I offer this with two notes. First, this isn’t a “modest proposal” in the satirical sense, along the lines of Jonathan Swift; I am serious. Second, this isn’t my own idea; I ran across it some years ago and no longer remember who came up with it. That said, here is the proposal.I would be willing to support same-sex marriage given two conditions:
the abolition of no-fault divorce and the recriminalization of adultery.Those who argue that it’s absurd for heterosexuals to oppose redefining marriage to include homosexual couples on grounds of the sanctity of marriage while tolerating divorce for non-biblical reasons have a point; where they go wrong, in my judgment (and, I believe, on the biblical standard) is in arguing for combining the two. The best course, I think, would be to hold the line on the definition of marriage while reversing the no-fault revolution—but I don’t expect that to happen. (To tell the truth, I don’t expect to see my own proposal realized either, but we’ll get to that.) As a realistic matter, politics is a matter of tradeoffs (except for short periods), and you have to give something to get something. Given that, I think that no-fault divorce and the lifting of formal societal sanction on sleeping around have done more damage to the institution of marriage than would inclusion of same-sex couples in that institution, and so I think the tradeoff would be, on the whole, beneficial.Including the recriminalization of adultery in this deal would also ensure that those homosexuals who supported it were actually serious about marriage. There are those who argue that the true agenda behind the push for same-sex marriage is the desire to bring down the institution of marriage, or at the least render it irrelevant; and I’m quite sure there are those for whom that’s true. I’m also sure there are those for whom it isn’t. The willingness to advocate and enter into legal marriage on grounds that would make that marriage much more consequential (and the violation of it much more consequential) would draw a clear and unambiguous contrast between the two groups.As noted, I would be very surprised to see this proposal enacted, since there are a lot more heterosexuals who would be inconvenienced by it than there are homosexuals whom it would benefit. I suspect for instance that most liberal heterosexuals, if these were the only terms on which they could win marital status for same-sex couples, would refuse. Their attitude, I think, would likely mirror that of New England environmentalists who are eager to see species in other parts of the country added to the threatened and endangered lists, but much less eager when it’s a species like the New England cottontail; easy to stand on your principles, after all, when it only inconveniences other people.I also suspect that many conservatives would dislike my proposed deal. Part of that is that many would disagree with my arguments for it; just because I believe that it would, on the whole, strengthen the institution of marriage doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with me, or that I’m necessarily right. Part of it too is that, given the divorce rate among evangelicals and fundamentalists, you have to figure that even many conservative Christians would balk at reversing the no-fault revolution.I don’t know how prominent people of homosexual inclination would react if this modest proposal were ever seriously debated; I suspect some, at least, would advocate for it with a certain sardonic humor, pleased to see the onus put on heterosexual America for once. I do think, though, that if people were forced to discuss it seriously, the conversation would be both enlightening and entertaining; and who knows? We might even learn something.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Political psychopathology
That wasn’t the title of Peter Berkowitz’ recent column on “Bush hatred and Obama euphoria,” but it might have been. (Although “pneumatopathology,” a pathology of the spirit, would really be more to the point.) This is not speaking, of course, to opposition to one and support of the other, or even to intense dislike of the policies of one and strong approval for the policies of the other, but to something which goes beyond both. As Berkowitz writes,
Bush hatred and Obama euphoria—which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed—are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. Bush hatred and Obama euphoria typically coexist in the same soul. And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.To be sure, democratic debate has always been a messy affair in which passion threatens to overwhelm reason. So long as citizens remain free and endowed with a diversity of interests and talents, it will remain so. . . .In surveying the impediments to bringing reason to bear in politics, it was not [Alexander] Hamilton’s aim to encourage despair over democracy’s prospects but to refine political expectations. “This circumstance, if duly attended to,” he counseled, “would furnish a lesson of moderation to those, who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right, in any controversy.”As Hamilton would have supposed, the susceptibility of political judgment to corruption by interest and ambition is as operative in our time as it was in his. What has changed is that those who, by virtue of their education and professional training, would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton’s lesson of moderation are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.From the avalanche of vehement and ignorant attacks on Bush v. Gore and the oft-made and oft-refuted allegation that the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq, to the remarkable lack of interest in Mr. Obama’s career in Illinois politics and the determined indifference to his wrongness about the surge, wide swaths of the media and the academy have concentrated on stoking passions rather than appealing to reason. . . .By assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. . . . They infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.
Kentucky as test case: the rhetoric/reality gap widens
Of course, the storms that passed to the south of us last week didn’t only affect Kentucky, but that seems to have been the worst-hit state, so it stands in for the whole mess (just as Katrina hit Mississippi, too, but you didn’t hear nearly so much about that because unlike Louisiana, Mississippi had a competent [GOP] state government that managed the disaster effectively); and that mess, it seems to me, is important for understanding what we can expect from the Obama administration in times of crisis—and this is definitely a crisis, with over a million people suffering, and a number of deaths. For those not used to dealing with ice storms, J. G. Thayer explains:
The problem with ice storms is magnitude. They cover vast areas, and the damage is systemic. They can wreak havoc on electric grids. Utilities can find themselves having to deal with thousands of broken lines and hundreds of broken poles. . . .It’s been about a week since Kentuckians got pounded, and they’re still digging out. Half a million people were still without power as of Saturday night, and almost half that many have no water. Emergency shelters are still open, and the governor has mobilized every single member of the National Guard to assist.
Now, by way of comparison, here’s Barack Obama in May 2007:
In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed.
Actually, the death toll was 12, so then-Sen. Obama overstated the magnitude of the tornado’s damage somewhat, but that’s still a tragedy; he certainly didn’t apologize for using it as an opportunity to bash the Bush administration for sending the Kansas National Guard to Iraq:
Turns out that the National Guard in Kansas only had 40 percent of its equipment and they are having to slow down the recovery process in Kansas.
Now, here’s this from the Obama White House website:
President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration’s “unconscionable ineptitude” in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.
OK, so the point appears to be clear: the Bush administration didn’t care about disaster victims and didn’t do enough to respond to their needs. Can we do better? Yes We Can! Which offers a not-so-implicit promise: We will.In Kentucky, we have the first test of that promise, and so far, Barack Obama is failing. Miserably. Under the Bush administration, FEMA was savaged for its poor response to Hurricane Katrina; so, did they respond quickly and effectively to help those suffering from this storm system? No. Why? Because it might be dangerous and difficult. According to FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak, “We have plenty of folks ready to go, but there are some limitations with roads closed and icy conditions.” I’m sorry, but that’s just pathetic. For crying out loud, it’s a natural disaster—of course there will be limitations. You find a way to overcome them, or you aren’t doing your job. That’s the standard to which FEMA was rightly held in 2005, and it’s the standard to which they need to be held now.Also, the White House website trumpets the fact that in 2005, Sen. Obama visited the area hit by Katrina several times; has he bothered to go to Kentucky? No, though he did find time to throw a Super Bowl party (with strips of $250 a pound Wagyu steak). He did get around to declaring a federal disaster area—two days after the storm went through, and only after he’d been asked to do so by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear. Compare that to the way the Bush administration and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal handled Hurricane Gustav, essentially pre-positioning the federal response. For all that the current administration brags that they “have learned the lessons of Katrina,” they clearly haven’t learned them as well as the Bush administration did. Their rhetoric, as always, is fabulous; their follow-through, however—as is the emerging pattern—doesn’t measure up.And then, of course, there’s the press. Have they been on top of Barack Obama on this the way they were on top of George W. Bush? Well, as the Anchoress writes,
Americans are freezing and dying but I guess I’ve missed Anderson Cooper flying to the midwest and crying and Geraldo shouting, “where is the help?” I guess I’ve missed members of the press demonizing President Obama for eating steak and having cocktails with the press while people are freezing and without food.When a million people in flyover country are suffering, and 42 people have died, we don’t hear much about it. If this was New York, Washington, Boston, (or if the president had an R after his name) you’d see non-stop reports, and the press would be roundly criticizing FEMA’s absence, and the White House’s disregard. Right?
Right. Or as John Hinderaker put it,
Is Barack Obama an insensitive lout who serves $100 per pound steaks to his elite guests and turns up the heat in the White House high enough to grow orchids while a million of his countrymen are without power and dozens are freezing to death? If not, why not?Solely because that is not the story the media want to tell. Many on the web—but no one in the mainstream media—have commented on the fact that Obama has not even pretended to do anything about the massive ice storm that has disabled much of Kentucky and neighboring states. It took days for FEMA to swing into action. Why is that not a scandal? Days went by before Kentucky’s governor called out the National Guard. Why did no one blame Obama for failing to call out the Guard sooner? Probably because he lacks the constitutional power to do so; but the Constitution hasn’t changed since 2005. . . .A basic reality of our time is that our mass media are monolithic, and what they choose to report (or not report) depends on what fits the narrative they are pushing on the public. If our reporters and editors wanted to portray Obama as clueless and out of touch with ordinary Americans, he has given them ample opportunity to do so. But because they are Democrats and he is a Democrat, they have no desire to tell that story. So “let them eat steak” is not a theme you’ll be seeing on the evening news.
If George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina was really such an executive catastrophe, then President Obama’s indifference to the suffering of Kentuckians is unforgivable. But since no one is objecting this time around, what does that say about the motives behind the outrage over Katrina?
Memo to Kentucky from the MSM: we don’t actually care about your suffering, we care about its political value. Since it has no political value, never mind.The fact of the matter is, this won’t be President Obama’s Katrina moment (whether or not it should be), because the MSM won’t let it be, and it’s just not big enough or horrifying enough for those not directly affected by it. But if he and his administration aren’t shaken up by their poor response to this storm and its aftermath, and if they don’t learn the necessary lessons from it, they will have one. Something will come along from which their media lapdogs can’t save them, and whether they believe it possible now or not, the Obama administration will be broken just as the Bush administration was. Right now, they’re sowing the wind; if they don’t make some major changes, the time will come when they reap the whirlwind.
Is the Crystal Cathedral about to shatter?
Maybe, if the AP story has it right:
The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, he implored the Eagle’s Club members—who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue—for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.
Robert H. Schuller, who is of course the church’s founder, handed over the senior position at the Crystal Cathedral to his son Robert A. Schuller a few years ago; after a while, though, it appears he decided he didn’t like what his son was doing, because last fall he removed his son from the television broadcast. After that, the younger Schuller’s resignation as senior pastor (which was announced last November 29) was inevitable, merely a matter of time. The resulting upheaval, of course, has badly damaged the organization. I was particularly struck by this comment:
Melody Mook, a 58-year-old medical transcriptionist from El Paso, Texas, said she stopped her $25 monthly donation and is looking elsewhere for her spiritual needs. She said she dislikes the guest pastors. “I feel hurt and confused, and I’m not sure that I want to sit and watch when I know there’s problems beneath the surface,” she said. “You feel like you’re in somebody else’s church every Sunday.”
I read that and I have to wonder, didn’t she realize it’s been “somebody else’s church” the whole time? She lives in El Paso, for crying out loud—she’s not a part of that congregation, and never has been.I have mixed feelings about this situation. On the one hand, this could have and should have been avoided; after all, it’s not as if no one saw it coming. The transfer of power from elder to younger Schuller has been planned since 1997 or so, and for that whole time, people familiar with the situation have been saying it wasn’t going to work. I remember being a part of a conversation in the summer of 1998 among folks from various parts of the Reformed Church in America in which people expressed two main concerns: one, that Robert A. Schuller didn’t have the gifts for the position to which his father wanted him to succeed; and two, that Robert H. Schuller would never really be willing to let anyone else run the show independently, not even his son. As a consequence, I doubt many close observers of the situation are surprised at how the transfer of authority has played out. I realize there was no way that the RCA’s Classis of California was going to tell the elder Schuller “no,” but they should have.On the other hand, maybe it would be for the best if the Crystal Cathedral did shut down. It’s generated a lot of money and a lot of publicity over the years, but to what real benefit to the kingdom of God? Maybe it would be better to shut the doors, let the property revert to the Classis of California, and let the classis and the Synod of the Far West figure out how best to use it. I know there’s been some discussion in the past about starting a new denominational seminary in the West; the campus could be used for that purpose, and you could probably cover a lot of the expenses of starting and running a new school by renting out the great glass sanctuary itself to some other church for Sunday services. Or maybe it would be better just to sell the whole thing and use the money to fund church plants all over southern California. I don’t know, but there would be lots of options.The bottom line here, I think, is that this is what happens when you build a church on a personality and a media strategy rather than on the gospel of Jesus Christ. If the driving force in a church is anything other than the gospel, and if the congregation’s chief loyalty is to anyone but Jesus, that church is built on the sand, and it cannot and will not endure.Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.—Matthew 7:24-27 (ESV)
An observer’s guide to the “new politics”
Since we’re now into February and the new administration is underway, it seems a reasonable time to stop and evaluate what Barack Obama’s “new politics” look like so far.
- Announce strict new rules on the hiring of lobbyists—then refuse to apply them to anyone you actually want to appoint.
- Declare a new era of transparency and accountability—then stop posting transcripts of the daily White House press briefing (and, in fact, remove the old ones), irritatedly duck questions you don’t want to answer, and allow your appointees to lie to the Senate.
- Declare that along with transparency, the rule of law will be one of the touchstones of your administration—then appoint people to your cabinet who don’t pay their taxes until they get a cabinet appointment (or perhaps some time after that); throw in the fact that one of those appointees, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (whom even liberals think is a sleazebag), was named to regulate an industry which paid him more than $220,000 over the last two years.
- Declare an end to the Bush administration’s approach to dealing with terrorists—such as “the imposition of stringent limitations on the ways in which U.S. agents can question terror suspects, an executive order mandating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and the freezing of all detainee prosecutions”—but leave enough loopholes to ensure that the rules don’t have to be applied if they’re ever inconvenient.
In short, posture a lot about things like “the greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch,” “bringing change to Washington,” and “the moral high ground” to cover over the fact that the reality is just D.C. business as usual. Funny, but the “new politics” looks just like the old politics.Update: Including the fact that the American people will only put up with so much. Tuesday afternoon, Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination.
A quick reader’s guide to postmodernism
courtesy of Brad Holland. This was published in 1996, so more has happened since then, but mostly, it still applies.
The narrow mind of the literary world
As my lovely wife posted recently, the British novelist Julian Gough wrote an excellent blog post a while back on the self-deluded ghetto that is modern literary fiction. His post was occasioned by a review in the Guardian—a review of a lit-fic book by a British author, by a British lit-fic author—that was very impressed with the book in question for the originality of its central theme. The only problem? Well, here’s what Gough has to say:
This is the first line of the review: “The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods.”Now, I couldn’t quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was. She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably “the first to contend” that migration “afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods”. And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not “literary”, nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.
I’m not surprised by this—nor, I suspect, is Gough, since in the first paragraph of the piece, he’s already diagnosed the main problem with the modern literary ghetto: it’s
a ghetto that doesn’t know it’s a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.
I have no problem with people enjoying literary fiction; I think a lot of it’s badly overpraised, but some of it’s worthwhile. What I do have a problem with, as I’ve noted before, is precisely this attitude Gough puts his finger on, that lit-fic isn’t a genre, but rather is simply what’s worth the attention of the serious reader. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, pure tripe from beginning to end, as B. R. Myers demonstrated at some length a while ago in The Atlantic (much to the anger and discomfiture, it should be noted, of the the mandarins of the lit-fic world; but though they did a fine job of dismissing his points and pulling rank on him, I don’t recall anyone actually disproving his arguments). Between them, Myers and Gough do a fine job of blowing away the pretentions of modern literary fiction and its acolytes, and showing that their affectation of superiority to the rest of the publishing world has no grounding in reality; in so doing, they demonstrate that the self-proclaimed openness and wideness of vision of the lit-fic world is in fact astonishingly myopic and narrow-minded.
Would the real issue please stand up?
Lots more to blog about from the Worship Symposium, and I’ll get back to that in a more serious way tomorrow; but I wanted to note separately a comment Craig Barnes made by the by in his workshop on Saturday to this effect: “The reason Presbyterians are so hung up on talking about sex is that it enables them to avoid talking about the fact that the [PCUSA] is dying. . . . Presbyterians would rather talk about sex than death.”It’s an interesting point, and I have a sinking feeling he’s more or less right. I’m not one who thinks we can just pretend our intradenominational disputes over sexual ethics aren’t there, or aren’t significant, because they are—but I have tended to think that if we could somehow just agree to put everything on hold for a while and put our energies instead into revitalizing older churches and planting new ones, as my other denomination (the Reformed Church in America) is doing, that the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be a lot better off, and in a much healthier position to have (and survive) the debate. If the Rev. Dr. Barnes is right, though, I’m not so sure; if he’s right, we’d just find something else to sabotage ourselves. Which suggests that some other approach is in order. I just wish I had an idea what.
The work of the people is the work of the Holy Spirit
Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”
• download
The most interesting part of my second day at the Worship Symposium at Calvin was Simon Chan’s workshop on the liturgy as the work of the Holy Spirit. Dr. Chan is a Pentecostal who teaches at Trinity Theological College, an ecumenical Christian seminary in Singapore; from the title and the interview he gave Christianity Today last year, I knew him to be rather more liturgically-minded than most Pentecostals, but I didn’t expect him to ground his argument in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians like John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis—which is exactly what he did. It was a fascinating argument and discussion about the way in which the Holy Spirit works on and in the church, and effectively takes on the shape of the church—the church, we might say, becomes the body of Christ by embodying the Holy Spirit.I’ll be a while processing what Dr. Chan had to say, I suspect; but I greatly appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the Spirit of God is always present with and at work in the church, and that it’s the Spirit’s ongoing work that constitutes the church. That really drives home the point that we are entirely dependent on grace.
The importance of friendship in ministry
The Worship Symposium began today at Calvin; this year, I started off by taking a seminar on “Developing Pastoral Excellence,” which turned out to be interesting in an unexpected way. The presenter, the Rev. David Wood, is the director of Transition into Ministry, a program funded by the Lilly Foundation which seeks to aid and support pastors in the transition from the education process into the early years of their first call. As such, he’s been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good pastor and what is necessary for pastors to minister well; in so doing, in looking at all the list that various authors have generated of what makes an excellent pastor, he noticed “the sound of something missing”: he argued that an essential and unconsidered component of pastoral excellence is friendship.In brief, his argument runs like this. To be a good pastor, one must be a person of character and integrity and moral habit; as Aristotle (whom he quoted repeatedly) says, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” To live in this way requires sustained moral effort; and to sustain moral effort, the Rev. Wood contends (following Aristotle), we need friends of character—deep, strong friendships with godly people whom we can trust implicitly.This is true for a number of reasons. For one, central to our work as pastors is our ability to maintain a proper balance of intimacy and distance with the people in our congregations, something we can’t do if we’re starved for intimacy ourselves. For another, this requires a degre of self-knowledge which we can’t manage on our own—we need people who know us well to reflect us back to ourselves, so that we can see them through their eyes. For a third, we need support, reinforcement, encouragement, and sometimes a good swift kick or two from others if we’re to live lives of excellence of character—none of us have the resources in ourselves to do that alone.And fourth, we need friends to protect us from boredom. The Rev. Wood argues that when you see a pastor in moral collapse, you’re probably seeing someone who was bored with their life. It’s easy to grow bored with the things that matter most to us if we have no one with whom to share them; it’s easy to forget why they matter. We need others to help us remember, and to help us stay excited about and invested in them. As long as we stay interested in what we’re called to be doing, we stay energized about doing it, and invested in it. When we get bored, we go looking for trouble—and usually find it.