Category Archives: Crime and punishment

Criminalizing evangelism?

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You’ve probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here’s the video they took (though I’m not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Smw9QuH1xkA

If you want to see a Muslim response to this, Allahpundit posted one, along with the above video; having watched it, I’d have to say he’s being exceedingly generous in calling that attempt at a response “singularly lame,” since it’s a collection of repeated assertions supported by non sequiturs and a brief video clip of dubious provenance and import.

I have to say, I have two reactions to this. On the one hand, from a constitutional point of view, I find this very troubling; while I certainly don’t support the “separation of church and state” read as government-mandated secularism, I’m also no believer in theocratic government—and in particular, the idea of agents of government aiding and abetting the de facto imposition of shari’a law in an American community is deeply problematic. Muslims are as welcome in America as anyone else—and they have to play by the rules, same as anyone else, that’s the deal. Our history has well established that “separate but equal” isn’t, that different rules for different groups is wrong, no matter the reason; Muslims have no more right to be insulated from the discord, dissent, and disagreement of a democratic society than anyone else. If they’re going to argue that their faith demands otherwise—well, in that case, we have a problem.

Considered as a case of Christian witness, though, I find this video very troubling in a different way. Though the professed purpose of the folks who made it is to share the gospel with Muslims, nothing about their actions actually seems to support that purpose aside from their copies of the Gospel of John. Rather, their actions in this case seem designed to test the Dearborn police; I’m not sure it’s necessarily fair to say they were trying to provoke a confrontation, but it certainly looks like they were trying to see if they would get one, and indeed that they were expecting to. From their comments during the video, and especially from the final section complaining about all the intersections where they aren’t allowed to hand out copies of the Gospel, it sure sounds like their real concern is not bearing gospel witness to Muslims, but the infringement on their constitutional rights.

Which I don’t deny, either as a real issue or as a fair complaint; as I say, I think there’s reason for real concern here. If in fact we’re starting to see Muslim communities in this country effectively seceding from the larger political and social structure, as many European countries have seen, that’s bad news. But it does make the whole thing more than a little disingenuous, in my judgment. It makes this supposed attempt at evangelism look like, not a true expression of Christian discipleship and witness, but a calculated attempt to use Christian practices to make a political statement—and that, as someone has said, is a kettle of fish of a different color.

The truth is that the life of Christian discipleship isn’t based on rights; as I’ve said elsewhere, in the Bible, “right” isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective. Christian doctrine certainly provided and provides the foundation and root for the political concept of human rights, and in its political implications, it requires us to stand up and defend the rights of others; but our contemporary insistence on standing on our own rights and insisting on our own rights against others is nowhere to be found in Scripture, and especially not in the example of Jesus. I can’t presume to judge the hearts of David Wood and the folks with him in that video, but from what I can see of his judgment, it’s pretty poor, and it looks to me like their priorities are out of whack.

In my judgment, what the folks in that video are actually advocating and bearing witness to is not the gospel, regardless of the texts they were holding; they showed none of the humility or willingness to meekly accept suffering for the gospel which Paul holds up as essential in Philippians 2, and most of what they had to say was about themselves. Rather, they were to all intents and purposes serving as advocates and defenders of a particular political and cultural position. In that role, it appears to me they succeeded, judging by the e-mails and blog posts I’ve seen. As evangelists . . . well, God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform (just read the book of Jonah), and I’m not going to say what his Holy Spirit can and can’t use—but the whole affair seems a lot more likely to turn the hearts of Muslims against Christianity than toward Christ. And shouldn’t that really be the bottom line?

The mythical meme of “cutting waste and fraud”

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A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,

Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.

“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.

The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.

That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.

Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.

As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”

All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.

Grace in action

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Thanks to Doug Hagler for tipping me off on this one—it’s from a while ago, but I had indeed missed it the first time. 🙂

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.”He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,'” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

If you’re not familiar with the story, read the whole thing to see what happened. Grace doesn’t come with a money-back guarantee—people don’t always respond—but when they do, God does wondrous things.

The invention of the Black Sox

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The common understanding of the Black Sox scandal was fixed in the public mind by Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book Eight Men Out and the subsequent movie adaptation of the same title by John Sayles. As it turns out, that may be a highly unfortunate thing, as an article in Chicago Lawyer magazine by Daniel J. Voelker and Paul A. Duffy reveals. Having gained access to Asinof’s files, the two discovered that his book is not in fact supported by his research; indeed, they’ve concluded that the book is, to a significant degree, fiction.

Those whose reputations seem to have been blackened the worst by Asinof’s fictionalization are the team’s owner, Charles Comiskey, who has been unfairly smeared as a skinflint whose miserliness drove his players to throw the 1919 World Series, and the biggest star among the banned players, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who always insisted on his innocence. Given his stellar performance in the Series that year—he led all qualifying hitters, on both teams, in batting average and slugging percentage, finished second in on-base percentage, hit the Series’ only home run, and seems to have played the field well (at least, he didn’t commit a single error)—I’ve always been inclined to believe him. Given the work by Voelker and Duffy, I think I’ve been justified in that.

Here’s hoping this article is the beginning of a new trial for Shoeless Joe, not just in the court of public opinion but also before the Lords of Baseball; and here’s hoping that the result is the clearing of his reputation and his long-overdue inclusion in the Hall of Fame.

We’re all Chicagoans now

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So, let’s see. The Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which among other things runs AmeriCorps, starts investigating the mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, and his nonprofit foundation, St. HOPE Academy; the foundation had applied for AmeriCorps money for a project called the Hood Corps. When Gerald Walpin audited the program,

The IG audit found that the program misused virtually all its funds and did little of what was outlined in its grant proposal.

Specifically, the audit found that Johnson and other officials of Neighborhood Corps used AmeriCorps volunteers to recruit students for a charter school run by its parent program, improperly paid at two school employees with AmeriCorps funds for duties they did not perform, improperly used volunteers to perform personal errands for Johnson (including washing his car and driving him to personal appearances) and used the AmeriCorps volunteers to engage in political activities in connection with a board of education election.

Rooting out abuse of government funds—clearly he’s doing his job well; that deserves a raise, or at least a pat on the back, right? Nope—because you see, Johnson isn’t just a former NBA star or a mayor, he’s a friend and supporter of Barack Obama. As a result, Walpin didn’t get a commendation, he got a pink slip.

Of course, that’s not the only case IG Walpin has investigated; he also found significant problems in an AmeriCorps project at the City University of New York. Despite his findings, however, the CNCS decided it didn’t feel like doing anything about it.

Funding for the largest AmeriCorps program—the Teaching Fellows Program, run by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York—is in abeyance pending resolution of widespread problems identified in a recent audit. Although Walpin recommended that funding be curtailed and that previous funds (perhaps as much as $75 million) be repaid to the corporation, the corporation has said it will take no action on that matter.

Walpin concluded that nothing was being gained by the grants to CUNY and that the money was simply being used to subsidize an existing and funded program.

That’s not to say, of course, that the administration isn’t doing anything about this—they did, after all, remove the embarrassing IG who insisted on making an issue out of it. What’s more, to ensure that nothing so disturbing happens again, Michelle Obama is kindly donating the services of her chief of staff Jackie Norris, who was appointed as a senior advisor to the CNCS. In the absence of a CEO (the last appointee for that slot having withdrawn her name last month), Norris will have particularly great influence; and word is that Michelle Obama is taking the lead in the selection of a new CEO for CNCS as well. After all, we have to make sure that whoever runs this corporation is willing to toe the administration’s line.

Which isn’t how it’s supposed to be, especially when it comes to IGs; these folks are supposed to be insulated from executive pressure, as Byron York notes:

Last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which was designed to strengthen protections for IGs, who have the responsibility of investigating allegations of waste, fraud and abuse within federal agencies, against interference by political appointees or the White House. Part of the Act was a requirement that the president give Congress 30 days’ notice before dismissing an IG. One of the co-sponsors of the Act was then-Sen. Barack Obama.

The Act also requires the president to outline the cause for his decision to remove an IG. Beyond saying that he did not have the “fullest confidence” in Walpin, Obama gave no reason for his action.

There are two big questions about the president’s actions. One, why did he decide to fire Walpin? And two, did he abide by the law that he himself co-sponsored?

According to Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a strong advocate of inspectors general, Walpin received a call from the White House Counsel’s office on Wednesday evening. Walpin was told that he had one hour to either resign or be fired. Senate sources say Walpin asked why he was being fired and, according to one source, “The answer that was given was that it’s just time to move on. The president would like to have someone else in that position.” Walpin declined to resign.

Grassley fired off a letter to the president on Thursday saying that, “I was troubled to learn that [Wednesday] night your staff reportedly issued an ultimatum to the AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin that he had one hour to resign or be terminated,” Grassley wrote. “As you know, Inspectors General were created by Congress as a means to combat waste, fraud, and abuse and to be independent watchdogs ensuring that federal agencies were held accountable for their actions. Inspectors General were designed to have a dual role reporting to both the President and Congress so that they would be free from undue political pressure. This independence is the hallmark of all Inspectors General and is essential so they may operate independently, without political pressure or interference from agencies attempting to keep their failings from public scrutiny.”

Ed Morrissey offers an interesting comment on this:

Congress gave IGs this level of protection precisely to avoid this kind of action by the White House. Obama doesn’t want IGs investigating his cronies and political allies, and the evidence for this is rather clear from the way the White House handled it. Instead of going to Congress, which the lawyers in the White House should have known was the correct procedure, they attempted to intimidate Walpin out of his job first. Apparently they didn’t have a good enough case for the proper procedure.

What we’re seeing here is a clear case of Chicago-style cronyism and machine politics on the national stage. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; I certainly saw it coming, and I was far from the only one. After all, this is how Barack Obama learned to do politics; this is the system that formed him. How else is he going to govern? How else would he behave? This is a man who has repeatedly said that his formative experience as a young man was as a community organizer—with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which includes among its activities political intimidation and massive voter-registration fraud for political and financial profit. ACORN doesn’t practice transparency and accountability—why would we expect Barack Obama to do so? Why would we expect him to govern with a high level of integrity when the people and environments that shaped him as a politician don’t reward integrity?

The bald truth is that we elected as president a Chicago machine politician and community organizer for a corrupt organization that considers fraud an appropriate tool for advancing its political agenda and filling its coffers, and we now have an administration run by people who are used to operating in those ways and on those principles; we should not expect any of them to be other than what they have been. Rather, we should expect national politics to look a lot like Chicago writ large—and so far, that’s what we’re seeing.

We’re seeing an administration that admits that the $800 billion it demanded be spent as “stimulus” is already being misappropriated, misused, and even flat-out stolen—Joe Biden went so far as to say, “Some people are being scammed already”—and can’t seem to be bothered to do anything about it. After all, the money is going to liberals, isn’t it? And we’re seeing an administration whose preferred response to the voter-registration fraud investigations going on against ACORN in numerous states is not to launch a federal investigation, but rather to give them billions of dollars. That’s why Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has introduced the Taxpayer Protection and Anti-Fraud Act,

which would restrict access to taxpayer dollars available through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for groups that have been indicted for violations of state or federal laws.

“No one has a right to federal funds,” she said. “We have a fiduciary responsibility as members of Congress to establish criteria by which groups can gain access to federal dollars. I believe we should be able to raise the bar above indictment and not be restricted solely to convictions. This in no way denies someone their due process rights in court.”

Under her new bill a determination would be made on a “case by case” basis to determine whether or not a particular organization should be eligible for federal support, despite indictments.

The White House, predictably, is opposed; but it seems clear to me that the government needs to be careful about giving out money, and that if there’s enough reason to issue an indictment against an organization, the government should at least be required to take notice of that indictment and evaluate it carefully before giving that organization so much as one red cent. (If you agree, sign the petition.) To the current administration, giving money to groups like ACORN is just business as usual; to my way of thinking, that’s precisely the sort of usual business we need to do away with. The Chicago machine is bad enough in Chicago; there’s nothing we can do now to keep it out of D. C., so we need to do everything we can to keep it from putting down roots and taking over. We’re all Chicagoans now; let’s do our best to make sure we don’t stay that way.

 

Sarah Palin on the murder of Pvt. William Long

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Here’s Gov. Palin’s statement (HT:  Mel):

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.

She’s right on all counts.  Contrary to my initial expectation, the killer here wasn’t a fringe anti-war activist, but rather an American Muslim convert and Yemen-trained Islamic terrorist.  My point still holds, though:  will the media and leftist pundits (but I repeat myself) treat Long’s murder as a terrorist act and go after those whose hateful rhetoric encourages such acts?  So far, nope.  (Go on, tell me you’re surprised.)

Update:  The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg has noticed, as has Toby Harnden of the Telegraph.

Since the Left is throwing the word “terrorism” around

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when it comes to the Tiller assassination, as Michelle Malkin points out, let’s see if they apply it to this guy, too; let’s see if they have the intellectual honesty, consistency and integrity to paint the anti-war movement with the same brush they want to use on the pro-life movement.  On the facts, it’s certainly every bit as warranted; somehow, though, I’m betting not.

Update:  Robert Stacy McCain has a great comment on this over at Hot Air‘s “Green Room”:

The Left always wishes to distance its own utopian idealists from the injustices perpetrated in pursuit of those ideals, while the Right is forever compelled to apologize for crimes that no conservative ever advocated or endorsed. It ought not be necessary to insist on the point that free speech and political activism are different things than the murder of Dr. Tiller, a crime that Michelle Malkin rightly denounces as terrorism.

Update II:  My initial expectation that the killer was an American anti-war activist was incorrect—he was, rather, an American convert to jihadist Islam.  See above.

Sarah Palin weighs in

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A couple hours ago, Gov. Palin released the following statement on the murder of Wichita abortionist George Tiller:

I feel sorrow for the Tiller family. I respect the sanctity of life and the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life. This murder also damages the positive message of life, for the unborn, and for those living. Ask yourself, “What will those who have not yet decided personally where they stand on this issue take away from today’s event in Kansas?”

Regardless of my strong objection to Dr. Tiller’s abortion practices, violence is never an answer in advancing the pro-life message.

For my thoughts and comments on this, see my post this morning on Conservatives4Palin.

George Tiller assassinated; may God have mercy on his soul

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For those unfamiliar with Tiller, he was an abortionist in Wichita who had become over the years, as the New York Times put it, “a focal point for those around the country who opposed [abortion],” largely because his clinic “is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy.”  He was shot in his church, where he was serving as an usher.

I’d missed this story earlier today, and I expect I’ll be processing this for a while, but I’ve seen several reactions with which I agree wholeheartedly.  Most basically, Princeton’s Robert George was right to say,

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. . . . By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller’s life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our “weapons” in the fight to defend the lives of abortion’s tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.

Robert Stacy McCain had some equally wise and true words:

One reason I so despise such criminal idiocy is that, as a student of history, I cannot think of a single instance in which assassination has produced anything good, no matter how evil or misguided the victim, nor how well-intentioned or malevolent the assassin. . . .

Those who slew Caesar did not save the Roman republic. Marat’s death only incited the Jacobins to greater terror. Booth’s pistol conjured up a spirit of vengeance against the South more terrible than war itself. Assassination is an act of nihilism. Whatever the motive of the crime, the horror it evokes always inspires a draconian response, and involves other consequences never intended by the criminal.

He also notes,

Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas.

Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom has some excellent comments as well:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder. It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers. It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation that the Obama Justice Department decided to drop ex post facto. There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there? If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes? Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments? Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Donald Douglas is right to complain about Andrew Sullivan’s selective outrage. . . . This sorry episode should be an example of how absolute is the sanctity of life; unfortunately, that’s not what people will teach, and that’s not what people will learn.

The president, of course, has weighed in with a condemnation of the assassination; that’s part of his job, and it’s unquestionably warranted.  That said, I have to agree with the folks at Stop the ACLU about this:

On one hand, Obama is correct. We cannot solve the abortion issue, or others, through murder. We are a Nation of Law, not a Nation of Men. On the other hand, Obama never seems to work up much shock and outrage at the murder of over 2 million babies every year, many of them during the 3rd trimester. I wonder why?

Finally, go read Sister Toldjah’s superb post, which I’m not going to try to excerpt.

I’m not going to try to match these folks for profundity (not at the moment, anyway), or repeat what they’ve written, except to say that I agree with them; what Tiller did was evil, and what his killer did was evil.  Those who argue for this sort of violence claim to be agents of justice, but that cannot be—it’s a response to injustice that is itself unjust, and an action that denies its own premises; you cannot kill abortionists without undermining your argument that abortion is wrong.  It’s ultimately, inherently, necessarily self-defeating—which is characteristic of nihilism, one reason I think R. S. McCain’s diagnosis is spot-on.  It’s also not the way of Christ, who defeated evil by surrendering to it, not by leading a paramilitary team to assassinate Herod.

And so, for whatever it may be worth, I do categorically and unreservedly reject and abhor the assassination of George Tiller; and though as a Protestant I don’t believe in praying for the dead, I do honestly commit myself to hope that God will have mercy on his soul.  No, he doesn’t deserve it—but then, neither do any of the rest of us.