Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Links to think about

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When I heard the news about the murder of George Tiller, one of the first writers to whom I looked for reaction was the Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia, but at that point, she hadn’t gotten around to writing about it. On Thursday, though, she posted a superb piece as the daily article on the First Things website entitled “Tiller, Long, Bonhoeffer, and Assassination”; it’s an excellent piece of theological and moral reflection, and well worth your time to read. I particularly appreciate this piece of wisdom:

Why should we care about some dumb hick named William Long, who was only a soldier and not a hero abortionist? And why should his assassin’s name or religion matter? Because William Long was as entitled to the life he had, as was George Tiller. And Long’s death, at the hands of a man who used his religion to justify his actions, is the ultimate reminder of why Christians cannot emulate Bonhoeffer, for all his brilliance, or Tiller’s murderer: When we start thinking that we know the heart and mind of God so well that we may decide who lives and who dies, we slip into a mode of Antichrist.

The Pauline paradox “when I am weak, then I am strong” carries a flipside: “When I am strong, then I am weak.” Relativism is dangerous because we can too easily slip into the belief that we so well comprehend God’s will that we can confuse our own will for God’s, and thereby do terrible damage to one another. God’s rain falls on “the just and the unjust,” and it is one of the challenges of the life of faith that we must leave to God the rendering of his Justice.

The duty of a Christian—and it is a difficult duty—is to remain in the present moment that we might be alert to the promptings of the Holy Spirit (“continuing instant” in gratitude and prayer) while also taking the long view of things. This requires trust that however things look of a moment or a day, God is present and working: Nothing is static, everything is in a constant state of flux, all of it churning forward so that “in the fullness of time” Christ may restore all things to himself. What is left? Well, prayer, which is the most subversive of powers; it is a self-renewing weapon that cannot be wrested from us, and it cannot be over-employed.

Also of importance on this subject is Michelle Malkin’s reflection on the differing reactions to those two attacks from the media and the White House, “Climate of hate, world of double standards”:

Why the silence? Politically and religiously-motivated violence, it seems, is only worth lamenting when it demonizes opponents. Which also helps explain why the phrase “lone shooter” is ubiquitous in media coverage of jihadi shooters gone wild—think convicted Jeep Jihadi Mohammed Taheri-Azar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill or Israel-bashing gunman Naveed Haq who targeted a Seattle Jewish charity or Los Angeles International Airport shooter Hesham Hedayet who opened fire at the El Al Israeli airline ticket counter—but not in cases involving rare acts of anti-abortion violence. . . .

The truth is that the “climate of hate” doesn’t have just one hemisphere. But you won’t hear the Council on American Islamic Relations acknowledging the national security risks of jihadi infiltrators who despise our military and have plotted against our troops from within the ranks—including convicted fragging killerHasan Akbar and terror plotters Ali Mohamed, Jeffrey Battle, and Semi Osman. . . .

Is it too much to ask the media cartographers in charge of mapping the “climate of hate” to do their jobs with both eyes open?

On Thursday, I posted a link to Robert Spencer’s demolition of the president’s Cairo speech, but he’s not the only one doing serious analysis and coming away worried; Toby Harnden of the Telegraph is another. Harnden highlights “Barack Obama’s 10 mistakes in Cairo” and concludes,

There’s been lots of breathless commentary today about the “historic” moment and the power of Obama’s oratory. In time, however, the speech will probably be remembered, at best, for its high-flown aspirations rather than the achievements it laid the foundations for. Or, at worst, for the naive and flawed approach it foretold.

Also well worth reading is the online symposium on the Cairo speech that National Reviewpulled together; the contributors raise a number of serious issues, but also offer some strong positive comments. I was particularly struck by the contribution from Mansoor Ijaz, identified as “a New York financier of Pakistani ancestry [who] jointly authored a ceasefire plan between Muslim militants and Indian security forces in Kashmir in 2000”; Ijaz begins by praising aspects of the speech as “brilliant” and “just right,” but then says this:

Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself—to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?

Islam’s worst enemies are within it. . . .

In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected a system of life that Islam’s holy scriptures urged Muslims to learn and practice, but over the centuries increasingly did not. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize the West and to try and bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate, or house.

And finally, for a different perspective on the state of the nation and on the international situation than we’re getting from DC, check out what Sarah Palin had to say on Saturday in her speech in Auburn, NY.

I especially appreciate this line, given our current president’s apparent belief that the best way to conduct foreign policy is to apologize for America to all the people who’ve hurt us for being the kind of people they want to hurt:

We never need to fear that though we’re not a perfect nation, that we must apologize for being proud of ourselves.

Thanks, Governor. We needed that.

The Glory of Truth

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(Exodus 20:1-21; 1 Timothy 1:1-11)

While we were living in British Columbia, the governing party—a socialist labor party called the New Democratic Party, or NDP—held a leadership race; the provincial premier, a deeply unpopular little mountebank called Glen Clark, got himself indicted for corruption, so they had to replace him. It was a circus, as BC politics tended to be, and produced some truly funny moments. One of my favorites came from the Agricultural Minister, Corky Evans, who had something of a country-bumpkin image which he liked to play up for comic effect. In announcing his candidacy for party leadership, he told the story of the time he had decided to build a house for his family; being impatient, he didn’t want to take the time to put in a foundation, so he just built the house right on the ground. It seems to have come as a surprise to him when the house began to sink. As he told the crowd, this left him with two choices; he could either tear down the house, or lift it up and put a foundation under it. Either way, it was going to be a very messy business.

Now, Corky Evans used this to describe the state of his party, but it applies just as well to the church. There is and always has been the tendency to try to build the church with, and on, and out of, human efforts. Some churches are built with music; some are built on one person’s charisma; some are built out of programs. Some are built by spending lots of money on advertising and entertaining Sunday services. Then there’s our denomination, the PC(USA), which has concluded that its polity—its structure of governance—is the only thing keeping it together, and is now trying to keep dissident congregations from leaving by threatening to take their property if they do.

The problem is, to build a church in such a way is to do what Corky Evans did: it’s to build a house without a foundation. If you try to build a church on the most popular music, or the most entertaining preaching, or the most exciting service, or the best structure, or what have you, you may appear to succeed for a time; you may produce a large organization, with lots of members and money and a high profile in the community. What you will not have, in any meaningful sense, is a church, and so it will not endure. Sooner or later, it will begin to sink, leaving you with only two options: either tear the whole thing down, or try to lift it up and put a foundation under it, because without the proper foundation the building cannot stand. And as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, there is only one foundation on which the church can be built, and that is Jesus Christ; which means it must be built with the truth of who Christ is and what he taught if it is to last.

That’s the value of 1 Timothy for us, and why we’ll be spending the next few weeks in this book. It’s often treated as a handbook for church operations, because of its practical instructions on such matters as the qualifications for elders and deacons; but that misses what’s really going on here. You see, Paul didn’t write this letter to give Timothy a refresher course in church government, he wrote it because heresy had broken out in Ephesus. Since Paul’s departure for Jerusalem, false teachers had popped up who were pushing some really strange things, and Timothy needed some help in dealing with them. One reason Paul wrote this letter—which he intended for the whole church, not just for Timothy—was to throw his own considerable authority behind Timothy, to buttress his position; but as well, he wrote to remind both Timothy and his church of some very important truths which were in danger of being lost in Ephesus.

This includes the concern for truth itself—the understanding, as I said a moment ago, that the church must be built with the truth of who Christ is and what he taught, and thus that false teaching is a very serious problem. There are a lot of folks who don’t see that, because they assume that what you believe matters less than why and how you believe it; but Paul understands that it doesn’t work that way. The teaching of the truth produces “love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith”; to wander off from the truth, even out of the best of motives, interferes with that and detracts from it. If we leave the truth of God for our own inventions, our heart isn’t pure even if we think it is, and our conscience isn’t good even if we’ve filed it down enough to keep it quiet, and so even if our faith is completely sincere, our love cannot be true.

This means that we must be rooted in Scripture, and must accept its authority; we must let it define us, rather than claiming the right to define it, because it is, in Luther’s phrase, “the cradle that contains the Christ.” It’s through this book that God has spoken to tell us who he is—and to show us who he is, in Jesus. If we deviate from its teachings, as Timothy’s opponents in Ephesus were doing, then we distort our understanding of Jesus and wind up worshiping a false Christ—which distorts everything else about our faith and life. When the leaders of the church turn away from Scripture, this effect is multiplied, distorting the whole church; this is why Paul is so concerned in this letter for how the church is to be led, because false teachers can do damage far beyond themselves.

Only the true gospel builds us up in the love of God; only the true teaching of Scripture, inspired by the Spirit, shows us Jesus in all his true glory. Only submitting ourselves to be transformed by the truth of God, rather than seeking to conform his truth to our own ideas, will fit us to be built up together as the people of God. God calls us to be the body on earth that contains his body, just as the Scriptures are the word that holds his Word; to answer his call, we must be faithful not to teach any different doctrine, not to pursue our own idea of truth, but to submit to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he has entrusted once for all to the saints.

What does this look like? Well, consider Paul’s greeting. He describes himself as “an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.” In this, we see present, past and future all together. Paul’s present, his daily life, is defined by his relationship with Jesus, and it’s that and that alone that gives him his identity. He is in Christ, and Christ has called him to a particular task, and it’s that call that defines his life and who he is. Everything else is secondary. In the past, he looks back to God’s saving work, accomplished through Jesus, which is for him—not just God the Savior, but God our Savior, including him—which is the root from which his whole life, every part of it, grows. And his future is sure in “Christ Jesus our hope,” as he looks forward to the day when Jesus will return in power and glory to judge and redeem the world. He sees his life, at every point, as existing on a line which stretches right from the beginning of God’s saving work in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ through history to its conclusion at the glorious return of Christ; that and that alone is the context for everything he experiences and everything he does. May it be so for us as well.

In remembrance

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Today is the 65th anniversary of D-Day; yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the death of Ronald Reagan. Joseph Russo put up a wonderful post on President Reagan, which I encourage you to read; as for remembering D-Day, I don’t think anyone’s ever done a better job of that than the Gipper himself.

Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”Strengthened by their courage and heartened by their valor and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

May it ever be so.

Why GM is doomed

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Not to put too fine a point on it, GM is doomed (probably, anyway) because the Obama-Pelosi administration has put them in a position in which the kind of bold leadership that could produce a turnaround is impossible. Though Barack Obama might declare that he is “not running GM,”

The President is so busy not running GM that he had time the night before to call and reassure Detroit Mayor Dave Bing about the new GM’s future location. GM is being courted to move its headquarters to nearby Warren, Michigan. And Mr. Bing told the Detroit News that he had received a call Sunday evening from the President “informing me of his support for GM to stay in the city of Detroit with its headquarters at the Renaissance [Center].” . . .

We don’t know whether GM should stay in Detroit. But we do know that the location of a company’s headquarters is one of those decisions typically not made by people who are busy not running the company.

This is exacerbated by the fact that, whether President Obama is interested in running GM or not, there are 535 members of Congress who are most certainly interested in micro-managing GM—since, after all, GM plants, dealerships, distribution centers, etc. now qualify as some of the pork they can bring home to, or at least keep in, their districts.

The latest self-appointed car czar is Massachusetts’s own Barney Frank, who intervened this week to save a GM distribution center in Norton, Mass. The warehouse, which employs some 90 people, was slated for closure by the end of the year under GM’s restructuring plan. But Mr. Frank put in a call to GM CEO Fritz Henderson and secured a new lease on life for the facility.

Mr. Frank’s spokesman, Harry Gural, says the Congressman discussed, among other things, “the facility’s value to GM.” We’d have thought that would be something that GM might have considered when it decided to close the Norton center, but then a call from one of the most powerful Members of Congress can certainly cause a ward of the state to reconsider what qualifies as “value.” A CEO who refuses the offer can soon find himself testifying under oath before Congress, or answering questions from the Government Accountability Office about his expense account. To that point, Mr. Henderson spent Wednesday with Chrysler President Jim Press being castigated by the Senate Commerce Committee for their plans to close 3,400 car dealerships. Every Senator wants dealerships closed in someone else’s state.

As Mr. Gural put it, Mr. Frank was “just doing what any other Congressman would do” in looking out for the interests of his constituents. And that’s the problem with industrial policy and government control of American business. In Washington, every Member of Congress now thinks he’s a czar who can call ol’ Fritz and tell him how to make cars.

Given Congress’ track record, and given the way leadership by committee normally works out, I don’t think it’s too much to predict that GM isn’t going to survive this.

Update: People are noticing, Mr. President . . . (HT: The Anchoress)

Pocket lint reaches a new low

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In recent weeks I’ve suggested that the shorthand MSM, for “mainstream media,” is inaccurate, and that our old-line media organizations would better be called the Obama-stream media, or OSM, and accused them of being so deep in Barack Obama’s pocket as to be little more than pocket lint.  Even so, I was surprised by a couple things I saw this past week.  One was Newsweek editor Evan Thomas telling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that “in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above—above the world, he’s sort of God.”

I can only say that in a way, that’s not even as ridiculous as Thomas’ follow-up statement that “He’s going to bring all different sides together”; I suppose that might make sense if you don’t consider conservative Republicans to qualify as a “side,” but otherwise, you have to wonder if Thomas has simply missed the hyperpartisan way in which the Obama administration has so far conducted business, and the severe disaffection of a significant chunk of the electorate.  (As of now, a full third of the electorate strongly disapproves of the president’s performance, just about as many as strongly approve, according to Rasmussen.)  In any case, if this is what the much-vaunted new Newsweek is going to amount to, then I have to think National Review got it right:

That’s not the only way in which our self-described “independent media” made complete lapdogs of themselves this week, either.  I thought far too much was made of NBC’s Brian Williams’ respectful inclination of the head to the president on taking his leave of the White House (especially since President Obama respectfully returned it), and far too little of the way in which Williams acted like a star-struck teenybopper mooning around ecstatically after the President over the course of the interview.  Amazingly, though, Jon Stewart caught it, and pretty much handed Williams his head on a platter.

Many liberals who believed in the importance of dissent and challenging the government when they were the ones doing the dissenting and challenging suddenly have a very different view:

These people are seeing that attacking “The Man” is not so funny when it is their man in the crosshairs. Suddenly such folks have a new-found respect for the office and a more circumspect behavior toward the president is now du jour.

The upshot of all this is a climate that is truly toxic to free speech, demanding conformity to the Cult of O—to the point that even some liberals are beginning to feel stifled:

If you want to stop a conversation in its tracks, just question something President Barack Obama has said or done. It’s not open to debate—and I don’t think that’s healthy, for the country or the president.

It’s especially unsettling for a free speech girl like me. The First Amendment is important—but lately, it feels like my right of self-expression is being squashed.

One example: Obama’s comment to Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show,” comparing his bowling abilities to someone in the Special Olympics.

Can you imagine the uproar had Bush said that? He’d be banished from bowling alleys for eternity. His bowling average and IQ would have immediately been compared in Twitter messages demanding his resignation.

But instead, media and water cooler conversations the next day were about bowling scores and how tough the game can be. Anyone bringing up the insensitivity of the president’s remark heard, “Come on, give the guy a chance. So he said one thing wrong. Anyone could have said something like that.” End of discussion. . . .

Don’t get me wrong, there is a whole lot to like about Obama. I want his smart ideas and policies to work. I love his youth, his inclusiveness and the way he cuts through the minutiae of public policy. But when auto execs get the boot, foreign meanies mock us and Special Olympians are insulted, I’m sorry, he rates some disapproving chatter.

I appreciate that Laura Varon Brown has a real commitment to real freedom of speech:

We need to hear both sides. We must hear both sides. But we ought to be listening to each other, not waiting to pounce and then closing down the conversation.

The point is, whatever side you come from, you have the right to talk—which comes with an obligation to listen.

What I think she’s discovering is that many of her fellow leftists don’t really share that commitment; rather, they’re no different than many of the conservatives they despise, commited to free speech for themselves and those who agree with them, and willing to embrace whatever argument they can to shut down those who disagree.  Unfortunately, conservative impulses in that direction are reined in by the fact that conservatives don’t control the big media corporate conglomerates in this country, and thus can’t shut anybody up (except callers into radio talk shows, anyway).  The same is not true of liberals, who really can go a long way to shutting up, shutting out and shouting down competing points of view.  (Websites like Conservatives4Palin are an experiment in how far the Internet can be used to counter this.)

Which makes the floor-scraping boot-licking tail-wagging groveling of media figures like Evan Thomas and Brian Williams not merely shameful, but actively harmful to this country.  I think Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is over the top to declare that “The greatest threat to America is not necessarily a recession or even another terrorist attack. The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias,” but I do think he’s correct to identify it as a threat—and I don’t say that because it’s liberal and I disagree with it.  Rather, I say that because at the moment, we have a liberal hegemony in the elective branches of our federal government, and we have a national media structure which, because of its bias, is disinclined to challenge anything those branches do—which means that one of the major checks on our government isn’t currently functioning.

Any time government can get away with more, it will; any time government can get away without having its mistakes hammered in the media, it’s going to make more and worse ones; and the whole thing will only breed arrogance on the part of our government, and whenever that happens, a crash is coming. And arrogance is exactly what we’re seeing from this government; it is the whole style and approach of the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, which is why the British media have gone into revolt.  The US media are unwilling or afraid or too star-struck to do so, however, which means they’re firmly under Gibbs’ thumb—and for most of them (all but Jake Tapper, really), apparently perfectly content to stay there.  As Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff put it,

They have been handed a most remarkable historical moment—in which they get to remake the media in their own image. They have the power and they are the subject. These people in this White House are in greater control of the media than any administration before them.

And we, the people are the poorer for it.

The campaign continues, and so do the hatchets

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The latest attempt on Sarah Palin’s political career is a campaign to get people to believe that she’s not a fiscal conservative.  I have a post shredding that argument up on Conservatives4Palin.  If you want to oppose Gov. Palin, fine, go ahead—if your opposition is based on what she’s actually done and what she actually believes.  All these lies and inventions that people are coming up with to try to bring her down are getting very old; the one encouraging thing about them is that they suggest that the Left is too scared of her to let people find out what she actually believes, because they’re afraid of what would happen if the American people took the true measure of this woman.

On the impossibility of a domesticated Jesus

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Five years or so ago, I posted a brief comment on a piece of Fr. Andrew Greeley’s in the Chicago Sun-Times titled “There’s no solving mystery of Christ”; the original is no longer available on the Sun-Times website, but fortunately, it can still be found here.  I say “fortunately” because, while there is much on which I do not agree with Fr. Greeley, in this piece he did an excellent job of capturing something profoundly important:

Much of the history of Christianity has been devoted to domesticating Jesus—to reducing that elusive, enigmatic, paradoxical person to dimensions we can comprehend, understand and convert to our own purposes. So far it hasn’t worked. . . .

None of it works because once you domesticate Jesus he isn’t there any more. The domestic Jesus may be an interesting fellow, a good friend, a loyal companion, a helpful business associate, a guarantor of the justice of your wars. But one thing he is certainly not: the Jesus of the New Testament. Once Jesus comforts your agenda, he’s not Jesus anymore. Consider Bush’s “political philosopher.” His principal statement on that subject is, “Render to Caesar things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”—a phrase that preachers for a couple of millennia have delivered with tones of triumph in their voice. Jesus had neatly dispatched his adversaries.

The preachers don’t explain what that ingenious phrase means in politics. . . . Where does one find the boundary between Caesar and God? Jesus didn’t say, and he still doesn’t. He won the argument, indeed deftly, but he leaves to his followers the challenge of how his dictum should be applied in practice. No easy task.

Or his challenge, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.” Does that mean we don’t denounce any sins? Or that we should take a good long look at our conscience before we take up the stones? Or that if we are confident of our own sinlessness, we can start throwing the stones?

Jesus did not issue any detailed instructions, save perhaps “by this all shall know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.” And that really isn’t detailed at all. Nor is the instruction that you should love your neighbor as yourself. All of these sayings seem vague, slippery, disturbing, dangerous. Jesus is as obscure now as he was in his own time: as troublesome, as much a threat to the public order. . . .

One is tempted to demand of Jesus: “Who do you think you are to challenge us with your paradoxes, to trouble us with your weird stories, to warn us that you are not a reassuring traveling companion, but a messenger from a God who is even more paradoxical, even more difficult to figure out, even more challenging.”

If Jesus makes you feel comfortable with your agenda, then he’s not Jesus.

Or as I’ve been told St. Augustine wrote, “If you think you understand the nature of God, that which you think you know is not God.”  What we can truly know about God is limited to what God has revealed to us about himself; unfortunately, we’re always trying to go beyond that, sometimes out of an honest desire to understand, and sometimes out of a desire to make God be what we want him to be—which is the essence of idolatry.  Jesus doesn’t accept that; he will not be tamed, or made to conform to our desires.

This is not to say that everything we know about Jesus is wrong, or that it’s impossible for us to know or speak truth about God, because those statements are clearly not true.  It is, however, to say that if we think we hear Jesus saying what we want him to hear, we need to stop and consider the possibility that we’re really only hearing our own wishful thinking, and then go back and take a long second look.  If we believe in a Jesus who only challenges those who disagree with us, who only makes our opponents uncomfortable, then we’ve gotten him wrong.  In the Gospels, many people received comfort from Jesus, but no one was ever trulycomfortable with him; the closer his friends got to him, it seems, the more he confounded them.

The basic principle here is that we’re all sinners, we all have sin in our hearts, and therefore Jesus confronts all of us with our sinfulness and calls us to change.  He calls all of us to give up things that we deeply do not want to give up, to set aside our own desires and goals and plans so that he can give us his own, to make changes that we’d rather not make; he loves all of us just the way we are, but he doesn’t affirm any of us just the way we are—he loves us too much for that.  As such, whenever we hear the challenge of God, we need to look first to our own hearts, without exception, to see how his challenge is for us before we ever think to apply it to anyone else.

Jesus didn’t come to confirm us in our agendas and tell us we’re doing just fine as we are; he came to upskittle our agendas entirely and call us to a radical new way of living.  As Fr. Greeley says, “If Jesus makes you feel comfortable with your agenda”—whether that agenda be political, personal, professional, or what have you—”then he’s not Jesus.”  After all, if you’re the one setting the agenda, then you’re setting the course and expecting others to follow you, and Jesus never offered to follow us; instead, consistently, he said, “Follow me.”

As a final note, I would be remiss to post on this without noting that my friend Jared Wilson (of The Thinklings and The Gospel-Driven Church) has a book coming out next month addressing this same concern, titled Your Jesus Is Too Safe:  Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior.  I’m looking forward to reading it.

 

Barack Obama’s priorities

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The Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces finally saw fit yesterday, two days after the murder of Pvt. William Long and the attempted murder of Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, to issue a statement on this attack on two young men who had pledged him their service (HT:  Michelle Malkin):

I am deeply saddened by this senseless act of violence against two brave young soldiers who were doing their part to strengthen our armed forces and keep our country safe. I would like to wish Quinton Ezeagwula a speedy recovery, and to offer my condolences and prayers to William Long’s family as they mourn the loss of their son.

Compare this to Sarah Palin’s statement, issued Tuesday (yes, a sitting governor took this seriously enough to respond more promptly than the President of the United States):

The stories of two very different lives with similar fates crossed through the media’s hands yesterday—both equally important but one lacked the proper attention. The death of 67-year old George Tiller was unacceptable, but equally disgusting was another death that police believe was politically and religiously motivated as well.

William Long died yesterday. The 23-year old Army Recruiter was gunned down by a fanatic; another fellow soldier was wounded in the ambush. The soldiers had just completed their basic training and were talking to potential recruits, just as my son, Track, once did.

Whatever titles we give these murderers, both deserve our attention. Violence like that is no way to solve a political dispute nor a religious one. And the fanatics on all sides do great disservice when they confuse dissention with rage and death.

And then, further, compare this to the statement of our Commander-in-Chief on the murder of George Tiller:

I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.

What conclusions can be drawn from these comparisons?  I can think of four.

  1. Barack Obama cares more about the murder of abortionists than about the murder of American soldiers.  The former “outrages” him, the latter merely “saddens” him.
  2. Barack Obama is more willing to condemn those who act in the name of Christianity than those who act in the name of Islam.  Murder by the former is “heinous,” while murder by the latter is merely “senseless” (never mind that it made perfect sense to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Leon Bledsoe).  This makes sense, given that he appears to be committed to a policy of naïve appeasement of global Islam, while his attitude toward evangelicals who don’t like his actions is, “I won.”
  3. Governor Palin takes the murder of American soldiers more seriously than President Obama.
  4. The likes of al’Qaeda are going to be a lot more worried if Sarah Palin is elected president down the road than they will ever be about Barack Obama.

Superb analysis of the President’s Cairo speech

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—one might almost call it a fisking—courtesy of Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.  I’m not going to try to excerpt it (not only is it long, but the comments are interspersed with the text of the President’s speech, making it less friendly to excerpting), but I encourage you to go read it; Spencer exposes a lot of the West’s naïve misconceptions about Islam—misconceptions which, alas, Barack Obama seems to share.  Taken all in all, having looked at the speech, I agree with Spencer, Michelle Malkin, and to a remarkable degree, even HuffPo’s Peter Daou (whose article title, “Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama’s Cairo Speech,” captures my point of agreement with him beautifully):  we have good reason to be concerned.

The Gnosticism of sexual sin

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In a recent ESPN Magazine article on Donald Sterling, the Clippers owner is quoted as saying—under oath, in a court of law—”When you pay a woman for sex, you are not together with her.  You’re paying her for a few moments to use her body for sex. Is it clear? Is it clear?”

That’s a stunning statement, for a number of reasons.  Most obviously, it’s stunning in its sheer crassness (something which, as Peter Keating shows at length in the piece, is completely characteristic of the man).  More than that, though, it’s stunning for what it reveals about his attitude toward sex—an attitude which I think is characteristic of far more people than just him.  In point of fact, while he puts it far more crassly than most people would, I believe the essentially Gnostic view he reveals here is in fact the default view in our culture.

Consider this in the light of a defense I’ve seen offered more than once of pornography, at least in the soft-core form:  “What’s obscene about a pretty girl taking off her clothes?” I will admit to having some sympathy with the way James P. Hogan framed this in his novel Giant’s Star:

[Victor Hunt] emerged from the kitchen and walked through into the living room, wondering how a world that accepted as normal the nightly spectacle of people discussing their constipation, hemorrhoids, dandruff, and indigestion in front of an audience of a million strangers could possibly find something obscene in the sight of pretty girls taking their clothes off.  “There’s now’t so strange as folk,” his grandmother from Yorkshire would have said, he thought to himself.

That, however, says more about the casual obscenity of much of our advertising than it does about pornography; both objectify the human body, if in different ways and for different reasons.  This defense is rooted in a complete misunderstanding of the issue.  It’s not that there’s anything obscene about the human body; far from it.  The human body is a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful of God’s creations.  However, a human body is not merely a thing, but rather is an integral part of something even more beautiful:  a human being.  The obscenity is not in the naked body; the obscenity is in the treatment of a human being as merely a naked body, as just an object of desire to be used for one’s gratification rather than as a full person to be respected and honored.

The appeal to this, I think, is that an object can be whatever one wants to imagine it to be; it’s conformable to one’s desires.  Real human beings have wills and desires, integrity and dignity, of their own, and frequently are not conformable to one’s desires.  Real human beings have minds and ideas of their own; objects don’t.  In pornography, human bodies are effectively made available for the wish-fulfillment of others, ready to be used whenever they’re accessed by whomever would use them; they never say “no,” because they’re never sleepy, achy, sick, in a bad mood, or just plain unwilling.

If we understood the spiritual consequences of this, we would take it far more seriously than most people do; but most of us don’t, because we’ve bought the line that our bodies are separate from our spirits, and that most of what we do with our bodies doesn’t really matter spiritually because they’re temporary—they aren’t the real person, and we’re going to leave them behind when we die anyway.  They’re just not that important.  That’s how you get the idea that Donald Sterling expressed, that you can rent out someone’s body for sex and just be using their body, “not together with her” (or him)—which is not only the idea behind his caddish behavior, but is also in its essence the idea behind pornography.

Even people who consider themselves Christians fall into this thinking, and use it to justify departures from biblical sexual morality; the argument that God doesn’t really mean what the Bible says about premarital sex, or homosexuality, or adultery, or whatever, always seems to rest in the end on the presumption that what we do with our bodies really isn’t all that important, and so God can’t really care about it all that much.  That stuff in Scripture must have been a cultural thing, or must have been put in there for some other reason, because God can’t have a good enough reason to tell us not to do what we want to do.  (It’s rather funny, when you stop to think about it, how we never question why such matters shouldn’t be important to God when we obviously think they’re worth fighting over.)

The truth is, though, that our bodies aren’t merely containers for our spirits, but are intimately connected:  we are our bodies just as much as our spirits, and everything that we do with one and everything that affects one affects the other.  When we treat our bodies and the bodies of others as merely things to be used and deployed for our pleasure, it debases us and it debases the people we use.  We can’t do that without consequences.  We need to treat people as people and respect them accordingly, even if they don’t fully respect themselves.