying Him.

Religious Objection 5: Execution prevents the possibility of repentance and being forgiven by God.

As Christians, our primary objective in life is to facilitate the reconciliation of sinners to God through repentance and accepting the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for their sins. When we allow our government to execute people, we are deliberately cutting off all chance for those most desperately in need of salvation to receive it, which is the only thing worse than the homicide itself.

Precisely because I so strongly agree with the spirit of this objection, I am happy to report that it actually endorses just the sort of capital punishment process we currently have in place. Nothing pricks the conscience to consider matters of eternity like the impending danger of death. Foxholes, sinking boats, life-threatening illnesses, and death row all serve as excellent motivators to ponder our status with God and do whatever we can to insure the right result.

Knowing you will die on Tuesday at 8:00 AM does far more in this way than the general knowledge that you will die at some completely unknowable moment in your incarcerated future. If we really want people to come to Jesus, the best way to raise that likelihood is by telling them when it will happen. Furthermore, people on death row regularly receive visits from the clergy, who are far more motivated to evangelize them than they are the ordinary inmate. Thus both the murderer himself and those around him are uniquely motivated by capital punishment to secure his salvation. Far from preventing repentance, execution increases the likelihood of it.

Another issue connected to this objection is the idea that people who have genuinely been converted should not suffer execution. Aside from the insoluble problem of distinguishing genuine conversions from forgeries, which would be enough to respond here, there is the fact that anyone who had truly repented for his sins would also be the last one to claim that he deserved to live. If he has embraced the gravity of his corruption necessitating the substitutionary atonement of Christ, he is not going to turn around and seek clemency from the state. More likely, he will embrace the attitude of the thief on the cross, who acknowledged the justice of his own condition during crucifixion beside his Lord. And, tellingly, the reward for his repentance and faith was the gift of eternal salvation with no reprieve whatsoever for the earthly punishment of temporal death.

In the next column, we’ll look at the three commonly used Biblical counter-examples to capital punishment: Cain, King David, and the woman caught in adultery.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 9

2008-05-02T14:31:00.000-07:00

Published 05.02.08 at Townhall.com

In the last two columns, I showed how the Bible consistently affirms capital punishment from Genesis to Revelation, including the teachings of Jesus. Nonetheless, many sincere Christians doubt this, and it is only fitting to entertain their objections.

Religious Objection 1: We should forgive people, not execute them.

Since forgiveness is the core of Christianity, people often say we are obligated to extend forgiveness to the murderer. After all, Jesus taught us to pray in Matthew 6:12, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,” and He added the emphasis in verses 14-15, “For if you forgive men for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” Such mandatory forgiveness hardly seems best expressed through execution.

One way to respond is by examining precisely what a justice system based on this interpretation of Jesus’s teachings would look like. If it is true that executing someone is an unchristian exercise in unforgiveness, it’s hard to see which punishment wouldn’t have to go. Though LIPWPP is more lenient than execution, life imprisonment still seems to be fairly unforgiving. It’s difficult to imagine a murderer sitting in jail after 40 years pondering the awe-inspiring forgiveness of his captors. Much shorter imprisonment would be more forgiving, but no imprisonment at all would be the zenith of forgiveness. Even community service, probation, and fines are less than fully forgiving. Thus, not merely execution, but all possible expressions of a justice system are incompatible with the forgiveness people claim Jesus is advocating here. LIPWPP advocates are showing the shallowness, not the depth, of their commitment to the principle of forgiveness.

I’m sure some would object that I’m being ludicrous here, but I would remind them of the clarity of the text. Its seemingly universal scope is not limited to merely capital crimes or execution. Moreover, Christian doctrine holds that we can be forgiven for any and all sins. Therefore, if the duty of the government is to forgive as much as God forgives us individually, we must not punish even a pickpocket or parking violator lest we forfeit our own forgiveness.

Now if someone seriously advocated anarchy for this reason, I would at least applaud his consistency. But one needn’t embrace such radical stupidity to honor Jesus’s doctrines. The problem, obviously, not with what He taught, but with how His teaching gets misapplied. Jesus was not trying to establish forgiveness as the guiding principle of government. He knew this was impossible. Forgiveness is an individual matter, and doesn’t even factor into governmental matters. Likewise, punishment, which is entirely a government domain, is not something individual citizens are tasked with doing. Jesus was instructing individuals, not writing a Constitution. Judging a state’s laws by their forgivingness is like judging a fish for how well he rides the bicycle.

Religious Objection 2: We should show mercy and not execute people.

Right at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus in Matthew 5:7 says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” Later, when challenged by the Pharisees for His associations with sinners, Jesus says in Matthew 9:12-13, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are ill. But go and learn what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” Surely we can offer enough mercy to the murderer to grant him life in prison instead of execution.

Before dealing directly with this argument, I’d like to point out what it inadvertently acknowledges: that capital punishment is perfectly just. In urging a punishment reduction, mercy advocates are conceding that execution is the appropriate starting point. Reducing an excessive penalty to something proper is only remedying an injustice, not an expression of mercy. Mercy is someone doing less than he is justified in doing. Lowering the penalty for theft from hand amputation to imprisonment is just averting an injustice. Making it merely a fine would be an act of mercy. Thus, moving a murderer from death row to LIPWPP is only an act of mercy insofar as death row was the correct place for him for his crime. I mention this because many people who urge mercy also complain that capital punishment is barbaric, unfair, excessive, or unconstitutional. Capital punishment could be inherently wrong, or it could be right but unmerciful. It cannot be both.

Still, shouldn’t we try to be more merciful? Well…more merciful than whom? I only ask because I just spent two columns establishing that God the Father and God the Son both affirm capital punishment for murder. In fact God even specifically says He is offended by people being too lenient to murderers and thus failing to expiate the bloodguilt which the murderer brought upon the land (Numbers 35:31-33, see Part 7). Are we really to put ourselves in the position of claiming that we can and should be more merciful than God Himself? The arrogance of this insult to His character is astonishing.

The truth is that we already are fairly merciful to murderers. We allow them much greater mercy than they afforded their victims in that we give them time and counseling to come to repentance. We are merciful in that we kill them in the least painful way, far less painfully than they generally kill their victims. And we are merciful in that we prevent them from polluting their own souls with subsequent evils, as both Augustine and Aquinas taught. I’m actually quite proud of how merciful we are already, much to the chagrin of certain bloodthirsty sorts who think our appeals process is too slow and say charming things like, “Hangin’s too good fer ‘em.” If our practice offends those who love justice without mercy as well as those who love mercy without justice, it’s likely we’ve found a healthy way to thread the needle through both values.

In my next column, we’ll continue our discussion of religious objections to capital punishment such as encouraging salvation, playing God by taking life, and whether execution is loving.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 8

2008-04-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

Published 05.01.08 at Crosswalk.com.

In the previous article, I showed that the Old Testament endorses capital punishment. Now, let’s see whether the New Testament maintains or contradicts this teaching.

Did Jesus support capital punishment?

Many Christians believe that faithfulness to the ministry of Jesus requires them to oppose capital punishment. Though they acknowledge that the Old Testament mandated this penalty for murder, they think Jesus changed everything. Typically, their view is that the harsh and mean God the Father of the Old Testament established execution, but the loving and kind God the Son of the New Testament abolished it. I’m pretty sure such people don’t realize they’re denying the Trinity when they say this.

The doctrine of the Trinity affirms the eternal unity of all three persons of the Godhead, but such a fundamental disagreement between the Son and the Father would rupture this unity. In fact, if Jesus had contradicted any of the Father’s principles, let alone such a well-established one, that very disagreement would have immediately disproved His claims to be the divine Son. This was exactly the heresy the Pharisees were hoping to trap Him into when they brought the woman caught in adultery to Jesus. Even His enemies knew that He absolutely had to affirm capital punishment in order to prove Himself not a false prophet. How truly strange, then, that those who claim to love Him assert that He did exactly what His enemies failed to trick Him into doing! Far from opposing capital punishment, Jesus actually advocated it, as His unity with the Father required.

In Matthew 5:17-18, He taught, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished.” Just a few verses later, He extends the prohibition against murder to hatred and condemns haters to “the hell of fire” in verse 22, which is very strange talk for someone who opposes capital punishment. It’s very hard to dismiss these verses because they occur smack in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, which is so often mistakenly offered as the repudiation of Old Testament justice. If Jesus elsewhere opposes capital punishment, then He is not only contradicting the Father but even His own words.

Later, Jesus scolds the Pharisees and scribes for teaching leniency toward rebellious children by quoting the Old Testament, “For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death.’” (Matthew 15:4) Subsequently, when the Romans come to arrest Jesus, Peter rather ineptly tries to defend Him by killing Malchus, but only succeeds in slicing off his ear. Jesus rebukes him with the warning, “Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.” Far from advocating pacifism, as this passage is often misused to do, Jesus here teaches Peter that using the sword (for murder) will only get the sword used against him (for execution).

Shortly thereafter, Jesus tells Pilate in John 19:11, “You would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above…” This authority to put Jesus to death would be odd if it didn’t entail the general power to execute criminals. Finally, when He is dying of crucifixion, Jesus accepts the repentance of the thief on the cross, who says to his reviling companion, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds….” (Luke 23:40-41) Had Jesus disagreed with this statement, responding to it with the promise of eternal salvation was a rather obtuse way to express the correction.

Beyond all this evidence that Jesus affirms the consistent Biblical principle of capital punishment, there is yet one more vital concept to grasp. Christians believe that Christ died on the cross to pay for the sins of us all. Although His sinlessness merited eternal life, He endured the death we deserved to extend that gift to us. As Prof. Michael Pakaluk so perfectly expressed the point, “If no crime deserves the death penalty, then it is hard to see why it was fitting that Christ be put to death for our sins….” If we didn’t deserve the death penalty ourselves, then why would Christ need to suffer it on our behalf in order to satisfy the justice of God? Denying the death penalty directly assaults the justice of the Father, Who required His own Son to pay precisely that price in our stead.

What about the rest of the New Testament?

Since both Jesus’s teaching and His death affirm the capital punishment, it should come as no surprise that the rest of the New Testament reinforces this view.

When confronting Governor Festus, Paul says in Acts 25:11, “If I am a wrongdoer, and have committed anything worthy of death, I do not refuse to die; but if none of these things is true of which these men accuse me, no one can hand me over to them.” He both affirms capital statutes and accepts them as binding on him if he has broken one. Later, in the New Testament’s most famous passage on the nature of government, Paul explains, “But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for [the government] does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil.” (Romans 13:4) Finally, the same Bible which begins in Genesis 9:6 with the establishment of capital punishment, then carries the theme consistently throughout the text, and ends by reiterating it in Revelation 13:10, “If any one is destined for captivity, to captivity he goes; if any one kills with the sword, with the sword he must be killed. Here is the perseverance and the faith of the saints.”

Literally from beginning to end, the Bible teaches that capital punishment is authorized and required by God. If so, then why do so many people claim to oppose this practice on religious grounds? We’ll consider some of their objections in the next column.

The Danger Of Hating What You Used To Believe

2008-04-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

Publication forthcoming.

I was raised by a mom who was very liberal, both politically and theologically. In fact, she was more distressed when I became a conservative Evangelical than she ever was when I was an atheist. As you would expect, once I outgrew liberalism, I became quite passionate about showing other people how stupid liberals were. One might well say I was on a crusade.

But was I genuinely motivated by wanting to help other people, or was I mostly intent on denying my own past errors? I realized that I was so heavily invested in hating liberalism and the people who advocated it because I hated having ever been one of them. Much like a disillusioned kid who has learned the truth about Santa Claus, I was embarrassed by having been capable of such foolishness. I finally realized that I needed to forgive myself for having been wrong in the past and embrace the fact that I had believed all those mistaken things.

Then, instead of screaming to everyone that I was right and had never been wrong, it became possible for me to calmly explain to anyone that I knew I was right precisely because I had been so wrong for so long. Once I accepted who I used to be, I also stopped hating other people for reminding me that I ever was that guy. I started being able to have conversations with them without absolutely having to win the discussion. I could even listen sincerely to their ideas because I didn’t feel threatened anymore. And a funny thing happened.

I became much more successful at persuading them to join me in my views. But I also discovered that they had many interesting and useful things to say which I would otherwise have missed out on before.

I’ve seen this pattern in many people. After leaving something they were for a long time, like Catholicism or Mormonism or atheism or even fundamentalism, they become very invested in hating the thing they used to be. Although this can be a healthy temporary phase for accomplishing separation, real health eventually comes from not feeling so threatened by the old thing that you must hate it in order to feel secure.

And there is one final, tremendous benefit from getting to that place. It allows you to minister to others who are currently in the error. It’s been very useful to me to consider that God opened my eyes so that I could help others see the light, not so that I could hate and attack them for still being blind.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 7

2008-04-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

Published 04.22.08 at Crosswalk.com

Following last week’s Supreme Court ruling that lethal injections for executions are Constitutional, it’s appropriate we continue our discussion of capital punishment. The first six columns in this series approached capital punishment from a purely secular perspective. Yet, since religious values and arguments so strongly shape this debate, it would be negligent to not consider this side of the issue at some length as well. Since the primary religious framework for most Americans is the Bible and Christianity, I will discuss it within that context. Although important ideas have been voiced by the non-Christian religious, both my own knowledge and also the actual nature of this debate in America, recommend this limitation.

Does anything in the Old Testament affirm capital punishment?

This question will strike those who have actually read the Bible as a bit ludicrous, but there are many who in fact do not know what it says on this subject. The foundational passage is Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.” This simple verse both explains what the punishment for murder should be and why murder merits it.

Because people are made in the image of God, their lives are precious in a way that animals and property are not. Wantonly destroying them is an insult to the God who made them, which is further emphasized by the contrasting emphasis in the next verse, indicating just how opposed the will of God is to the destruction of innocent life. Genesis 9:7 reads, “And as for you, be fruitful and multiply; populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it.” In the very center of a passage which is foundational to the relationship of man to God after Noah’s flood (Genesis 8:20—9:17), God thus establishes death for those who murder and proclaims life as His ideal.

Although this clear reference is sufficient, I wouldn’t want a reader mistakenly thinking that it stands alone. In fact, one of the interesting notes about the first five books of the Old Testament (called the Pentateuch) is that every one of them specifies death as the penalty for murder. Exodus 21:12 says, “He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death.” This follows closely after Exodus 20:13, which proclaims, “You shall not murder,” in the middle of the Ten Commandments. Those who tritely claim this verse means to not kill (an inferior translation) would do well to explain how the author (traditionally Moses) so flagrantly contradicted himself in the space of just 25 verses. Better exegesis wouldn’t mangle such an important Scripture.

Leviticus 24:17 reads, “And if a man takes the life of any human being, he shall surely be put to death.” Numbers 35:31 says, “Moreover, you shall not take ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall surely be put to death.” In fact, murder is unique in that it is the only crime with no possibility for restitution. We know this from Numbers 35:33, “So you shall not pollute the land in which you are; for blood pollutes the land and no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it.” Thus, failing to execute a murderer brings a stain upon the land.

Completing the books of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy 19:11-13 explains, “But if there is a man who hates his neighbor and lies in wait for him and rises up against him and strikes him so that he dies, and he flees to one of these cities, then the elders of his city shall send and take him from there and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of blood, that he may die. You shall not pity him, but you shall purge the blood of the innocent from Israel, that it may go well with you.” This last reference is fascinating because it comes amidst the discussion of God providing “cities of refuge” for the protection of those who merely commit manslaughter. In other words, God refuses to require life for unpremeditated homicide but goes out of His way to clarify that actual murderers who appeal to such protection must be killed without pity. It’s almost as if He wants to be sure there’s no misunderstanding and that someone doesn’t come along to claim that He favors leniency for murderers.

To further punctuate the point, Deuteronomy 19:10 prefaces this very passage by explaining that the reason God wants to provide cities of refuge is to protect Israel from the bloodguilt that would come to them if they executed a mere manslaughterer. And, as if all this weren’t sufficient, the chapter finishes with the requirement that those guilty of perjury in a capital case be executed for their attempt to use the state as their murder weapon (Deuteronomy 19:21). Such distinctions and contrivances are at least moderately surprising if God’s real intent was for murderers to be left alive.

Now I know this is going to feel like overkill, but, given the number of people who claim to base their opposition to capital punishment on the Bible, I hope you can forgive me for feeling the need to be thorough. Not only did God put capital legislation in the hands of the Israelites, but He even specifically sanctioned execution in particular cases. He told Joshua to kill Achan’s family for breaking the ban on items taken from Jericho (Joshua 7). He told king Saul to kill all the Amalekites and then punished Saul by taking the kingdom away from him when he failed to do so (1 Samuel 15). And one of the most celebrated prophets in the Old Testament, Elijah, rather famously executed the 450 prophets of Baal when God proved His reality and the falseness of their religion. Whether through governmental legislation or direct command, the God of the Old Testament clearly believes in capital punishment.

In the next column, we will examine the record of the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus regarding the propriety of execution.

The Three Kinds of Rules

2008-04-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

Published April, 2008 in the Greater Phoenix Christian Chronicle

Ethical rules fall into three fairly distinct categories. First, there are universal rules, which apply to all people in all places, such as, “Do not murder,” or, “Devote time to God in prayer.” Second, there are particular rules, which apply to all people in a group or common circumstance, such as, “Drive 65 or less on most American interstates,” or, “Obey your superiors in the military.” Finally, there are personal rules, which apply only to you, usually based on your individual purpose, character, or commitments, such as, “No alcohol because drunkenness tempts you,” or, “No motorcycle riding because your wife hates it.”

Many well-intentioned people wrongly deny one or more of these categories, and this leads them to be mistaken about how a rule applies. Out of the fear that relativism will take over, some people deny personal rules and turn everything into a universal, such as, “No one should celebrate Halloween.” Likewise, out of the fear that absolutism will turn us all into robots, others wrongly reduce universals to the merely personal, such as, “I would never have an abortion, myself.”

Yet the Bible teaches principles that fall into all three categories. Thus, knowing how to answer an ethical question often starts with properly understanding into what category the question belongs. For illustration, let’s consider three fairly simple ethical issues: murder, sex, and alcohol consumption.

First, imagine the somewhat bizarre situation that a stranger asks you whether it’s okay for him to murder another person. Without hesitation, you say it is not, and you may well seek additional information for the sake of public safety. When people are mistaken about murder, we correct them. If they say it is merely a personal choice, we explain that it is always wrong. But even if they say that it is wrong because it is illegal in America (making it a particular rule), we still correct them by emphasizing that it would be wrong anywhere, even if it weren’t illegal.

Second, imagine if some stranger came and asked you whether it’s okay for him to have sex. You would immediately seek to know what category he is in: married or unmarried. If he is married, sex is mandatory, but if he is unmarried, it is prohibited. Certainly, there can be refinements in personal situations, but that is the ordinary particular rule regarding sex. Obviously, you would also want to be sure that the woman in question is his wife. As this example shows, one interesting thing about particular rules is that they often constitute the exact boundary that distinguishes one category of people from another. Once again, we see that getting the category wrong demands correcting. If someone thinks sex is for everyone or no one, or thinks that some unmarrieds may indulge but other marrieds may abstain (for long periods), they are simply wrong, and part of educating them would involve correcting these category mistakes.

Finally, consider that a stranger wants you to tell him whether drinking alcohol is okay. You might begin by telling him that drunkenness is wrong, particularly so when it is a regular habit. Next, you might inquire as to whether he thinks he has a problem consuming it in moderation. If so, you would surely counsel him against it. Perhaps you would ask him where he intends to drink. At a wedding or at his home, fine. In a park or in front of a former alcoholic, not so much. In Saudi Arabia or in Wisconsin? The difference matters. You might inquire about his finances, his age, what his religion teaches, whether he intends to be driving afterward, and even what his family thinks about alcohol. In other words, you can’t just answer the question quickly because the proper reply depends on a hundred variables. What muddies the waters even more is that this personal rule can take on the appearance of a particular rule, for instance if the man is Muslim or Mormon. But since it is not always a category issue, we don’t start by presuming it to be.

So how does all of this help us? Simple. There is a universal rule to love others. This requires us to assist them in living well, which means we must be careful to correctly know whether, when, and how the rules apply to them. Just knowing the difference between these categories is an excellent start in practically doing this.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 6

2008-03-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

Published 03.28.08 at Townhall.com

Previously, we learned that the distinction between innocence and guilt solves three of the common conceptual arguments against capital punishment. Let’s continue with the remainder of these arguments.

Conceptual Objection 4: Execution violates the Eighth Amendment by being cruel and unusual.

The wording of the Eighth Amendment is abundantly clear: only punishments which are both cruel and unusual violate it. Thus, no matter how cruel a punishment is, if it is administered with regularity, it cannot be unconstitutional. Likewise, no matter how unusual a punishment is, if it is administered humanely it is constitutional. Since the standards for execution are uniform (at least within a particular state) and the procedure used (lethal injection, most often) is humane (especially when compared to both past forms of execution and the ways murder victims suffer), this objection is a non-starter.

The most serious arguments seem to derive from (1) the method not being completely painless; or (2) similar cases do not always receive the same penalty. Ironically, the primary reason that cases are not resolved identically is because we try so hard to confirm guilt. The conviction and appeals process produces varying results. Thus the simplest way to create more uniformity would be to execute the guilty immediately after every conviction. Obviously, this would not improve our system, although it might please certain bloodthirsty advocates of execution who are convinced that such a system would do a better job of deterring murder. Doubtless it would, but not at an acceptable price.

Finally, whatever claims might be made about the 8th Amendment, the 5th Amendment specifically endorses the taking of it under the right circumstances. When it says that no person may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” the 5th Amendment is obviously granting permission to deprive people of any of these if due process is satisfied. Any interpretation of the 8th Amendment that is used to oppose capital punishment must fail in light of what the 5th Amendment so clearly authorizes. And we know that the ratifiers were not conflicted on this point since all thirteen colonies maintained capital crime statutes. I know that some issues of Constitutional interpretation are complex, but this is not one of them.

Conceptual Objection 5: Capital punishment is barbaric and hateful.

According to opponents, there is a vast burgeoning awareness that capital punishment is wrong because it represents the most vicious and malicious elements of a human past we are evolving beyond. Enhancing their point is our current war against a political vision that thinks it appropriate to punish almost any crime with public beheading. Furthermore, the angriest, meanest, most unloving people are rarely the ones who oppose capital punishment. Which kind of people do we want to be?

Frankly, the way many people talk about executing murderers demonstrates such fury and lack of love that I cringe to find myself on their side. During my years in talk radio, I’ve often heard sentiments such as, “Those vermin deserve to suffer”; “Hangin’ would be too good for them”; “Lethal injection’s for sissies”; “Bullets cost money, but at least you can reuse a rope.” Such rage is powerful … and frightening.

Nevertheless, the fact that many of the wrong people support the right thing for the wrong reason does not require me to abandon supporting it for the right reasons. I’d like to talk such people out of their anger, but I’d also like to keep them supporting capital punishment for murderers in the process.

As for being barbaric, well, to me the barbarism is not in taking a murderer’s life, but in refusing to do so. As for the method, I’m indifferent. My sense of retribution doesn’t require suffering, and I’m unclear how gratuitous torture does a civil society much good. So, I’m basically satisfied with anything that turns a convicted murderer into a dead murderer.

Conceptual Objection 6: Execution is degrading to the executioner.

Even if capital punishment does no damage to the sanctity of life and no indignity to the murderer being killed, nonetheless, asking an otherwise decent human being to so ruthlessly take the life of another person in this way damages the soul of the executioner. Although I understand this concern and accept that many real executioners may feel this way, I think there is a basic misunderstanding here. If execution is honoring of life and justice, then it cannot be the case that doing it would be harmful to the executioner. A just action cannot pollute the soul of the doer. Only unjust acts can do this. So, once the propriety of capital punishment is established, the issue of its impact on the executioner should be settled. An execution is properly understood as the only way to honor the capacity of the murderer to pay for what he has done. Likewise, allowing another human being to make this honoring possible is itself an honor, not a pollutant.

Conceptual Objection 7: The victim’s family often doesn’t want execution.

I’ve often seen interviews with family members of the victim who encourage leniency in sentencing the murderer. On the other hand, I’ve also seen interviews where the family wants something atrocious done to the defendant verging on torture. In both cases my response is the same. We neither execute people in order to satisfy the wrath of the victim’s family, nor do we refrain from doing so if such wrath is not present. Our justice system is not based on the idea that we do whatever the particular victim or his family wants done, but on the idea that we do what is decided upon as right by the calm, rational deliberations of the entire society. We seek justice, not the satisfying of particular, emotionally-connected impulses. Thus, individuals do not get to decide the punishment. In fact, ignoring what such people want is an important element of keeping this practice from being the unpredictable barbarity it might otherwise be.

In the next column, we will begin looking at the final kind of objections made against capital punishment: religious ones.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 5

2008-03-20T18:44:00.000-07:00

Published 03.20.08 at Townhall.com

In the previous column, we saw that the practical objection about executing innocent convicts can be solved by heightening the capital standard to guilt beyond any doubt. Now, let’s look at some of the conceptual objections.

Conceptual Objection 1: You cannot teach people that killing is wrong by killing.

What punishment could we assess against criminals that wouldn’t be wrong when done to innocent people?

Is it inconsistent to punish embezzlers with fines? Is it inconsistent to put kidnappers in the liberty-deprived condition of prison? Would we be inconsistent, or merely brutal, to adopt a more Indonesian response to assault by publicly flagellating offenders?

Precisely because every form of punishment is a form of harm to the convicted, the problem with this objection is that it proves too much, indicting all expressions of any justice system. That’s why the proper response to it is to ask why the person advocates anarchism, since only the anarchist view (that all outside impositions upon a person are wrong) is consistent with the principle of this argument.

But that’s probably a bit much for your naïve friend in a casual discussion. Instead, ask him if he also opposes execution because of the risk that the convict is innocent. If so, then he is simultaneously arguing that all killing is wrong and that the killing of innocents is uniquely wrong. Every person who opposes CP because of the risk to innocents affirms, in making that argument, that there is something vastly different between killing those who have done nothing to deserve it and killing those who have. And clearly, this is the distinction that solves this objection.

Simply put, to allege that killing murderers and killing innocent citizens are the same is to deny the distinction between guilt and innocence which is the presuppositional foundation of all law in the first place. If we cannot distinguish between how we should treat lawbreakers and non-lawbreakers, we have much more elementary problems than rationally discussing the validity of capital punishment.

Conceptual Objection 2: It erodes the sanctity of human life.

There are two ways for our justice system to show that something is sacred: by protecting it from violation and by punishing those who violate of it. Clearly, in this case, the two are interconnected. Life is uniquely precious, which is exactly why taking the life of one who deliberately takes innocent life is the only way to affirm life’s sacredness. Rather than proclaiming the preciousness of life, allowing a known murderer to live is a declaration that life is not precious enough to justify the forfeit of another life as punishment.

When something is sacred, that does not mean that it cannot be violated. Rather, it means that it must be violated only in the rarest of cases and only in the most deliberate of ways. The almost absurd solemnity with which we execute people in this country is not a defect of our system, but a testament to the importance we attach to human life. Instead of eroding the sanctity of life, execution practiced with such regard actually affirms it.

Conceptual Objection 3: You can’t be pro-life and pro-capital punishment.

First, it’s a mistake to assume that all pro-lifers base their view on the idea that abortion is homicide. While this is common, there are, in fact, other grounds for opposing abortion. Nonetheless, I’ll grant most pro-lifers do oppose abortion for this reason.

According to this objection, it is inconsistent to oppose the killing of a human fetus while favoring the killing of a human murderer because one must treat all killings the same way.

What so offends us about abortion is the taking of an innocent life, the destruction of someone so vulnerable and guilty of no wrong. Executing a murderer doesn’t elicit the same response because we are, again, making the simple distinction between the innocent victim of a crime and the guilty perpetrator of that crime. Since this distinction is at the heart of our justice system, the person who can’t make it is back to equating being stolen from with being fined, and being kidnapped with being incarcerated, equivocations that make a life sentence in prison every bit as problematic as execution.

I am convinced that even those who grieve the death row convict do not view his death as a tragedy equal to that of his victim. In fact, I’d have trouble taking someone seriously who told me that his horror at an executed murderer was equal to his horror at the original murder itself. This difference of reaction acknowledges a distinction even at an emotional level between the two. It may not seem big enough to justify execution, but just getting opponents to admit the difference might start to erode their notion that the two are morally indistinguishable.

Furthermore, if the idea is that we must oppose all homicides if we oppose any, then we might reasonably demand that such opponents also protest every form of warfare or self-defense. Obviously, most death penalty opponents are not pure pacifists, which makes them no less inconsistent on this issue than they allege pro-lifers to be. I only point this out to show that many CP opponents are skewered by their own willingness to distinguish wartime and self-defense homicides from others.

I am willing to concede that it would be more philosophically rigorous and less confusing to use the more cumbersome label “pro-innnocent-life.” But we all know that rigor often yields to pith in modern discourse. Nevertheless, there are clear lines distinguishing abortion from capital punishment which this objection colors quite sloppily across.

However, as a point of practical concern, ending abortion is far more important to me than continuing to execute. I’d certainly rather save a few million innocent than kill a few hundred guilty. So, if I thought that opposing capital punishment would make me look more consistent to those who can’t make such distinctions and thus gain their support for ending abortion, I might well consider it. But I’d like to hope, perhaps naively, that we can get both issues right without pandering to such superficial thinking.

In the next column, we’ll look at the concerns that execution is unconstitutional, barbaric, motivated by hate, and degrading to the executioner.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 4

2008-03-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

Published 03.12.08 at Townhall.com

To this point in our series on capital punishment, we saw that retribution (rather than rehabilitation, incapacitation, deterrence, or symbolism) is both the only valid reason for executing murderers and also an adequate reason for doing so. But, of course, the other side hasn’t yet responded. Their objections fall roughly into three categories: practical, conceptual, or religious.

Practical Objection 1: It’s unacceptable to execute innocent people.

I agree.

Although any legal system assumes some danger of wrongful convictions, the obvious differences between capital punishment and our other forms of punishment are irreversibility and completeness. Even though all penalties (other than fines) take away things that cannot be returned (time, reputation, relationships, freedom), at least the loss from other punishments is only partial. Execution is total and permanent.

As death-row acquittals have shown, even the plodding deliberation of our legal process with all of its safeguards and evidentiary standards is not enough to guarantee that no innocent people get executed. This is troubling, indeed, and it’s useful to see why the two most common responses fail.

One attempt begins by noting that we bias our system overwhelmingly in favor of the accused. He need not incriminate himself. He is entitled to representation. If convicted, he may avail himself of a ludicrously thorough system of appeals. And the main bias in favor of the accused is his presumption of innocence. Though such safeguards are set even higher for execution, the chance of error is nonetheless real. Merely reducing the chance of injustice on this issue is not enough.

The other attempt describes us as being in a “war against crime,” and asserts that all wars entail “collateral damage” to undeserving victims. The problem with this analogy is that the differences between the pressures of fluid battlefield situations and the capital process are so vast that the analogy becomes useless.

The justification for killing the enemy when doing so entails either the chance or the certainty that noncombatants will be killed comes from the principle of “double effect.” We would avoid harming the innocent if we could, but if practical factors prevent it, we accept the tragedy so long as it is still less than the good accomplished by killing the known bad guys. People often use the medical analogy of cutting off a leg to save the body or killing a few healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. The problem with this is it doesn’t apply to the single individual isolated within a jail posing no imminent threat to anyone. Also, since the only thing justifying killing the innocent would be the certainty of also killing the dangerous, not knowing for sure which one stands before us renders the principle of double effect unhelpful. Also, the protection of other citizens cannot be used because the alternative is LIPWIPP, not release, for a given convict.

So if these replies don’t work, how can I respond, especially since I don’t accept the oft-used deterrence argument? (See parts 2-3.) Well, it’s because I believe we can eliminate such mistakes by having two different standards of certainty. Though guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is already a hefty presumption favoring the accused, it’s clearly not enough to avoid all errors. Nor am I interested in raising it for conviction because that would mean acquitting more offenders. But why not a higher standard for sentencing?

There are two different kinds of capital cases: those with some doubt, but not a reasonable doubt, and those with no doubt at all. If we executed only those people who are guilty beyond any doubt, this objection evaporates. Thus, juries in capital cases would return one of three verdicts: not guilty, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and guilty beyond any doubt. Regardless of aggravating circumstances, only those in the third category would be eligible for the death penalty. Legislators will doubtless need to more precisely define this new standard, but in principle I’m confident a court can recognize cases that are beyond mistakenness. As an example, consider the case of Timothy McVeigh. People rightly worry that some capital convicts are innocent, but no one worries that he was one of them.

I have one final though on this issue. The Bible makes two instructive points about capital cases: there must be two eyewitnesses, and the penalty for perjury is death. Just as it is right to execute murderers, it is right to execute those who conspire to murder through the legal system, assuming again that the same sorts of standards are satisfied.

Practical Objection 2: Capital punishment disproportionately targets the poor and minorities.

Properly understood, this is really just a variation of the previous objection. The reason for wrongfully executing innocent poor or minority defendants doesn’t really matter. Nonetheless, the argument is gripping to some, so I will respond to it.

Clearly, minorities and the poor are over-represented on death row compared to their percentage in the general population. There are two possible reasons. Either such people are more likely to be convicted or they are more likely to be criminals. The fact that they are disproportionately present on death row fails to tell us which. However, it’s worth noting that another group is disproportionately represented on death row, and no one seems to think it indicates bias in the system: men.

Constituting just 49.2 percent of the population, men are 98.4 percent of death row convicts. This is because men commit the vast majority of murders, not because the system is hopelessly female chauvinistic. Such a fact doesn’t prove that all poor and minority persons on death row are guilty, but it does deflate the claim that their disproportionate representation proves systemic bias.

Another variation is the complaint that the wealthy (having access to superb counsel) or the white (having the benefit of friendly racism) regularly go free despite being guilty. Unfortunately, the fact that a thousand guilty persons are acquitted for irrational factors does nothing to dilute the justice of punishing a single person who actually committed the crime. That wealthy whites avoid just punishment does not give minorities and the poor any reason to complain if they are punished for their actual crimes. I, too, am revolted that anyone who murders would go free for any reason, but the only thing worse than accepting this unsavory fact would be to exacerbate it by under-punishing others in the interests of setting our errors as our standard for consistency.

In the next column, we will look into the conceptual objections raised against capital punishment like “killing is always wrong” or “it’s cruel and unusual.”

Should John McCain Start Being A Coward Now?

2008-03-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

Published 03.04.08 at Townhall.com

Given that the most well-known fact about Senator John McCain is his war record of courageous endurance in a prisoner camp, why do some commentators suddenly seem to want the Arizona Senator to start being a coward now? I only ask because people are saying that McCain could have just kept his mouth shut instead of challenging the not-so-subtle name-smearing of Senator Obama by Bill Cunningham. They think this would have been easy to do since McCain had the convenient cover of not actually hearing the comments himself. This would make it easier for conservative talk radio hosts to continue to persuade their frustrated “red-meat” listeners to swallow the less bitter pill of the McCain Presidency. But that explanation sounds a lot like cowardice to me.

Instead of being ashamed of a man who has, for whatever other faults of his we might agree about, led the way on honorable campaigning, this should be one of the great rallying points for moral conservatives. Cunningham played the fool, and McCain rightly and properly rebuked him for it. I hope I’m wrong, but it seems like talk radio wing of the Republican Party has suddenly decided that a key platform point for conservatives is the right to imply slander through the highly witty second grade tactic of name abuse.

“It’s his name. His mamma gave it to him. I’m just honoring him the same way we would honor John Fitzgerald Kennedy or Franklin Delano Roosevelt or William Jefferson Clinton.” Oh, yes, Mr. Cunningham, I’m quite sure that, in a speech which also referred to, “CBS, the Clinton Broadcasting System, NBC, the Nobody But Clinton network, [and] the All Bill Clinton channel ABC,” your references to Barack Hussein Obama were meant as a display of profound and sincere respect. Of course, I suppose it’s possible that some people believe you, but I’m hard pressed to believe that you’re stupid enough to believe your own explanations on this one.

Let’s be clear and say out loud what everyone knows about this particular middle name. The only reason to use it in referring to Senator Obama is because doing so panders to a noxious combination of anti-Arab/anti-Muslim sentiment and gives life to the ongoing slew of false allegations concerning Obama’s upbringing or secret religious affiliations. “See, he’s really just one of them…just look at his name.” I wonder if you would be so bold if the name happened to be Adolf or Aidid, although given your willingness to lie to America’s face about your motives, I have to figure you’d find that equally entertaining.

Just for a moment, consider this episode as a case study on the virtue of courage. On the one hand, Bill Cunningham engages in a cowardly ad hominem slur against a man based on the unfortunate historical timing of his middle name. When he is called on it publicly, he acts as if he is didn’t do anything wrong, nobody saw him, and you can’t prove anything. Bart Simpson would be proud. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is conduct unbecoming a public figure.

On the other hand, Senator John McCain immediately repudiates such behavior when he becomes aware of it. He does so while certainly knowing that this might alienate legions of angry conservatives who love to imitate Cunningham’s vitriol, but he seems to care not a whit about such foolishness. As people are pointing out, he surely had other options, most of them more politick. But what does courage do? It does the right thing, regardless.

So why are others so upset with McCain’s courage? Well, I have a simple theory. When you scold one shoplifter, all shoplifters become outraged. When you criticize speeding, all speeders get defensive. And when you publicly rebuke one of the cherished but immoral tactics of conservative talk radio, well, who gets upset?

We ask moderate Muslims to repudiate the Islamo-fascists. We demand that Christians condemn those who bomb abortion clinics or kill gays. We asked Mitt Romney to repudiate the ugly past of his own religion. We even ask Barack Obama to distance himself from Louis Farrakhan. All rightly so. Why do we suddenly think that John McCain should keep quiet about the sleaziest race-baiting behavior of some members of his party? Is such behavior an important element of modern conservatism? No. And saying so the sort of response that we should celebrate rather than apologize for.

I have never been a McCain supporter, but it would seem to me that courage is one of the defining elements of his life. Thus I am absolutely baffled why anyone would suddenly prefer him to pander like a coward to the worst elements of our right wing. Millions of Americans believe that conservative talk radio is nothing more than hate-filled bigotry. As a member of the profession, I have a hard time imagining how slandering the nation’s first serious black candidate for President through the abuse of his given name is the best strategy for proving them wrong.

To me, this past week has offered a stark contrast in political tone alternatives. On the one hand, we have the ridiculously inflammatory and deceptive excesses of one sort of political commentary embodied in Bill Cunningham’s I-can-throw-a-bigger-narcissistic-fit-than-Paris-Hilton express. On the other hand, we have the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr., whose loss has been noted and lamented by people across the political spectrum. What’s the difference between them? As even the New York Times noted, Buckley was special because, “Yale’s angry young man turned out to be not so angry after all. He hated most of what the liberals stood for. He didn’t hate them.” To Christianize this phrasing, Bill Buckley hated the sin but loved the sinner.

Talk radio and political discourse in general have two icons we can honor with our emulation: William F. Buckley, Jr. and Bill Cunningham. To embrace the one is to reject the other, regardless of the political views we are advocating. The fork in this road requires a choice, and I not only admire John McCain for forcing us to realize this, but I for one think that the best way to honor the passing of the father of modern conservatism would be to follow down the path where his example led.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 3

2008-02-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

Published 02.19.08 at Crosswalk.com

As I have explained in my two previous columns, there are five core objectives of a justice system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. In the first column, I showed that incapacitation and rehabilitation are irrelevant as distinctions between execution and life in prison without the possibility of parole (LIPWPP) and that retribution strongly favors execution. In the previous column, I explained why I think capital punishment does not deter, though I strongly support the practice for other reasons. But even if I thought that executing murderers would deter others from this crime, that still would not justify doing so for that reason. Why not? It’s actually quite simple.

People must be punished for their own crimes and not used utilitarian instruments for the sake of scaring other people.

Consider a rather extreme example. Graffiti is a scourge on many cities. It costs money, it costs time, and it is a serious social pollutant because of all the intangible messages its presence communicates. But I have a solution. I say we cut the arms off of all taggers. If that doesn’t work, we’ll start cutting off their legs as well. If that doesn’t work, we can systematically progress through a list of cherished body parts until we find the correct deterrent effect. Perhaps we’ll try advancing the mandatory body mutilation schedule every three months until we find no new graffiti appearing on our city surfaces. Though clearly effective at deterring, would this approach be wrong?

The obvious problem is that, as much as we hate graffiti, the punishment is disproportionate to the crime. Punishing a person more than his crime merits is itself an act of injustice, all the more so when done with the solemnity and deliberation of the state. Just as the lex talionis (eye for an eye) principle in the Bible was meant as a limit on retribution not an escalation, our system of ethics likewise obligates us to never punish a person more than he deserves.

“But wouldn’t removing limbs be an excellent deterrent?”

Indeed, but people are not objects which may be used as we please to obtain a desirable persuasive impression on others. They must be treated with respect as persons in their own right. The problem with punitive amputation is not that it wouldn’t deter. The problem is that, in overpunishing the violator, we would be reducing him from a human being to an instrument. This is the essential defect of every form of totalitarianism including communism. They turn people into numbers or cogs or machines or whatever metaphor best clarifies the problem rather than respecting them as human beings made in the image of God. Even benevolent motives cannot justify such abandonment of our core principle that humans have inalienable rights.

The proper first question is not whether capital punishment deters; it is whether capital punishment is just. If murder justifies execution on retributive grounds, then we should do it for that reason. If murder does not justify execution this way, then going beyond what is justified for the proposed benefit of deterrence becomes its own crime. Punishing a $200 theft with full restitution plus $600 for social fabric damage is fair. That this might deter is nice. That punishing it instead with $200 and three fingers would deter better does not alter the fact that hand mutilation would be an evil punishment.

There is one wrinkle in all of this, and it has to do with deterring the particular convict himself from future wrongdoing. It is sometimes right to overpunish a perpetrator for the sake of convincing him to not be a recidivist. This is the source of civil law’s punitive damage awards. But at least for this discussion such considerations are obviously irrelevant. The executed murderer is very unlikely to need deterring from future murders.

Thus, when considering two or more punishments which differ primarily in degree of severity, deterrence is always at best a side issue. If the alternatives are both retributively just, then deterrence can certainly break ties. But if the difference is so clearly about severity, as is the case with execution versus LIPWPP, deterrence cannot be a consideration.

When the just punishment deters, that is nice. But if not, that’s too bad. Even if an unjust punishment would deter better, a moral society may not objectify even its criminals in such a way. This is why I say that emphasizing deterrence is the most significant blunder most advocates of capital punishment make in this discussion.

Symbolism

Symbolism in a justice system is the goal of tangibly embodying the values and ideals of a society.

The law is one of the most powerful teachers any culture has. It has a stigmatizing effect on behavior, and it is the most meaningful indicator a society has of its core principles. Thus, whether we do or do not execute murderers says something extremely important about how highly we value life that the mere assertions in the Declaration of Independence and the 5th Amendment never really can. It is our society’s pledge of allegiance to the sanctity of life that we will take it from anyone who deliberately takes it from others. In this regard, there is simply no comparison between capital punishment and LIPWPP.

When we execute murderers, we are saying something loud and clear about this most fundamental of rights. If we neglect to do so, we are saying something equally potent. Because all other rights derive from and devolve to the right to life, I am frankly proud to live in a country which still, for the most part, takes a stand on this one point of order. That being said, however, I freely acknowledge that if the arguments regarding retribution did not justify execution, no amount of symbolic benefit would suffice to do so. Symbolism would become just another way of objectifying people, just as deterrence through overpunishment is.

Summary

Thus, when considering the five purposes of a justice system, incapacitation and rehabilitation wash out, retribution clearly endorses capital punishment, and deterrence and symbolism become purely secondary concerns to retribution. On this analysis alone, I can strongly support capital punishment as an abstract proposition. But aren’t there practical concerns? What about innocent convicts? And doesn’t the Bible say things that should concern me? Well, of course. So, we’ll talk about those in my next few columns.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 2

2008-01-29T18:05:00.000-08:00

Published 01.29.08 at Townhall.com
Published 02.12.08 at Crosswalk.com

Several developments over the last three months seem to indicate that our society is at a moment of decision regarding capital punishment, which behooves us to think seriously about this issue and clarify the very muddy waters people have made of it. As I explained in my previous column, there are five basic purposes to a justice system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. Between the two alternative murder penalties of execution and life in prison without the possibility of parole (LIPWPP), we saw that incapacitation and rehabilitation are essentially moot issues. Retribution, however, strongly favors capital punishment. Let’s continue our analysis.

Deterrence

Deterrence is the goal of giving people who might otherwise be willing to commit a crime a strong enough disincentive to prevent them making this choice.

This is the most complex part of the discussion and the part most misunderstood by nearly every commentator on both sides.

Given the frequency with which they contradict each other, studies have proven useless in answering definitively whether capital punishment deters. In the presence of such unclarity, it’s left to reason to decide, and reason rather counter-intuitively indicates that capital punishment does not deter. Despite wholeheartedly supporting capital punishment myself, I think that emphasizing deterrence is the signature error most of my intellectual allies make when discussing the issue.

Capital punishment does not deter because the capital offender is not the right sort of person.

There are three kinds of people in any society: the good, the barbaric, and the rational. Good people are self-governing enough that they either do not want to commit crimes or else restrain themselves morally from committing them. Clearly, capital punishment does not deter such people because decency or morality gets there first. Barbaric people are so much like animals that they are incapable of stopping themselves from doing the wicked things they want to do. Such people cannot be deterred because they lack the combination of prudence and self-control which deterrence presupposes. Instead, they must be stopped with the use of force. Rational people are those who want to do illegal things but are self-interested enough that they can perform calculations about risk and reward and decide to avoid committing a crime when its legal penalty outweighs its potential benefits. Thus, deterrence is only an issue with respect to rational people.

The problem is that murderers are not rational in this way.

For one thing, they are more likely to be barbaric than to be rational. Furthermore, at the time of a murder, even people who might otherwise be rational or good usually have become momentarily barbaric. This means that they are not performing the sort of calculus or exercising the sort of self-control necessary for deterrence to stop them. But even if they were, I’m hard pressed to take seriously the claim that capital punishment would deter them whereas LIPWPP would not. If they are indeed rational at the moment, surely LIPWPP represents a massive enough disincentive to deter someone from murder. It’s hard to imagine a potential murderer saying to himself, “I’m willing to kill this person because the worst it could cost me is LIPWPP. If only my state had the death penalty, I surely wouldn’t do this thing.”

Even if you can imagine such an internal dialogue in the mind of a potential capital offender, the marginal deterrent difference between execution and LIPWPP would be further weakened by several factors. Murderers always assume they will not be caught. In the event they imagine being captured, they think that they will be able to escape punishment by some legal technicality or a skillful defense. If convicted, they anticipate acquittal or reduction upon appeal. Even so, they know they will likely be alive for several decades while this process unfolds. And in the end, there’s always the hope of clemency or escape. All of these considerations significantly mitigate whatever deterrent power execution has, but there is a much more significant problem.

Criminals don’t know the law that well.

Other than in New Jersey and Texas, I doubt the average criminal actually knows what the current state of the law regarding capital crimes is. And if he does, he surely might imagine that it could change between now and his own unlikely trial or be nullified by some layer of the judiciary including the Supreme Court. All of these factors create such an ambiguity in the mind of even that rare highly-informed criminal who retains enough rationality just prior to the commission the crime for it to matter that the difference in deterrent effect between execution and LIPWPP is effectively diluted to zero.

But here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine that Mr. H. wants to kill his wife and lives near the border of a state which executes and whose neighbor state does not. Other than in the movies, can you really imagine the long process he would have to go through that would result in him saying, “Well, I guess I’ll drive her over next door before I kill her so that, just in case I’m caught, prosecuted, and lose my appeals over 25 years, at least I’ll get to live out the remaining 15 years of my life rather than die by lethal injection?” Such fantasy is beyond even my nimble imagination.

Dennis Prager once said in a column on this topic that a state which made murders committed on certain days of the week punishable by death but by LIPWPP on the others would surely find a shift from the former to the latter for homicides. Though his hypothetical may be correct for a small subset of criminals, I would instead say that waiting a day to kill is very different from transporting a victim across state lines or selecting residents of another state for victims based on such calculations. Weird hypotheticals produce unreliable conclusions. I know Dennis, and I think his error stems from thinking criminals are even remotely as rational as he. They are not.
Understanding all of this, it should now be clear that capital punishment does not deter. But what if it did?

You may disagree with every point in my prior analysis, and I’m sure many of you will relish doing so. But for the sake of argument, allow me to grant that threatening people with execution for murder might actually deter. Would that justify using it? I say not, and I’ll explain why in my next column on this topic.

Why I Support Capital Punishment, Part 1

2008-01-26T15:03:00.000-08:00

Published 01.26.08 at Townhall.com
Published 02.04.08 at Crosswalk.com

In November, the United Nations called for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. In December, Gov. John Corzine signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in New Jersey. Now, in January, the Supreme Court has heard arguments on whether lethal injection violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on Cruel and Unusual punishment. So, with New Jersey and the UN on one side and Texas and Iran on the other side, the Supreme Court seems poised to pick for us all between the new morality and the old.

Now, granted, New Jersey hadn’t actually executed anyone in 45 years, so this was a bit like Bill Cosby announcing that he will stop using profanity in his sketches. But the official decision is still noteworthy, as is the fact that New Mexico, Montana, and Nebraska all came close to doing the same thing this year. In the face of the seemingly unstoppable modern sensibility, why would anyone continue to support executing murderers? Well, I’ll tell you, since you asked.

There are five possible objectives of any legal system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. Starting with these values, let’s explore the differences between the two alternatives: capital punishment and life in prison without he possibility of parole.

Incapacitation

Incapacitation is the goal of making it physically impossible for the criminal to commit further crimes against his fellow human beings.

Clearly, both capital punishment and life in prison without the possibility of parole fully incapacitate criminals with respect to the general society. The only exception is if the prisoner escapes, but given that there is such a long delay between conviction and execution that death row becomes a de facto prison sentence until then, there is less distinction here than initially appears. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that once the two paths diverge, execution is 100% incapacitation and LIPWPP (Pronounced Lip-Whip) is 99+% incapacitation. As an advocate of the death penalty, I’m not interested in quibbling about numbers, so I’ll grant that incapacitation is the same for both alternatives.

Within the prison community, however, things are not so clear. Unless LIPWPP is upgraded to permanent solitary confinement, such prisoners will still be a threat to guards and other prisoners during their confinement. This is no trivial difference given the obligations of prisons to protect prisoners from each other. Nonetheless, as long as such isolation is the form of sentencing advocated, I’m willing to grant that incapacitation is a non-issue in this debate.

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is the goal of reforming the criminal so that he can be reintegrated into society as a well-behaved, productive citizen.

Several recent studies have shown that execution is almost completely unsuccessful as a method of rehabilitating the offender. However, given permanent residence in isolation within a prison, LIPWPP isn’t really rehabilitative either. Thus, both alternatives are equal again on this value, at least in the sense of preparing a criminal for re-entry into general society.

However, if one means by rehabilitation the service done to the criminal himself of helping him have a profitable and meaningful life while incarcerated, things are not so clear. On the one hand, it is possible that a murderer would repent and dedicate himself to self-improvement. On the other hand, it is possible that a murderer would go on hating and descend into a spiral of self-destructive seething. Since quantifying these probabilities exceeds my abilities, I’ll optimistically estimate that the net chance of self-development benefits obtained during LIPWPP is offset by the equally small advantage in incapacitation certainty obtained through execution. So, rehabilitation and incapacitation taken together become moot issues.

Retribution

Retribution is the goal of restoring the scales of moral justice to balance as possible.

For instance, when someone thieves, the objective is to restore the victim to his condition prior to the loss. This requires restitution equal to the theft plus a penalty to cover the lost use of that money and the intangible damage to his confidence and security. Civil law is the easiest illustration for understanding retribution. We quantify all sorts of things in civil courts for the sake of saying what the offender owes, and the idea is to restore balance by taking from the criminal and repaying the victim.

But there are always two victims of every crime: the particular person and the moral fabric of the society itself. For every infraction against this fabric, we asses varying degrees of penance including jail time, community service, and fines. These all have their own merits, but the retributive purpose is to make the criminal pay enough to restore balance to the moral universe just as he must to the victim. Not only is this about compensating those who have lost, but it is about allowing the offender the privilege of paying his debt to society so that he may satisfy the demands of just retribution. Once paid, we are no longer owed, and he not longer owes.

What, then is the proper retribution for murder? As death penalty opponents are so fond of saying, “Executing the murderer will not bring his victim back to life.” That, of course, is true. It’s just as true, however, that giving him LIPWTPP will also fail to accomplish a resurrection. And that’s the point. There is simply nothing the murderer can do to truly restore the social fabric to the status quo ante for the obvious reason that there is no way to replace missing people. Nonetheless, as history and the Bible so clearly have held, blood alone can atone for shed blood. By requiring his life of him, we make him pay the only correct price and we also allow him to fully pay it. This balances both the moral fabric as well as the murderer’s personal register.

Once we comprehend this distinction between murder and all other crimes (which can be restituted for), it should be clear that retribution not only justifies execution, it requires it. Execution is the only correct penalty-in-kind for murder, and retribution is the only value so far analyzed which justifies taking this most precious of payments from someone.

In my next column, I will consider the issues of deterrence and symbolism before moving on to discuss the other issues in this complex and often difficult issue.

Bad Christmas Gifts, Part 1: Not Giving Them

2007-12-21T18:16:00.000-08:00

Published 11.24.07 at Townhall.com

Have you ever received a Christmas gift you didn’t want? Idiot mittens from grandma. A subscription to the deodorant-of-the-month club. Membership to the “We Fix Fat People” gym and spa. Yes, we’ve all received bad gifts.

But do you remember what it felt like? Burdened. Insulted. Irritated. Disturbed. All are candidates. Naturally, however, you smiled and said, “Thank You” while you secretly considered how to dispose of the new curse you’d acquired. And, of course, if someone gives you a bad gift once, next year’s gift is preambled with a nice holiday dose of anxiety to boot.

So if that’s how you felt when receiving a bad gift, why would you want to risk being such an anti-blessing to someone else? If you love them, you surely wouldn’t. We all want to be the sort of person who gives the gifts people can’t wait to open and are thrilled to receive. If so, why does this process go so wrong with such regularity?

1. We live in America.

In the United States of America, the vast majority of us have enough money to buy pretty much anything we want. If I want a shirt, I buy it for myself. If I want a DVD player, I buy it for myself. And if I want a new CD, I buy it for myself. In short, anything someone might give me that I would actually want, I already own. So in buying a gift for me, someone should ask himself a simple question: “Why doesn’t he already have it?” There are three possibilities.

One, I’ve never thought of it. This is obviously a good reason to buy it for me, and quickly, before I think of it myself. Two, I can’t afford it or don’t think it’s worth the price. This may seem like a fine reason, but such gifts then burden me with the obligation to be equally wasteful on you in return. That’s rarely a blessing. But the third and primary reason a gift recipient doesn’t already have this something is pretty obvious: he doesn’t actually want it. Clearly, such gifts really aren’t. But wait, there’s more.

2. Some people are picky.

I can’t buy gifts for my wife. Not because I’m bad at buying gifts, but because she is extremely particular. The good news is she doesn’t care whether I buy a gift for her. She is unusual in that she is perfectly happy for me to tell her to go buy what she wants for herself, and I get the credit for that. Other people have the unfortunate disease of being picky and also desiring gifts. I’d love to tell you that I have a solution for such people, but I don’t. However, I do have a thought.

Picky people are usually unhappy people, and unhappy people are usually not worth trying to please. So, one viable option is to simply not get a gift for this person and see what happens. “Why didn’t you get me anything this year” can easily be answered with an honest, “Because nothing I ever buy satisfies you, and I’d rather save my money and spare you the grief of receiving what you don’t want.” Isn’t honesty liberating?

3. The nature of gifts escapes many people.

These two problems make things harder, sure. However, the biggest problem with giving gifts has nothing to do with either of these difficulties. The real hang-up is that people don’t understand what a gift is. A gift is a tangible demonstration of your love for someone.

Bad gifts are a burden precisely because they show your lack of love for the recipient. The prerequisite of love is knowledge. You cannot love whom you do not know. Thus, a gift shows love when it demonstrates a real knowledge of who someone is and what he desires. Bad gifts are evidence of a bad relationship because they demonstrate that you do not know enough about this person to be capable of giving a good gift.

Thus, an unwanted gift is a double failure. First you’ve burdened the recipient with something he wants about as much as more telemarketing calls. Second, you’ve actually insulted him by saying that he isn’t important enough for you to really know who he is. This may sound harsh, but it’s the truth that few people are willing to tell bad gift-givers. Unless the giver is a child who cannot do better, it’s not cute when someone gives a bad gift. It’s obnoxious.

Let me be clear, the reason I’m writing this is so that people will swallow some pride and actually accomplish their (hopeful) purpose in buying Christmas gifts: to bless the recipient. Just think of how awful the theological implications are in celebrating the Perfect Gift from God by giving someone a gift he neither wants nor needs. But just as a bad gift wounds a relationship, a good gift solidifies it. And, because I want people to have good relationships, I want people to learn how to be more like God and give great Christmas gifts.

4. But isn’t it the thought that counts?

There is one final myth that needs direct dispelling. The thought does not count. The gift counts. And I’ll tell you why this phrase disgusts me. When do we say it? We say, “It’s the thought that counts,” precisely when the gift is terrible. But if the gift is terrible, that means that the thought wasn’t really so great either. It takes a lot of thought to give a good gift. It takes only a little thought to give a terrible one. So, a bad gift is actually evidence that you don’t care enough about the person to bother taking the time to have a quality thought about what would make a good gift for him. Thus, rather than the thought being the thing that counts, it’s the lack of thought that winds up counting.

By the way, this is why it’s so tacky to ask people what they want to be given. If you have to ask, you’re admitting you don’t know them well enough to be giving them a gift in the first place. It’s sort of like saying, “Gee, I really want to pretend that we have a strong relationship and I want to earn false affection from you, so can you tell me who you are and I’ll just act like I already knew?” Now, granted, it’s better to ask and get it right than to not ask and get it wrong. But the real challenge is to not ask and get it right. And if you can’t get it right without asking, maybe you shouldn’t be buying gifts for this person in the first place. Just maybe.

5. Categories of bad gifts

To illustrate some of the pitfalls, here are my six categories for bad gifts:

The insult gift, which criticizes rather than edifying the person. “Here’s your Thigh-Master video and a subscription to Escaping Codependency Magazine, hon.”
The selfish gift, which shows you can’t distinguish between what you like and what others like. “Here’s your organic lotions that I’m really into all of a sudden.”
The narcissistic gift, which serves your ego, not his needs. “Here’s your own framed portrait of me.”
The gift from me to you for me, which looks like a gift, but it’s really selfish. “Here’s that uncomfortable lingerie I know you hate to wear for me, dear.”
The burden gift, which is the gift that keeps on giving you problems like stealing your time or space. “Here’s your own copy of War and Peace. Let’s talk about it when we have lunch next week.”
The almost good but really bad gift, which shows you know a little about someone but haven’t really taken the time to realize that a person’s interests are actually a dangerous place for gifts precisely because you probably don’t know enough about the field of interest to gift well in it. “Here, Dr. Schwartz, I thought you could use this copy of “Basic Anatomy for Dummies” in your neurosurgical practice.”

6. Being a good gift-giver

Okay, sarcastic humor and acerbic comments aside, how do you give good gifts? It’s simple, but it’s not simple. Be humble, and do your homework. That’s it. You have to realize that there is no formula because every relationship and every person is different. The idea of giving gifts is to put aside every desire you have other than the one to bless someone. Then you just learn whatever you have to learn about this other person so that you can buy (or make) a really good gift.

In fact, one of the most powerful gifts is a gift that you do not even agree with and the other person knows this because this is a statement of great love. “I love you more than I love myself, and to prove it I’ll submit my own desires to my love of you and give you what you will appreciate.”

Now go do the work necessary to give a gift so precious that the recipient would never even think of having to say something ridiculous like, “Oh, well, it’s the thought that counts,” because the thought really did count. If this column means you need to go make some returns, so be it. There are still a few days until Christmas. And look for my next article on what to do when you get a bad gift. A hint: the answer is not to politely say, “Thank you.”

Bad Christmas Gifts, Part 2: What To Do When You Get Them

2007-12-21T18:13:00.000-08:00

Published under a different title 12.24.08 at Towhnall.com

In my previous column on bad Christmas gifts, I explained why we give bad gifts and how to avoid doing so. The main point of that column was that bad gifts are a burden because they fail to show real love. But what should we do when someone loves us this badly? The most habitual response is to say that we should be polite, smile, and say, “Thank you.” The most habitual response is wrong. Why? Because lying is a sin.

“But being polite is not a sin.” That’s a discussion worthy of it’s own attention. Fortunately for this column, acting pleased in the reception of a bad Christmas gift is not a form of politeness. Being polite is what we are supposed to do to strangers and people we don’t know well enough to be fully honest with. Such people are not usually giving us Christmas gifts, and, if they do, that’s a different case. I am talking about bad gifts from friends and family, people with whom we have a relationship, or are supposed to.

“Still, why is lying and acting grateful not acceptable? Isn’t it the thought that counts?” As I explained in the previous column, no. But the danger of lying is already well-known to anyone who’s tried this approach: it only makes things worse. I once had a good friend give me a book as a gift. I added it to the 3,000+ other books I own and forgot all about it…until he asked me a few months later if I had enjoyed it. I told him I hadn’t read it yet, and I distorted reality slightly by saying I intended to do so. Another few months passed, and he inquired again. Now I had to make a choice, either continue to lie and act as if I intended to read this book as soon as I could make the time or else tell him the truth.

And that’s the point, bad gifts accepted gratefully only cause further problems. Your friends visit and inquire if something went wrong with the lava lamp you’ve been storing in the garage sale pile. You get asked why you never wear that hand knit green and orange sweater you acted so glad to get from your grandmother. Or perhaps your realtor notices that your skin tone doesn’t seem to be responding to the Siberian anchovy cleansing cream he sent you.

Maybe you lie. Maybe you have to invent subsequent outrageous lies to cover over the first. But the worst part of lying is the awful thing that happens when you do it well: you receive another bad gift next year from the person who thinks he’s doing you a blessing. Alternately, at some point the deception becomes so fraudulent that you rightly recognize it as being incompatible with the honesty that’s supposed to be the cornerstone of any non-pathological relationship. So you tell the truth later, which turns out to be messier than if you’d done it earlier, before the scope of the fraud was so extensive.

Let me come at this a different way. When you give a gift, do you want it to be a blessing to the other person? Of course you do. If it isn’t one, do you want to continue falsely thinking you’ve succeeded while the person secretly deceives you and harbors resentment over having to do so because of your bad gift? Surely not. Unless you’re so selfish as a “giver” that you’re really doing it only to please yourself and you don’t really care about whether they are pleased.

When I give someone a gift, I make sure it’s going to be something the recipient wants. But even so, I will make it as easy for him to tell me it isn’t as I possibly can. “Here’s the receipt. If you want to exchange it. I won’t be offended at all. Please, if it isn’t what you really want, get something you’ll enjoy. I want to bless you, not be a problem, and I’d be truly upset if you didn’t exchange it.” Precisely because I know that bad gifts are an awful moral burden, I want to eliminate that possibility in giving something. But, of course, we all know the paradox. People who give gifts so selflessly are also the same people who give good gifts. It’s the bad gift-giver who makes honesty so challenging.

But honesty is your only viable option. Bad gifts are immoral, and just as a child needs guidance when he does something foolish, bad gift-givers need honest feedback if they are ever going to learn to do better. Not because it’s a way of punishing them, but because we care about them and about our relationship to them. But I get ahead of myself. You’re probably still balking on the idea of objecting to a gift in the first place. Allow me to persuade you with some examples.

I’m a Christian man. Imagine someone were to buy me a subscription to Hustler and a VIP pass to a local strip club. Should I smile and say, “Thank you?” What if he gave me a couple of ounces of cocaine? Perhaps a copy of the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce? What if someone bought my 3½ year-old son a hunting knife? What if someone gave my Muslim friend a one-year subscription to the pork-of-the-month club or my Mormon friend a copy of “Polygamy for Beginners?” Now, obviously, these are ridiculous and even sometimes evil gifts. But that’s the point. Some gifts are so inappropriate that being polite is clearly wrong.

If my son comes to me one morning with a dripping paintbrush in his hand and says he decided to give me the gift of painting my car for me, he would be in deep trouble, not in deep affection. If someone decided to “clean up” my desk and papers “as a favor,” this act would be such an affront that to act grateful would be nearly as inappropriate as the act itself. And that’s the point. When a gift is really bad, it demands an honest response. So why don’t we react honestly when it’s only moderately bad? The real answer here is painful to admit.

It’s because we’re selfish.

Bad gift-givers are selfish (see my other article), and polite bad-gift receivers are also selfish. It’s simply easier to avoid the conflict honesty would cause. It’s easier to make jokes about the person to a sympathetic spouse than to tell him the truth to his face. So we take the easy way out and deceive ourselves into thinking that we’ve done something loving. It’s almost perfectly symmetrical with the immorality done by the person who gave the bad gift. Both parties are selfish, and both parties think they are behaving lovingly. Now isn’t that ironic?

But there’s more wrong here than first meets the eye. We lie to them with our gratitude, but we lie to ourselves about our motives. We say that being polite is the loving thing to do for the other person, but we are equally motivated by the desire to protect our own reputation. See, you worry people will think less of you if you complain about a gift, so you do whatever is necessary to keep this fear from happening. Instead of voicing your ingratitude, which you fear will make you look mean, you lie and seem like a perfectly decent person. Thus, what seems like selfless etiquette actually turns out to be a very deceptive maneuver to prevent yourself from being judged for who you really are. What did the Bard say about webs and deceptions?

Here’s further irony. We would never feel such a burden in dealing with our enemies. Although I admit it’s a bit weird to imagine, consider how you would respond if someone you despised gave you a bad gift. Likely you would feel no compunction about telling this person the truth, and rudely. Why? Because you care neither about this person’s feelings nor about his image of you. But isn’t there something askew in a moral system where we only feel at liberty to be honest with those we do not love? I suspect our notions of love and truth need revising.

There is an explanation: we’re bad at telling the truth effectively. The reason for rules of politeness (though I repeat this isn’t about being polite) is because it’s easier to not mess them up. Honesty is really difficult. Nonetheless, there’s enough light at the end of the tunnel to make it worth trying. A bad gift is a kind of rupture in a relationship. It shows lack of knowledge and, therefore, lack of love. But any rupture is also an opportunity.

Bad gifts create a sort of crisis, and the relationship can’t stay where it is. It must either become stronger or weaker, and ignoring the breach can only make it weaker. Confronting it runs the risk of total ruination, but it also runs the risk of deeper intimacy. So you have to ask yourself a very simple question: Would you rather keep such relationships forever trivial by protecting them from the stress that might break them, or would you rather risk losing them in the hope that you might gain real ones in exchange? Every meaningful relationship I have is so because it survived one or more crises of honesty. The only way to get respect and real love is to tell people the truth. So here’s how to do so successfully.

The three keys to effective confrontation

1. Apologize in advance. “I’m sorry, John.”

2. Admit the obvious. “I have something really awful to say to you, and I’m genuinely afraid that it’s going to hurt your feelings or make you mad and ruin our friendship. I’m really scared right now because you mean a lot to me and I don’t want to lose that. ”

3. Get permission. “So would you rather have me tell you the truth or keep it hidden from you?”

Certainly, the frenzy of Christmas morning may not be the correct time for such a confrontation. This you must decide for yourself. The Bible wisely teaches that we should confront people and resolve our issues with them privately, in part because defensive anger is a more likely result in public encounters. But some form of honest confrontation is the only loving way to proceed, and the benefits should by now be clear.

You’ve taken a breached relationship and tried to heal it. You’ve dealt with the giver honorably, as a loved one who deserves your honesty. You are likely helping that person to become a better gift-giver to you and others in the future, which should make everyone a lot happier. And you’ve cleared your conscience against the need to indulge in subsequent deceptions. But there’s one more benefit to this approach. When people know you react honestly, they know your expressed joy at a gift is real. Precisely because my friends know I’m honest, they also need never second-guess my reactions. I yield no false positives. And as a symbolic reinforcement of this very concept, my honesty about the need to be honest is my possibly unwelcome Christmas gift to you. I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

A Religious Test Oath?

2007-12-20T14:42:00.000-08:00

Published 12.20.07 under a different title at Townhall.com

Charles Krauthammer writes, “The Constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.” Well, Chuck, I’m growing tired of you and others telling me what I may or may not consider in my voting decision.

I care about a candidate’s religion. It’s not the only thing I care about, but, still, I care about it. And I’m about fed up with people telling me I’m a bigot and un-American because I happen to have a different idea of what matters in my decision for whom to vote than they do. How about this: I won’t say you’re un-American for ignoring religion if you stop saying I’m un-American for considering it.

I care that Mike Huckabee is an ordained Baptist. I happen to think Baptists are wrong about a lot, but I still care that he is. I care that Hillary Clinton is a full-fledged non-Wesleyan United Methodist. That tells me a lot about her. I care that Barack Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ. I care that Rudy Giuliani is a Catholic, mostly because the fact that he is so disconnected from the staunch doctrines of his own faith tells me a lot about him. Yes, he is rebellious, but he’s also independently stubborn like a mule. Rudy would never have had to give the JFK speech because it would be preposterous to think he cares what the Pope thinks about his political views.

And, as it happens, I care that Mitt Romney is a Mormon.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I could still vote for him. Though I’m a non-denominational Evangelical Christian (since you asked), I’m not of the camp who thinks that Latter Day Saints are members of some Satanic cult in league with the FreeMasons and the Bilderbergers.

But what if I thought they were?

If I did in fact believe that a candidate’s religion were evil, would you really be so audacious as to tell me that I’m not allowed to consider that when I enter the voting booth? For all the conservative lip-service given to protecting religion from government, that sure sounds to me like you’re saying I’m not allowed to bring my religious views to the ballot box with me.

I would not vote for a Scientologist. They make good movies, especially when John Woo is directing, but I don’t want them running NASA. I would not vote for a Christian Scientist. I love their newspaper, but I don’t want them overseeing the FDA. I would not vote for a Muslim. At this moment in world history, I’m having a hard time really believing that Islam is compatible with the notions of freedom from government coercion that we cherish in this country. Most Muslims and I agree deeply about private morality, but I don’t share their belief that God only cares what the society looks like and not whether freedom is allowed as part of the process of getting there. And perhaps most obviously, I don’t want to vote for an atheist. I was one, and I am no longer. I do not want to deliberately put someone in the White House (or any other marble hall) who does not consider himself accountable to any god at all.

Allow me to clarify myself slightly. By saying, “I would not vote for” them, I’m actually saying I would prefer not to have to. This is not a strict pass/fail grading system. These are merely strong considerations for me because they pertain to character and judgment, and other factors could certainly counterbalance them. Still, these are strong preferences.

So do these views make me a bigot? If so, then bigot I am, but I’m hard pressed to draw the further hasty generalization that all bigotry is bad. My Webster’s says that a bigot is someone “obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion.” That sounds like an apt description of Martin Luther, Saint Paul, any Pope you name, and even my Savior, quite frankly. It certainly doesn’t mean a racist, which is the similarity implied by the tone of the word use.

Also, lest you mis-stereotype me, I’m probably the most tolerant and open-minded Evangelical you’ll meet in your life. I’ll talk with anyone. I’ll be friends with anyone. And I don’t feel threatened by a wildly pluralistic society such as we enjoy in America.

But that’s not the point. When I go into a voting booth, I’m not picking a friend or a conversation partner. I’m picking a leader. I want leaders that I would trust my money and my children with….since I sort of am. And that means that I consider a person’s religious views. Because religion matters, and it matters to me. Why is that so wrong?

“But, Andrew, don’t you know that the Constitution prohibits a religious test for elected office in the United States?” Of course I do. But do you realize that there is a vast difference between officially requiring such a test and me privately considering the results of such a test? You seem to think that simply because it is illegal to require a religious test for office that it should also be illegal to consider a candidate’s religion. Should it also be illegal to ask about it or for him to describe it to us?

“Well, I didn’t say these things should be illegal. I merely meant that you’re being un-American and neglecting the great principles of the Constitution by using them yourself.” Really? Are you sure that you want to take a position which states there is no difference at all between what we do officially through the Constitutional and what we do in our own private judgment?

Swearing is protected speech. Does this mean I’m un-American if I consider a candidate’s predilection to profanity in my vote? Blasphemy is protected speech. May I not consider a candidate’s irreverent references to God in my vote? Pornography is protected press. May I not consider whether someone is a pornographer or porn consumer in my vote? The Constitution only requires that someone be 35 to be President. May I not, therefore, consider youth or elderliness as a factor in my vote?

As I understand democracy, I am free to vote how I think best. Perhaps I’ll vote based on age. Perhaps I’ll vote based on gender. Perhaps I’ll vote based on policies, past record, education, party affiliation, or height. Some of these factors are better than others to consider, but just because I agree that we should not have a State religion, this doesn’t mean I should become religion-blind in my judgments about leadership capacity. Precisely because I believe religion (or even its lack) is central to who a person is, I not only will consider it, but I expect lots of other people to consider it as well. The ones who ignore it can only achieve consistency in their views by believing that religion can and should be walled off from every important area of a man’s life. I’m probably more troubled by such aberrant theology than I am by that of the non-believer. They would have us believe that God exists but shouldn’t matter. Even the atheist is not so foolish.

I’ve no doubt that this column will be misunderstood by many. They will think this is an attack on Mitt Romney and Mormons more generally. They’ll probably accuse me of opening the door for anti-Semitism. And I’m sure they’ll be saying that I want to make every religion other than mine illegal.

They will be wrong.

Let me repeat. I can easily see myself voting for Mitt Romney. In fact, I spend a fair amount of time convincing those who object to his Mormonism that they should not. Not because religion doesn’t matter, but because they’re wrong in thinking this particular religion is wrong enough to disqualify him. I know too many Mormons to be overly worried about a Mormon President, even though I also have many questions about this very secretive faith.

If I do vote for Mitt, I would be doing so in part precisely because of his commitment to religion, even one other than my own. But that’s the point. I am considering his religion in my decision, and I am very frustrated by hearing so many conservatives tell me and others who disagree with me in my assessment of Mormonism that we are all a bunch of unpatriotic bigots because we happen to think that what a man believes and practices with regard to God is important stuff.

Truth be told, your bigotry on this point against me is at least as distasteful as my bigotry in considering religion, if either is bigotry at all.

How And Why I Do Radio

2007-11-20T14:22:00.000-08:00

Published in Faith Talk Magazine--November 2007
Published under a different title 01.09.08 at Towhnall.com

Have you ever wondered why Christians aren’t smarter? I mean, we have the only true religion, we have a Book which is responsible for all of Western Civilization, and we serve a God who can safely call Himself the supreme champion at every trivia contest. So why aren’t we smarter? Well, the reasons are many, but the goal of changing that condition is the driving passion of my life. Having taught college philosophy, my background is in equipping people to think better, and I used to think that talent was best used in the secular world. Three years ago, however, I was persuaded by some good counsel to turn my attention toward the Body of Christ, and that’s why I came to Phoenix to do my radio show weekdays from 5 to 7PM on AM 1360 KPXQ.

Not thinking well is a sin.

God commands us very simply: Love Him with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. Catch that last part....with all our mind. This means thinking is not optional for the Christian. Thinking, and thinking well, is a form of worship of God which is nothing short of obedience to His primary command. Hence, if we do not “use the brain God gave you,” (my mom’s favorite rhetorical chastisement), we are sinning.

Not thinking well is a scandal.

The most pervasive myth about Christianity is that it is incompatible with intelligence.
This is what I believed before I became one, and it made me not want to be one. I say it is a myth both because nothing demands more thinking capacity than being a faithful Christian and also because our history is rich with intellectual giants. Nonetheless, Christianity has a reputation as a religion for fools, and this is at least partially our own fault. By offering empty platitudes such as, “Well, you have to have faith,” when challenged with difficult questions, outsiders can be forgiven for forming the impression that what we really mean is, “Well, you have to be stupid.” This puts people in the painful situation of feeling like they have to choose between their mind and God. Also, it makes Christianity offensive to the smartest people in society, who tend to be culture’s greatest influencers. Thus, simply showing non-Christians that one can be both smart and faithful is a powerful form of evangelism.

Fishers not just fish-eaters.

“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Simple. Obvious. But, all too often, it’s not the guiding principle of Christian education. Christians can be so concerned about having the right answers (good doctrine), that we fail to teach people the thinking skills and patterns which would lead them to these and other true conclusions. They may have the unreliable dogmatism which comes from mere repetition, but they lack the true confidence which comes from deep and honest examination of an idea. Sadly, it also means they do not have the ability to discover new answers for themselves in novel situations. On my radio show, I deliberately do not provide people many answers because I am more interested in helping people learn how to think than I am in telling them what to think. My confidence is high that such an ability will ultimately get them to the right place, and it will be a place of true security as well.

Disciples, not an audience.

Jesus mentored His disciples. He interacted with them. He answered their questions. He joked with them. And He corrected them. He didn’t lecture them. He lectured the masses. And I think the reason is simple. A lecture is not the ideal form of education. The reason are many. If a listener doesn’t like what is being said, he can simply ignore it. If he doesn’t understand or if he disagrees, he cannot easily inquire of the speaker. Because such questions go unanswered, other people miss out on having these questions answered. When the teacher fields questions, he replaces his own assumptions about his audience with real knowledge and can more accurately tune his teaching to the real needs they have. Finally, I believe in collaboration rather than solo performances. Although I think I have many reliable insights worth saying, I’d rather talk with people and work together toward truth instead of just trusting in my own ideas too much. So my show is built around discussion rather than presentation. I am working with my listeners to fashion a product together rather than simply distributing to them a prefabricated one.

Haggling, not purchasing.

In the Mediterranean culture of the Bible, haggling is a way of life because such negotiations are a great way of coming to know someone. The process of haggling gains both friends and sharper minds. We are often baffled by this when they travel to that part of the world because Americans are so transaction oriented. “I agree,” “I disagree,” “I will buy,” or “I will not buy.” Such shallow interactions we are very comfortable with. In the Mediterranean, the sellers understand that the product is insignificant compared with the relationship it’s sale can create. In contrast, I think Americans are too concerned with conclusions instead of being concerned with relationships. Thus, the key in my show is to find stimulating topics which cause people to want to talk with each other and build friendships. Whether we agree is not so much the issue. Whether we are able to love each other while we disagree and talk about it. That matters.

In Conclusion

I was concerned when I took this job; concerned that my fellow Christians wouldn’t endure me because they wanted their own ideas reinforced rather than examined and challenged. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered vast numbers of Christians who were excited about the prospect of being made to think, even if they didn’t always agree with me. And so my audience and I have created an environment where we love each other not because we agree all the time, but because we enjoy the experience of talking it over together. Every day we collaborate to show that theology, like a good relationship, is not something to be purchased or rejected, but something to be enjoyed….together.

To Husbands: How To Have A Great Wife

2007-11-07T13:18:00.001-08:00

Published in Arizona Family News--November 2007
Published at Townhall.com--November 14, 2007

“He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor from the Lord,” and he who nourishes a wife preserves a good thing and maintains the favor of the Lord.

God allowed you to find your wife because He believed you would take good care of His precious daughter. This is why you obtain the dual blessings of having her and pleasing Him. But what happens when you don’t take good care of your wife? A man who neglects his wife makes her miserable and then she makes him miserable. As the saying goes, “When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” But she isn’t the only unhappy one. I believe you also anger God by betraying His confidence in trusting you with her. After all, what father is happy when his son-in-law fails to keep his darling content?

I’ve been to many weddings, and I have yet to see a woman stand at the altar promising to “love, honor, and obey so long as you both shall live” while thinking to herself, “I despise this man, and I expect this marriage to make me miserable.” Not likely. She stand there with hope, anticipation, love, admiration, and the expectation of great joy in her heart. Unfortunately, if you fail to meet her needs and fulfill her hopes, she will not stay that way. The best way to ruin a good woman is to marry her and then fail to give her what she expected to receive.

Oh, sure, perhaps she exerts a tremendous effort and manages to stay sweet and wonderful in spite of you neglecting her. Even the Bible teaches her to love you into being a better man. But to expect or demand this from her is naively optimistic and, quite frankly, unfair. There is a much better way: the Biblical way.

When we quote Ephesians 5, men often emphasize the wife’s duty to submit. Okay, fine. But the husband’s duty is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, His Bride. In thinking about the relationship between Christ and the Church, who has the greater challenge? Who does more? Who is primarily responsible for the ultimate success of the Relationship? Your obligation to represent the love of Jesus in your marriage is a monumentally greater task than your wife’s obligation to represent the submission of the Church.

So, what does it take to have a great wife? Simple. Be a great lord. And what does it take to be a great lord? Equally simple. Know the needs and desires of your wife and meet them. If you don’t, she will become just the sort of wife you don’t want: nagging, withholding, bitter, and frustrated. God gave you a beautiful flower. He does not expect a dead thorn bush in return. You’d have done better to remain single than to so ruin the beautiful human rose He entrusted to you.

That’s the simple part. It may be unpleasant to ponder, but it’s simple. Your job is to nurture, cherish, love, honor, serve, provide for, lead, impress, and protect your wife. And if you never stop doing this, the chance that she will be a great wife is very good. Yes, she retains free will and may fail on her part, but, when you do your part, it becomes much easier for her to do hers.

So how is this to be accomplished? This is where things get dicey. Willard Harley wrote a very helpful book called “His Needs, Her Needs,” in which he outlines the top needs of women. They include affection, conversation, honesty and openness, financial support, and family commitment. This is all true. Gary Chapman wrote another helpful book called “The Five Love Languages,” in which he talks about giving love through gifts, quality time, words of encouragement, physical touch, and acts of service. This is also true. Gary Smalley has written books. James Dobson has written books. Ellen Kreidman has written books. And all the books in the world are helpful and at the same time not. Here’s why.

Women aren’t a formula.

Every woman is different. Every woman is complex. Every woman is mysterious. And just about the worst thing you can do is think that she can be solved like some math equation. Men, by contrast, are not all that complex. This is why men and women don’t understand each other. Women often refuse to believe men are so simple. Men often can’t grasp that women are so complicated.

Yet God is represented in both of these. He is at once both absurdly simple and astoundingly complex. He is straightforward and mysterious. In other words, God made it so that women could learn about Him by understanding men and that men could learn about Him by understanding women. That’s why marriage is such a rich theological gift.

And your part, husbands, is the harder one. Though the task is simple (to make her feel loved and precious beyond comparison), the method is not simple. Although I can confidently tell her what to do in general to make you happy (see my previous article), I cannot tell you the same about your wife. You have to figure that out for yourself, and, even if you figure her out today, it may be a new puzzle tomorrow or the next day.

That’s okay. That’s one side of God’s Nature you’re experiencing. If it frustrates you, you’re really just admitting you’re frustrated with God. But if you take it as the greatest challenge with the neatest reward, then you’ve suddenly discovered something far more interesting than fantasy football ever can be.

But if I can’t give you a formula, why did I bother writing this? Because if I can merely get you to recognize the nature of the challenge and stop thinking that there is a four-step plan you can follow to nurture a great wife, I’ve already helped you immensely.

Let me conclude with a personal example. Most women like surprises. My wife hates them. Most women like to be given sweets such as chocolate. My wife likes it once but then gets angry because she worries it will make her fat. Most women like to be given lavish gifts that show their value. My wife considers that a waste of our carefully managed budget. Most women like to celebrate anniversaries. My wife couldn’t care less. So what do I do?

Well, I could ignore everything I know about her by surprising her with an expensive chocolate extravaganza on our anniversary. Then I could pride myself for having followed a set of rules that would apply for most women as I sit back to enjoy the fruits of my stupidity. Or I could let her purchase season 10 of Little House on the Prairie on DVD for herself at Target on sale two months before our anniversary. Guess which one I did? And she was quite satisfied with that. We must give our wives what they truly want, not what we think they want…just like God.

So, what’s the lesson? Learn what YOUR wife needs from you to feel loved, and then give it to her. Pay attention. Really pay attention. Try some experiments, and see how it turns out. If you find something that works, try it some more. Never stop trying to impress her with the things you will do to make her feel loved. But also never forget that she’s a woman, not a formula…just like God.

And if you follow this simple (and completely unsimple) advice, I suspect you’ll find yourself married to a great wife. At the very least, she’ll appreciate you trying so hard to understand and satisfy her…just like God.

What I Learned About Liberalism From Barry Manilow

2007-10-24T15:02:00.001-07:00

Published at Townhall.com--10.24.07

Barry Manilow recently gave a seminar on liberalism. Oh, not intentionally, of course. But sometimes unintentional seminars are the most instructive of all.

It all started when the singer suddenly cancelled his September 18th appearance on the television show “The View.” This statement was posted on Manilow’s website on the 17th:

I wanted to let you know that I will no longer be on The View tomorrow as scheduled. I had made a request that I be interviewed by Joy, Barbara or Whoopi, but not Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Unfortunately, the show was not willing to accommodate this simple request so I bowed out. It’s really too bad because I’ve always been a big supporter of the show, but I cannot compromise my beliefs. The good news is that I will be on a whole slew of other shows promoting the new album so I hope you can catch me on those.

Although he had appeared twice in the past year without conditions, the fuss between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O’Donnell back in May changed all of that. As a close friend of Rosie’s and a large Democratic contributor, Manilow didn’t relish the idea of putting himself anywhere near the token conservative. As he told TMZ, “I strongly disagree with her views. I think she’s dangerous and offensive. I will not be on the same stage as her.” When “The View” refused his “simple” request, he declined to appear.

Or did he?

Barbara Walters discussed the event on her radio show with Bill Geddie, her co-executive producer. According to them, Manilow didn’t cancel “The View.” They cancelled him. Geddie explained it this way: “He said, ‘I’ll do Barbara and Whoopi or I’ll do Whoopi and Sherri or some combination, but I won’t sit with Elisabeth,’ and I said ‘Well, then you won’t be on the show. It’s that simple. And that was the end of it. He’s not going to call the shots. You’re not going to tell me how to produce the show.”

So what did Barry Manilow teach me about liberals through all of this?

1. Liberals are very confident in their views. In fact, Manilow is so confident that he doesn’t even feel the need to demonstrate the fact in a public discussion. He’s like the kid on the baseball team who is so much better than the other players that he doesn’t even want the coach to put him in the game. Some people think this is because he can’t really play his position, but that’s only because they don’t realize how good he is.

2. Liberals really believe in free speech. Regrettably, truth is fragile and must be protected from dangerous people like conservatives. Free speech, therefore, means letting a wide variety of liberals speak as freely as possible. This is called diversity. As a good liberal, Barry Manilow opposes all forms of censorship and wants to ensure that everyone who agrees with him has full freedom of speech.

3. Liberals think clearly. Barry said that he really supports the show, which can only mean he believes in robust debate. When he also says that appearing on “The View” with Hasselbeck would compromise his principles, we must infer that he has an even stronger personal conviction that’s it’s wrong to actually be a participant in such debates. One wonders whether Barry thinks that Barbara, Joy, and Whoopi are also compromising their values by being on stage with her. Then again, their value systems probably just aren’t as refined and contradiction-free as his.

4. Liberals are friends of the minority. Of the five people, including Barry, four of them would have been liberal or liberal-leaning. You might think Barry would champion Elisabeth in her underdog status, but you would be forgetting that minorities only count as minorities when they agree with liberals. “Conservative minority” is, by definition, a contradiction. This is confusing when the conservative is a woman, often considered a minority. But one must remember that conservative women are really gender-traitors, so it’s okay.

5. Liberals are gracious to their enemies. As Manilow told one reporter, “I will not be on the same stage as her.” Given Barry’s obvious self-confidence, he probably didn’t want to risk crushing poor Elisabeth’s fragile mind with his overpoweringly rigorous political philosophy. Since he also called her “dangerous,” you might think he’d want to stop her from harming others. He must have meant that she’s only dangerous if his glorious presence on the show entices other, less-confident liberals to watch and risk being infected by her.

6. Liberals are very good at thinking ahead. Although the spat between Rosie and Elisabeth leading to Rosie leaving “The View” happened three months ago, Manilow wisely decided to make his demands the day before his show was to air. Sure, he could have declined to book the appearance in the first place or cancelled earlier, but only people who plan poorly would do that. Then, when reporters wanted to ask Barry about his provocative comments, he became frustrated, even telling one Fox TV reporter, "Alright, stop! I'm sorry this thing had to happen. Let's just talk about the album, OK?" If only all of these developments weren’t so darned impossible to foresee!

7. Liberals are honest to a fault. “I bowed out” is virtually the same thing as “They refused my silly request.” Only a grammar-Nazi would think otherwise. Besides, we all know Barbara Walters’ terrible reputation for deception over her four decades of broadcast journalism. Anyone who says Manilow’s statements were self-serving or misleading just hasn’t plumbed the depths of his honesty yet.

8. Liberals are not their own worst enemies. Whereas Elisabeth, the lone conservative-leaning voice on “The View,” sticks it out day after day with as much grace and eloquence as she can muster, Barry writes songs, attends hair-frosting parties, and throws darts from a distance at people he dislikes. The contrast between Elisabeth’s conservatism and Barry’s liberalism is stark. With role models like these, it’s amazing everyone isn’t a liberal already.

Why Dr. Dobson Is Wrong

2007-10-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

Published at Townhall.com--10.22.07

In recent weeks, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, Dr. James Dobson, has generated a lot of discussion with his public announcement that he will support a third party candidate if the Republicans nominate Rudy Giuliani or anyone else who is pro-choice. Although I agree with Dr. Dobson’s principled stance on family and life issues, in this case he could not be more mistaken. Ironically, it is our common ground that causes me to say this.

Both Dr. Dobson and I believe we have a moral obligation to participate effectively in elections. We must use our votes to advance virtue and to hinder evil, insofar as government is able to do so. Hence, given the grave evil of legal abortion, we must work to elect people who will limit and abolish this practice. Both of us believe that such considerations must be the beginning and heart of our thinking rather than electives to be included as convenience allows. Where we differ is in our understanding of the nature of politics.

Christians despise the word “compromise” because it connotes yielding on our principles. This is appropriate in the realms of theology and ethics, but politics is not theology. It’s politics. We must accept that the choice to participate in democracy is the choice to share decision-making with people whose ideas we can’t stand. Thus, the very essence of politics is compromise, and, unless we believe that democracy itself is contrary to our principles, our goal must be to advance as much of the common good as we realistically can.

Therefore, we are obligated to vote for the person who is closest to the ideal, even if he is quite far from that ideal, as long as we have reason to expect he will be better than the alternative. This is precisely the situation in a hypothetical choice between Senator Clinton and Mayor Giuliani.

On a pro-life 1-10 scale, I desire a 10. Clinton is a 2. She affirms abortion and supports it in many circumstances, regardless of her mouth saying otherwise. Giuliani is a 5. He personally opposes abortion, but thinks it should be each woman’s decision. Whereas Clinton is truly pro-abortion, Giuliani is truly pro-choice.

The key consideration for us is the Supreme Court. When it comes to political impact and justices, Giuliani might turn out to be anywhere from a 3 to an 8. He is close friends with Justice Scalia and has said he would eagerly support nominees in the Roberts-Alito-Thomas-Scalia mold. If so, then how would he differ from a truly pro-life President? Surely there is more to the life issue than just such nominees, but the key is to keep in mind how he might compare with Senator Clinton. And here the contrast is stark.

Think of it like a tug-of-war. Those of us who oppose abortion are pulling on one side when we vote. If we choose to let go of the rope, it’s impossible to imagine that the knot will move any closer toward our ideal. But how can I vote for a pro-choice candidate without becoming complicit in the evil he supports legislatively? Allow me to let another pro-life advocate answer for me.

Despite disagreeing with the Catholic Church on many points of theology (as I also do), I’m sure Dr. Dobson wouldn’t doubt their pro-life credentials. Within the Catholic Church, no one in recent years has been more clear about the ethical ramifications of voting for pro-choice politicians than Archbishop Raymond Burke.

Burke became nationally famous four years ago for stating that Senator John Kerry should not be allowed to receive the Eucharist because he was pro-choice, which he has also recently said about Giuliani. So how could Burke ever support voting for candidate Giuliani? One way: if his opponent is even worse.

In his excellent pastoral letter “On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good,” Burke explained it plainly:

“43. In such cases, would it be better not to vote at all? While I respect very much the sentiments of those who are so discouraged with the failure of our public leaders to promote the common good that they have decided not to vote at all, I must point out that the Catholic who chooses not to vote at all, when there is a viable candidate who will advance the common good, although not perfectly, fails to fulfill his or her moral duty, at least, in the limitation of a grave evil in society.”

Although it is frustrating to be given a choice between bad and worse in candidates on the issue of abortion, Christians are obligated to vote for the person who will most “limit this grave evil in society.” We cannot be enthusiastic about the choice, but we must not abandon what little ability we have to shape the outcome either. We must be clear to others that our support for this candidate is not whole-hearted, lest we be misconstrued as supporting his errors. However, we must not abdicate participation.

Remember the tug-of-war? Letting go in disgust may feel better. It may even feel like virtue. But letting go always moves the knot farther away. And make no mistake, whether it’s not voting or supporting a hopeless third-party candidate, the end result is the same as if we had dropped the rope.

For the sake of the million-plus children per year killed legally in the United States, it’s better to take a chance on Giuliani than to stand no chance whatsoever with someone else. The chance of real victory is always better than the certainty of real disaster.

Dr. Dobson has said that he doesn’t even consider Giuliani a viable candidate because too many conservatives will not be able to hold their noses and vote for him as I can. To this I have a simple response. They will if people with real power and influence come to understand what’s at stake and explain it to them properly. People like Dr. James Dobson.

Significant response pieces to this column:

Joseph Farah at World Net Daily: Why Dr. Dobson Is Right

Dennis Durband at AZConservative.com: Why Mr. Tallman Is Wrong About Dr. Dobson

Gregory Koukl at Towhnall.com: When Compromising Isn't A Compromise

To Wives: Some Advice On Preventing An Affair

2007-10-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

Published in Arizona Family News--October 2007

If I told you there were some simple things you could do to dramatically lower your risk of cancer or heart attack and that, in the process, you’d actually have more fun now, would you want to know what they were? Likewise, given the devastation that infidelity causes in a marriage, presumably you would be glad to know how to prevent it. And if that prescription is enjoyable, so much the better. So, then, what can you do to prevent an affair?

As a married man for ten years, I am writing this from the perspective of a man to women, and I’ll warn you in advance that you may not like some of what I’m going to tell you. But if you take me seriously, I’ll explain to you things that every man knows to be true. Just keep in mind that all I’m really doing is explaining how men think and behave. If you doubt me, go ahead and have your husband read this so he can tell you whether I’m correct or not. He’ll probably look at you in disbelief that you don’t already know this stuff about him. And remember, my goal here is to equip you with useful information and help you know what to do, not to criticize you. If it sounds like criticism, I’m sorry. My goal is healthy marriages, and helping you know how to have one. Some men may also misunderstand what I’m writing as some sort of excuse for them or justification for them. It’s not. Nothing a wife does or fails to do justifies adultery. Ever. There are simply things she can do to make it easier for him to obey his vows and this absolute rule.

First, understand that men are naturally predisposed to be promiscuous. Whereas, for a woman, infidelity entails a total rejection of the man she married; men do not think about it this way. Men like to have several different cars. Men like to have several different hobbies. Men like variety. And men like to hunt. And the problem is that the trifecta of wanting variety, liking to hunt, and having a much higher level of simply biological sexual desire means that men are not naturally monogamous. Marriage is an unnatural condition for most (not all) men. That’s the bad news. But marriage is such a blessing to men that loving them means wanting them to enjoy it rather than to lose its benefits because they give in to their unsavory nature.

So it’s important to realize just how much of a struggle it is for most men, even those who are firmly Christian and believe in marriage and love their wives, to keep themselves from thinking about and doing things you don’t want them to do. This basic problem is compounded by living in a culture where men are encouraged to express this nature in ways hostile to marital fidelity rather than in ways which affirm it. Add to this the idea that most men have spent their post-puberty lives hunting women…with their eyes,…with their imaginations,…and with the stories they tell each other. This means that learning to stop hunting other women after marriage is far more difficult to accomplish than it is to merely say the words, “I do promise to forsake all others.”

Why do I point out all this very unpleasant stuff? Because the Bible teaches us to be wise about the difficulties we face, and knowing the reality is the first step in becoming equipped to solve it. Being naïve about men is the single best way to find yourself on the receiving end of a conversation about how “this won’t ever happen…again.” So, understand what you’re up against and that it’s not a peculiar defect of your husband. Almost all men are like this, so wishing you had found a man not like this is a vain hope. Wanting men to be otherwise is really the same as wanting them to be…well…women.

This, by the way, is why most modern advice on relationships is useless because it starts from the premise that the man is defectively made and must be fixed rather than from the premise that he is properly made and must be understood. God built men as they are, and God designed wives to provide what they need. Starting from this recognition will get you much farther than the modern approach which tries to fix men by turning them into women. Of course, it goes without saying that men were also built to meet women’s needs, and have an equal, if not greater, obligation to understand and satisfy these.

So, what can you do? Well, first, understand that when your husband married you, he believed he would be satisfied with you for the rest of his life, and he hoped you would be satisfied with him. Second, understand that, over time, most all marriages move from a stage of supreme optimism and joy to something less blissful. In this process, men easily forget how little fun it was to be single, especially when television, magazines, and movies try to convince them that it was wonderful. Third, realize that the main thing which allows a man to cheat on a wife he loves (and yes, most cheaters still love their wives) even though he believes in marriage and even fears God (remember David?) is that he does not feel his wife is meeting his needs. It’s that simple. And, by the way, it’s usually the same for women. The difference is that when women don’t get their needs met, they usually withhold meeting their husband’s needs in an effort to get his attention. Unfortunately, this doesn’t so much provoke him to be better as encourage him to seek benefits elsewhere.

The key to preventing a man from cheating is to make him feel like his most important relational needs are being met by you. So, what are they? Most men need just two things from their wives, and they really like a third thing. What they need is sexual gratification and admiration, and what they really like is food. Hence, I have the simplest recipe for any wife willing to do a little relational cooking. Feed your man food he likes. Give him your body as often as he wants. And praise him like he’s a rock star and you’re his groupie. You know…like you used to do before.

A man with a happy stomach is very easy to get along with. Surely you’ve noticed. A man who has been pleased sexually is equally easy to get along with. Again, surely you’ve noticed. And then there’s that third component: admiration. This is the part most women simply don’t understand about men: their need for admiration is even stronger than their need for sex. Think about it for a moment. A man can buy a pornographic magazine for five dollars, and it will “provide” for him numerous times. But the same man will spend two hundred dollars at a strip club in one single night. Why? Because the stripper will listen to him, admire him, and treat him like he’s special. Strippers do not sell sex, they sell the fantasy of being admired by a beautiful woman; admired by her body as well as by her words. And he will gladly pay lots extra for that one vital difference.

Women whose husbands cheat with some cute young thing at the office deceive themselves by saying it is primarily because she is attractive. It’s not. It’s because she gives him admiration and encouragement. She validates him and praises him, and if he has not felt that same sense of honor from his wife, it is truly like showing a man in the desert the way to a river…the wrong river. By the way, this is why nagging a husband to do better is such a counterproductive choice. Yes, you believe in him and what he is capable of becoming, but that’s not what he hears. He hears you saying that he is not adequate and that he is not worthwhile, things which would be devastating if he said them to you, right? In short, you’ve taken away his river. You would never consider depriving your children of water to get them to listen to you, and here’s the truth: Men need admiration like children need water. They die very quickly without it.

So how do you keep a man from thinking about other women? Lower the incentive to cheat, and raise the cost of cheating. Fortunately, you can do both at one time by meeting his most important needs in such a generous way that you give him something monumentally worthwhile to lose by acting on any such thoughts. Make yourself the source of such bodily pleasure (food and sex) and such ego satisfaction that he never wants more from anyone else. And then, even if he does occasionally think about reverting to his promiscuous hunter nature, he can easily remind himself of just what he would be risking in the process. In short, make the gamble unthinkable. Make him feel so adored by you that he literally can’t stand the idea of letting you down or losing what you provide him. Be like the job he loves and cherishes rather than the one he wishes he could quit.

And, by the way, I think you’ll also find that he will become so eager to please you in return that these gifts you give him will avoid not just the cancer of unfaithfulness, but will also create the sort of marriage you both hoped you would have when you chose each other. Will this suggestion always work and save all marriages? No. But is it the single best thing you can do to save your own? Yes.

So there it is. The hard truth that most men won’t tell you and that most women refuse to accept. Men are simple. They need admiration, sex, and food. And the way sex and food are provided serves as a tangible form of admiration in addition to bringing him pleasure. Remember, asking him to forsake all others is perfectly decent, so long as in exchange you become the one who gives him the things he needs to receive. It was that exchange he both had in mind and strongly desired when he said, “I do.”

At this point, allow me to repeat some things I said much earlier, just to be sure there are no misunderstandings. First, nothing a wife does or fails to do can ever justify a man cheating on her. There are no exceptions to this rule. There are times when we talk about a justified homicide or a justified theft. There is simply no such thing as justified adultery. His vow before God and men to his wife is permanent and inflexible. Next, a wife can do all the things I mentioned and still have a husband cheat or suffer a bad marriage. There are many, perhaps more, duties husbands have as well. And nothing a wife can do will ever eliminate free will, immaturity, selfishness, or just plain stupidity completely. However, the regrets and anguish that always accompany being cheated on will be greatly diminished if you can honestly look back and know that you did everything you could have done to satisfy him. Third, I know that children make everything more difficult, and being stressed or tired rarely puts a wife in the mood to give these things, especially if she feels like her own needs aren’t being met. What you have to decide is whether you are willing to do more than you must in order to have a better marriage or whether you’re willing to accept the risks that come from doing only what you feel like doing. One of the great lies is that marriage is supposed to be easy and not take a lot of work. Parenting requires us to often do what we don’t feel like doing, and so does marriage.

Finally, I truly understand that much of what I’ve written runs the risk of shocking you or making you feel angry or condemned. That is not my goal. I want to see marriages thrive both because marriage matters but also because I want to see you enjoy having the marriage you hoped you would have when you made your vows. But precisely because I was concerned about this, I had several female and male friends read this first. Many of their suggestions were incorporated in this final draft, but the one most common thing they said was, “This is really helpful, and, even though I found myself wanting to disagree, I really couldn’t.” But seriously, don’t take it from me. Let your husband read this, and ask him whether he agrees. Because ultimately none of my advice nor the general truth of these ideas matters at all. What matters is your particular marriage. And I only hope that these ideas will be an eye-opener and a blessing to you in making your marriage outstanding. In the end, if all this does is get the two of you talking, then I’m satisfied with that outcome. That’ll help prevent disaster, too.

A Chat With My Friend About What Makes Sense

2007-09-01T13:52:00.000-07:00

Published in Arizona Family News--September, 2007

Brenda: Andrew, I’m so furious. I just found out my boyfriend cheated on me.
Andrew: So, you’re angry that your boyfriend had sex with another girl?
Brenda: Yes.
Andrew: Why?
Brenda: What do you mean, “Why?” What a stupid question!
Andrew: Why are you angry at him?
Brenda: Because it’s wrong to cheat, of course.
Andrew: I agree. But why is it wrong to cheat?
Brenda: Because he made a promise?
Andrew: Really? I thought you weren’t married.
Brenda: Well. I mean he promised me he loved me.
Andrew: Were there any witnesses?
Brenda: Witnesses? No. He just told me. He told me lots of times.
Andrew: But no one else was there? So it’s just your word against his?
Brenda: I guess. What’s that got to do with it? A promise is a promise.
Andrew: Do you think he might have made similar promises to this other girl?
Brenda: Probably. He’s a jerk.
Andrew: Do you think maybe he could only get away with that because he only made them privately?
Brenda: I guess.
Andrew: Did he make a list of specific things he was promising?
Brenda: No. He just told me he’d love me forever.
Andrew: But he didn’t spell out exactly what it meant to him to love you forever?
Brenda: It was implied.
Andrew: So he didn’t really promise, right?
Brenda: I guess not.
Andrew: And no one can really confirm it, right?
Brenda: I don’t like you very much.
Andrew: I’m sorry. But let’s say that he had promised, just for argument’s sake. Why would it be wrong to cheat if he had?
Brenda: Because it’s wrong to break promises. Are you stupid or something?
Andrew: Bear with me, I’m a little slow sometimes. Why is it wrong to break promises?
Brenda: Because it’s a lie.
Andrew: And lying is wrong?
Brenda: Are you from Mars? Of course lying is wrong!
Andrew: Why?
Brenda: Because you’re not supposed to.
Andrew: Who says?
Brenda: Well, God, right? He says you shouldn’t do stuff to other people that you wouldn’t want them to do to you. And that’s why you shouldn’t lie and cheat. Because no one wants it done to them. And God says not to do that.
Andrew: So we should do what God says?
Brenda: Yeah. That’s what it means to be a Christian, right?
Andrew: You’re a Christian?
Brenda: Of course. I go to church every week.
Andrew: Okay. So you think we should do what God says?
Brenda: Yes.
Andrew: But doesn’t God say to wait until you’re married to have sex?
Brenda: That’s different.
Andrew: Why?
Brenda: Because nobody follows that rule.
Andrew: So, if everyone started lying and cheating, that would be okay because we should only follow God’s rules when everyone else does, too?
Brenda: Well, no. Those things are wrong because they hurt people. Having sex doesn’t hurt anyone.
Andrew: So it’s not really about obeying God. It’s about obeying God when you think it makes sense?
Brenda: Yeah. That makes sense. He gave us free will, right?
Andrew: So when your boyfriend cheated on you, was he using that same free will to do what made sense to him?
Brenda: That’s different.
Andrew: How.
Brenda: He hurt me.
Andrew: So?
Brenda: You shouldn’t hurt people.
Andrew: Why?
Brenda: Because God says not to hurt people. Aren’t you listening?
Andrew: Well, one of us isn’t.
Brenda: What does that mean?
Andrew: So, your boyfriend hurt you because he did something you really wanted him to not do, right?
Brenda: Right.
Andrew: And you’re mad at him?
Brenda: Very.
Andrew: Do you think God should be mad at you?
Brenda: What? Why?
Andrew: Well, you did something He really didn’t want you to do, right?
Brenda: I guess so.
Andrew: And doing things other people don’t want us to do hurts their feelings, right?
Brenda: Yeah.
Andrew: So I guess your feelings are more important than God’s.
Brenda: That’s an awful thing to say.
Andrew: But isn’t that what you told God when you had sex with your boyfriend?
Brenda: I guess I wasn’t thinking about it that way.
Andrew: What way were you thinking about it?
Brenda: Well, I really wanted to do it.
Andrew: So it’s okay to hurt God’s feelings as long as we really want to do something?
Brenda: Well, no.
Andrew: Do you think he makes rules for our benefit.
Brenda: Yes. He loves us, right?
Andrew: So which of His rules do you think we should follow.
Brenda: I guess all of them.
Andrew: So does it make much sense to be mad at your boyfriend for breaking your rule when you don’t want God to be mad at you for breaking His rules?
Brenda: I guess not.
Andrew: So what did you learn?
Brenda: That I haven’t been acting very smart.
Andrew: But you know what?
Brenda: What?
Andrew: God still loves you, and He’ll forgive you if you ask Him to.
Brenda: I know.
Andrew: And do you still love Him?
Brenda: Of course.
Andrew: Then maybe you can start obeying Him better.
Brenda: That makes sense.
Andrew: And I’m truly very sorry it took you being hurt so bad to see this.
Brenda: Me, too.

Should Children Be Encouraged To Think For Themselves?

2007-08-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

Published in Arizona Family News--August, 2007

This is one of those questions that seems to invite an immediate and emphatic, almost dismissive answer. “Of course children should be encouraged to think for themselves. We’re not raising robots, after all. What’s wrong with you? How dare you ask such a silly question!” Well, my personal defects aside, the question is far more difficult than it first appears.

For one thing, we should all learn to be particularly cautious when our response to a question is too strong. The tone of an answer like the one just given is often an indicator of two rather unpleasant truths. First, the person is far less sure of his answer than he would like to be, but he covers this uncertainty over with emotional emphasis. He is scared that he might be wrong, and he doesn’t want to entertain the possibility of investigating a weak point in his thinking, so he raises his voice in psychological self-defense. Second, and closely related, we often become emotional in resisting ideas which expose our own flaws. We seek to deflect even our own eyes from looking at our actual practices by more loudly using our voice to proclaim our “true” values.

See, no parent in America today would likely affirm the idea that children should not be encouraged to think for themselves. But a closer look at the way they treat their children would reveal the clear fact that they do not practice what they yell. Children are told to do things “because I said so,” “because I’m the parent,” or even, in a Christian home, “because God says.” Personally, I think all these phrases serve the quite useful purpose of teaching a child about authority, as long as they’re not used exclusively in situations where the parents really have no idea why the thing they’re commanding is correct. Yet, even though we all know that children should sometimes be told to think as we do, it’s still not something we’re supposed to say out loud. So we practice wisdom privately and proclaim submission to a foolish social standard. This disconnect explains the indignant voice. “How dare you make me contemplate my inconsistency!”

But this is not the entire story. Many parents, and particularly Christian ones, are scared by the idea of individual thinking. “God provides the answers in His Book, and who are you to even consider questioning them?” Well, true. But how does memorizing a set of answers cultivate the capacity to form conclusions in new situations which do not come prepackaged with ready solutions? It does not. And if we are supposed to use the brain God gave us for something, that something is probably the art of thinking effectively for ourselves.

For my own part, I think God wired children to remind us of this important developmental feature. They seem almost wind-up doll like in their use of the question, “Why?” And it’s plausible that one purpose of this tendency is to encourage parents to impart not merely a set of catechetical answers but also the ability to comprehend those answers and form new ones as well.

But the real challenge for parents who understand both the need for honoring parental and Godly authority in good answers as well as independent thinking is obvious. What do we do when children come to self-formulated ideas which are at odds with what the Bible or we teach them? You might wish for a simple solution for this conundrum. I do not possess it. Nor, I think, does anyone else. I’ve tried their wares, and the proof is not in the intellectual pudding.

It is not possible to fully affirm both a process and a result at the same time. Fair competition means you may not win. Free markets will often produce inequality. Electoral politics will often yield officials we do not prefer. And teaching a child to think for himself may well produce an adult who does not think like you.

So here’s my encouragement. It’s tempting to just propagandize children. Tempting because we fear the real danger they may, if taught to think for themselves and ask questions, come to conclusions we abhor. But God gave them brains, and we must honor the gift as good stewards. So the key here, as with so many things, is to trust the Maker that honoring His gift will work out alright in the end.

God gave children their brains. And the real question at the end of each parenting day is whether you are more interested in shaping that child in the Image of the God who made him…or in your own image? Then, we must acknowledge that picking the right answer to that question will require from us more than just loud lip service to the idea that children should be encouraged to think for themselves…most of the time…especially when the scariest thing to imagine is the possibility that they might actually learn the lesson.

Must Trust Be Earned?

2007-06-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

Published in Arizona Family News--June, 2007

Just like honest communication, common values, and enjoying each other’s company, trust is a necessary component of a marriage destined for survival. Most observers readily agree upon this much. However, as is often the case when everyone seems to agree at first, this consensus is based upon a failure to be clear about the meaning of a key word. Education and love and justice are universally praised values, but the devil (and the dispute) is in the details. Of course trust is vital, but do people really know what trust is?

To understand trust, allow me to contrast it with it’s opposite: prudence. Prudence is what we call it when people take account of the past and then use it to guide their behavior in the future. It’s prudent to put the dog on a leash after he nips at someone. It’s prudent to loan your car to your teenager again when he returns it safely the first time. Prudence, whether it entails having confidence in someone or the opposite, is guided by reason. But this is not trust.

Trust is essentially imprudent (and, hence, unreasonable) because trust extends confidence beyond what is deserved. Trust is giving the teenager the car after he has mishandled it previously, or even giving it to him the first time. Trust, you see, is what you give to someone who has not earned it; what you choose to do when you are unsure whether the person will handle it responsibly. In short, if you have total certainty (as much as that is possible for humans regarding other humans) that the other person is “trustworthy,” then trust is not in play at all.

To trust is to give the benefit of the doubt to someone, to believe in his abilities even when you have reason to think this is a foolish thing to do. In fact, the more reason tells you to beware, the more trust exists when you ignore or merely discount the counsel of reason. But it is precisely this sort of trust which is necessary in a marriage.

This sort of trust doesn’t need to know where someone has been, instead choosing to believe a good answer exists without needing to actually know it. This sort of trust is shown when a father tells a son that his mother is correct even though he initially disagrees with what she has said. To be blunt, trust is currency put at risk. If there is no risk, there is no trust. And those who think that trust needs to be earned simply do not comprehend this point.

As I have recently grown fond of saying, the key to a good marriage is both people consistently treating each other better than they deserve. And trust is one very important example of this principle put in action. Merely having confidence in someone to the degree that he or she has earned it is not trust. It’s prudence. Having more confidence than is warranted is the sort of thing that will nourish a marriage. And this should make it all the more clear that trust is neither a feeling nor a reward, but a gift made with the will…much like it’s close cousin, love.

That being said, I’d be remiss in this brief essay if I didn’t say at least a bit about betrayal. As should be clear already, the very act of trusting is an invitation to betrayal. But how can trust be given in the wake of a betrayal? Simple. Remember the formula. Any confidence beyond what is merited is an expression of trust. So, the greater the betrayal, the smaller the act of confidence required to represent trust. After a major betrayal, even a small amount is more than has been merited. A spouse who has been unfaithful has no complaint when the offended party requires email passwords, time reckonings, money accounts, a job change, and anything else, reasonable or not.

Trust in such a case could take the form of requiring none of this, but it could also take the form of simply not requiring all of it. Although not demonstrating maximum trust, even small gestures of trust, such as allowing the cell phone to be returned to a cheater, still embody the unmerited nature of grace involved in all expressions of trust.

But even in these cases, one must never be misled into thinking that the level of trust to be given should be based on what is safe or reasonable, for that is not trust at all. In short, the recipient of trust who is thinking clearly will recognize the gift for what it is, a gift that honors and humbles the recipient precisely because it is not merited. And it is in this sense that I say that trust is not only necessary in a strong marriage because it edifies the unworthy, but also because it is Divine in the way it seeks to bring the unworthy to restoration.

Thus, we should not regret trust given and violated. Rather, we should weep for those poor, doomed relationships where people feel so little indebted to God that they are incapable of giving the other person more than is deserved after such a violation.