Monthly Archives: May 2010

Good work by Justice Stevens

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who wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in American Needle v. NFL. It was an interesting case, turning on the question of whether the NFL is a single corporate entity or a collection of competing corporations, and one with potentially huge ramifications. Had the Court upheld the NFL’s claim and allowed them to act as a single corporation, it would have been an immense transfer of power to the NFL which probably would have drastically weakened the players’ union; but in denying that claim (as they did, and rightly) there was the potential to significantly weaken the league. Justice Stevens’ ruling, from what I can see, did an excellent job of maintaining the necessary balance, laying a clear legal foundation for the NFL as a collection of competing corporations which must by the very nature of their business act cooperatively and collectively in much of what they do. As Doug Farrar sums it up,

Stevens basically said that the Supreme Court, and any other Court, would test function rather than form and avoid absolute impingement of any collective activity taken on by the teams,. But any act in concert with an eye on the evasion of antitrust law would not be allowed or exempted. In effect, as Berthelsen intimated in his statement, the NFL must operate under the same constraints as almost any other business. It was a sound and reasoned ruling that penalized neither side.

Nice job of threading the needle, that.

Politics in the end view

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I don’t make any apologies for blogging on political matters; I believe they’re important, and that we as Christians need to learn to see all aspects of life, including politics, with the eyes of faith. There are some things going on in our country right now that deeply concern me, and I think that concern is both warranted and appropriate. That said, there’s a risk in this, too—the risk of coming to overvalue political victories and defeats, to attach too much significance to them. It’s the risk of narrowed perspective, and it has contributed to the politicization of all too much of the American church (on both sides of the political divide).

To counter it, we need to pull back and reorient ourselves. We need to remember not only that this world isn’t all there us, but that for those of us who are in Christ and now live by the Holy Spirit, it isn’t even really our home. In Christ, we have been made citizens of another country, and given the life of the world to come; we don’t simply live in the present anymore—we live in the future, too. Our life comes from the future, from the coming kingdom of God which is breaking into the kingdoms of this world—in us, the people of God. In us, the future kingdom of God is present, the rule of God is exercised, the authority of God in and over this world is proclaimed. We are ambassadors from the future to the present, and the life God calls us to live only makes sense if we see it in that perspective.

Put another way, what we need to understand is that biblically, we are in the last days. To be sure, we’re still waiting for the last last days—this isn’t to say that the end of the world is right around the corner; people keep thinking it might be, but so far, it hasn’t happened. The point is more this: in God’s time, itwill happen, and we don’t know when that will be—and for that matter, many of us will die before then, which will be the end of the world for us, and we don’t know when that will be, either—but whenever it comes, that’s the end toward which we’re moving, when everything God has begun in us will be completed and fulfilled. That’s the destination of our journey, the purpose of our calling, the goal that will make sense of everything along the way.

To live in the last days, and to live in the understanding that we’re in the last days, is to live with that orientation and that focus: toward the future, toward dying and being reborn, toward the kingdom of God. It’s to live with the understanding that what happens in the present is primarily important for the effects it will have in the future; what we do in this world matters, and this world itself matters, not because it’s all there is but because it isn’t. What matters isn’t the things, and the worldly victories, and the worldly praise; rather, what matters is what will endure: the people we meet, the truth we speak, the lessons we learn, the love we give—and of course, the ones we don’t, as well. In the end, if we shut people out, if we refuse to speak or to hear truth, if we withhold love, for whatever reason, the only person we impoverish is ourselves. If we focus our attention, our concern, our efforts, on the things the world values, such as money and power, we may get the rewards the world has to offer (or we may not), but when this world goes, they’ll be gone. As my wife’s grandfather used to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead”—and it’s only what you send on ahead that will last.

As such, we ought not get too tied up in winning victories now; after all, we worship a God who has been known to do more with earthly defeats than worldly victories anyway. We need to work for what is good and right and true to the best of our ability and the best of our judgment, but we need to remember that in the end, winning isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whether we win or lose, God is in control; what matters most is not that we get our way, but that we do things his way, that we speak his truth in his love, fearlessly, every chance we get. If we do that, we can let the chips fall where they may, because by his sovereign will, he controls every last one of them.

(Adapted from “The Life of the World to Come”)

Politics by thuggery returns to the US

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Erick Erickson is right, this is profoundly disturbing:

In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or in Thailand or in former Eastern Bloc countries it would not be unheard of for union goons to show up on a man’s doorstep to intimidate the man into submitting to the thugocracy’s will. It is not supposed to happen here.

A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama told Wall Street that he, personally *he*, was all that stood between them and pitchforks. Well, Obama’s SEIU buddies decided to break out the pitchforks.

500 SEIU goons showed up on the front porch of a house belonging to a Bank of America Executive. The man’s 14 year old son was home alone and, fearing for his life, barricaded himself into a bathroom.

Yeah, you read that right. The man in question, Greg Baer, is one of the senior corporate lawyers for BoA. He’s also a Democrat, but like animals, some Democrats are more equal than others.

Here is what is so stark and troubling about this incident: the media was not invited. The SEIU brought along a Huffington Post blogger to shoot some propaganda, but otherwise the media was not invited. Why not? Because this was an act of sheer intimidation. It wasn’t a publicity stunt. Had a journalist, Nina Easton, not lived next door we may never have known this happened.

Friends, this is not supposed to happen in America. More troubling, the former head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, was Barack Obama’s most frequent visitor to the White House last year. Patrick Gaspard, the guy who was in charge of the SEIU before Stern, is now Barack Obama’s political director. Gaspard’s brother is a lobbyist for ACORN.

The SEIU spent last summer beating up conservatives at congressional town hall meetings about health care. Now the SEIU is sending busloads of goons to the front porches of bank executives to intimidate them and their families.

Two years ago, a lot of us on the Right were looking at Senator Obama and saying, “Look at who this man hangs out with, and look at how they operate”—and the response from the Left was outrage that we would try to “play politics” with something so obviously irrelevant. But as this shows, it wasn’t irrelevant. Barack Obama is a product of a political system that sees intimidation as a useful tool in its arsenal for getting its way, and he associates closely with people who think intimidation is a perfectly appropriate tactic to try to get their way; why would anyone be surprised by this? I won’t say I predicted it, but honestly, I should have.

If it isn’t surprising, though, it’s still cause for deep concern, as Erickson points out:

When it becomes fair game to attack and intimidate private citizens and their families to advance a public policy, we cross over from an orderly civil democracy to something decidedly third world.

Had these been tea parties instead of SEIU activists, this would be the front page story of the New York Times.

Going for the political jugular

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One doesn’t usually see this sort of willingness to scrap in Republican politicians. It’s a feisty and effective ad, and one which stands out from the usual run of political advertising in that it actually gives some sense of the candidate’s personality. (Pictures of candidates with family and dogs and/or doing heartwarming things don’t count; that’s just boilerplate.)

The odd thing, if I have my facts right, is that this guy is a primary challenger to a Republican incumbent—though a recent convert, Parker Griffith, who was elected in ’08 as a freshman Democrat. Interesting to see this sort of approach from someone who doesn’t even have his party’s nomination yet. It’s a good way to go, I think.

Song of the Week

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This song gets me every time.

Legacy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Vbi4nSrhRxo

I don’t mind if you’ve got something nice to say about me;
I enjoy an accolade like the rest.
You could take my picture, hang it in a gallery
Of all the Who’s Whos and So-and-Sos
That used to be the best at such-and-such;
It wouldn’t matter much.

I won’t lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights;
We all need an “Atta boy” or “Atta girl.”
But in the end I’d like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this world

I want to leave a legacy—
How will they remember me?
Did I choose to love?
Did I point to You enough
To make a mark on things?
I want to leave an offering
A child of mercy and grace
Who blessed your name unapologetically
And leave that kind of legacy.

I don’t have to look too far or too long a while
To make a lengthly list of all that I enjoy;
It’s an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile,
Where moth and rust, thieves and such
Will soon enough destroy.

Chorus

Not well traveled, not well read;
Not well-to-do, or well-bred;
Just want to hear instead,
“Well done, good and faithful one.”

Chorus

Words and music: Nichole Nordeman
© 2002 Ariose Music
From the album Woven & Spun, by Nichole Nordeman

Response to feetxxxl

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So on Friday, I put up a post which was sort of about homosexuality but not really; my primary interest was to use that argument to consider our popular theology of suffering, which from a biblical point of view is thoroughly deficient. Predictably, though, someone popped up to ignore the actual content of the post and mount a spirited if more than a little muddled defense of homosexual sex, at fair length—which I think served, ironically enough, rather more to reinforce my point than to challenge it. Much of the content of those comments, I’ll address in that thread; but there were a couple attempts at scriptural argument to which I wanted to respond at greater length.

to start with where is the “easy yoke and light burden” in your condemnation of homosexuality

The same place as in my condemnation of adultery, murder, gossip, lying, substance abuse, theft, cheating, idolatry, and every other sin. Jesus is not here saying that he will never ask us to struggle against our sin—after all, elsewhere, he says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s clearly not in view. Rather, he’s saying two things. One, to pull from a pastor down in Florida,

The word “easy” simply means “fit for use” or “fits well.” Consider for a moment—in context, a “yoke” was used to harness one ox to another for working the fields. Jesus, being the master carpenter knew how to build well-fitted yokes that eased the burden on the oxen.

Did a well-fitting yoke mean the oxen would no longer be doing the work of plowing the field? No. Did it mean they would no longer be constrained to go only where the driver of the team told them to go? No. What it meant was that there would be no unnecessary difficulty and no unnecessary pain for them as they plowed, because the guidance of the driver—Jesus, in this metaphor—would be well-fitted to their size and strength as he sought to accomplish his will through them.

Two, to say that Jesus’ burden is light is not to say that if we follow Jesus, we’ll never have to carry anything that’s hard to bear; that’s just not life in this world. It certainly wasn’t for his disciples, most of whom would die painful deaths for their faith. But you see, a yoke holds together two oxen; the key is not the size of the burden, but the one who bears it with us. What makes the burden light for anyone who takes up Jesus’ yoke is that the believer is yoked together with the Spirit of God, and the Spirit provides the strength to bear the burdens we have to bear—and to bear them lightly, for all that they would be heavy to bear on our own. To find Jesus’ yoke well-fitted and his burden light, we have to actually accept it and put it on.

the fruit of the spirit of galatians the essence of the spirit of christ and the 2nd commandment( love your neighbor….) the summation of all new covenant law(gal,romans)

This comment betrays a very poor understanding of Scripture. It may be willfully so, since this commenter is trying to argue for a version of Christianity that has no vertical component to holiness, only a horizontal one (which, of course, would leave everyone free to define the latter as it suits them, without reference to the biblical witness). Here’s what Jesus has to say about that:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.

You see, the first thing before all others is these: Love the Lord your God with absolutely everything that is in you. Commit yourself to him wholeheartedly, without reservation, and with absolutely nothing in your life that’s more important to you than him.

Put bluntly, then: if you aren’t willing to give up homosexual sex to follow Jesus, then you’re in violation of the greatest commandment. That’s idolatry, and it’s a sin.

Of course, this is also true of everything else, including many things which aren’t sinful, so in and of itself, it doesn’t prove that homosexual sex is sinful. However, I’ve never met anyone trying to argue from Scripture in favor of homosexual sex who did so disinterestedly, with no vested interest in the argument; everyone I’ve ever seen argue that position had an a priori commitment to demonstrating that the scriptural witness conformed to the position they wanted to take, and they would not accept or even consider the possibility that the Bible might flatly contradict them. As I’ve already said, it’s my observation that their refusal rested on one proposition which they would not allow to be challenged:

God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

They valued that more than they valued God; they would only accept a God of whom that statement could be true. That’s idolatry.

The Life of the World to Come

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(Joel 2:25-32; Acts 2:14-24, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11)

I heard a story once about a Scotsman who traveled down into England to visit some of the great English churches and listen to the great English preachers of the day. He was gone for a number of weeks, and came back shaking his head. When his friends asked him what was wrong, he declared that those English weren’t flying with both wings. That puzzled them, as you may imagine, and so they asked him what he meant; he responded, “I heard plenty of talk about Christ’s first coming, but nothing at all about his second.”

That Scotsman was on to something, I think. People tend either to focus very intensely on Christ’s second coming, or to pretty much ignore it. Again, it seems to me that reaction plays a part in this; we in the church have an unfortunate tendency to be embarrassed by our brothers and sisters who don’t do things the way we do, and to react against them, which usually results in our throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Here, you may remember a little book by a man named Edgar Whisenant entitled 88 Reasons Why Christ will Return in 1988; he even doubled down the next year with a sequel, 89 Reasons Why Christ will Return in 1989. Of course, Whisenant was wrong both times, and made a lot of people look and feel foolish—and it’s a very natural human response to go to the opposite extreme and just say, “Well, I’m not going to think about that anymore.” This is unfortunate, because it reinforces a tendency that’s there anyway to think of our lives and the church and the political situation in this-worldly terms, and thus to overstate the importance of worldly success, worldly victories, and worldly methods.

When we affirm our faith by saying the creed together, we end by declaring our belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, and that’s no afterthought. That’s nothing tacked-on. It is, in fact, every bit as essential to our faith as everything else we affirm. We miss that because we tend to think of it, again, in earthly terms as just the reward for being good and living a good life—as if God’s telling us, “You be nice and eat your broccoli in this life, and you’ll get dessert when I’m ready to give it to you.” Certainly, bribery can be very effective, as I’ve found with my own kids, but that’s really not what this is about at all. Rather, this is about the logical conclusion and completion of the life we live on this earth—our resurrected life in the kingdom of God, in the new heavens and the new earth, will be the same life we now live in Christ, only more so. It will be the new life he has given us with all the sin we still struggle with and all the pain we still bear finally removed, completely, from the picture. What we’re on about in this world is preparation for what’s coming.

This is, incidentally, the answer to those who insist that a good God wouldn’t keep anyone out of heaven. If you view heaven as nothing more than a giant party that anyone and everyone would enjoy, then the question, “Why would God keep anyone out? Isn’t he merciful?” appears to have some force. The truth is, though, that life in the kingdom of God will be the distillation of everything that those who reject God are unwilling to accept. Some years ago, I was talking with an atheist acquaintance of mine and he decided to go after me a little bit on this point; I looked at him and said, “I thought you don’t believe in God.” He said, “I don’t.” I asked him, “Would you want to spend eternity with God?” He said, “If God actually existed, no, I wouldn’t.” I said, “Well, that’s what heaven is; if you don’t want to go to heaven, why should God make you?” He looked at me for a moment and changed the subject.

The key here is that those of us who are in Christ and now live by the Holy Spirit are already living eternal life, however imperfectly we may realize it at times; the life of the world to come is not a separate thing, but an integral part of our life now. We don’t simply live in the present—we live in the future, too. Our life comes from the future, from the coming kingdom of God which is breaking into the kingdoms of this world—in us, the people of God. In us, the future kingdom of God is present, the rule of God is exercised, the authority of God in and over this world is proclaimed. We are ambassadors from the future to the present, and the life God calls us to live only makes sense if we see it in that perspective.

Put another way, what we need to understand is that biblically, we are in the last days. We don’t tend to think of it that way; when we talk about the last days, we tend to think of a very short period of time right before Jesus comes again. The Bible doesn’t do that, though. Take a look at Joel 2, at the passage Bryan read a few minutes ago. This is describing the last days, the final blessing of God on his people, the great and dreadful day of the LORD, attended by all sorts of apocalyptic events, and ultimately by judgment. He’s clearly looking forward to things we have not experienced. But then look at Acts 2, as Peter stands up to tell the crowd in the temple what they’re seeing: he starts with this passage from Joel. You’ll note that Acts even uses the phrase “in the last days” in its translation of the prophet’s message. What the crowd needs to understand, Peter tells them, is that what they’re seeing isn’t anything they can explain on the basis of their own experience, because the world has changed: the last days that Joel predicted have arrived, and the new thing God promised has begun to happen.

Now, if biblically speaking, we’re in the last days, what does that mean? Obviously the prophecy of Joel has only been partly fulfilled; things that the prophet puts right together have so far been separated by almost two thousand years. You might say that we’re still waiting for the last last days. So this isn’t a statement about the end of the world being right around the corner; people keep thinking it might be, but so far, it hasn’t happened. The point is more this: in God’s time, it will happen, and we don’t know when that will be—and for that matter, many of us will die before then, which will be the end of the world for us, and we don’t know when that will be, either—but whenever it comes, that’s the end toward which we’re moving, when everything God has begun in us will be completed and fulfilled. That’s the destination of our journey, the purpose of our calling, the goal that will make sense of everything along the way.

To live in the last days, and to live in the understanding that we’re in the last days, is to live with that orientation and that focus: toward the future, toward dying and being reborn, toward the kingdom of God. It’s to live with the understanding that, if you will, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas, because what happens in the present is primarily important for the effects it will have in the future; what we do in this world matters, and this world itself matters, not because it’s all there is but because it isn’t. What matters isn’t the things, and the worldly victories, and the worldly praise; rather, what matters is what will endure: the people we meet, the truth we speak, the lessons we learn, the love we give—and of course, the ones we don’t, as well. In the end, if we shut people out, if we refuse to speak or to hear truth, if we withhold love, for whatever reason, the only person we impoverish is ourselves. If we focus our attention, our concern, our efforts, on the things the world values, such as money and power, we may get the rewards the world has to offer (or we may not), but when this world goes, they’ll be gone. As Sara’s Grandpa Van used to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead”—and it’s only what you send on ahead that will last.

Again, the key is that the life of the world to come isn’t just for the future, it’s the life we have now; this is why, as Paul says, we are not of the night or of the darkness, but are children of the light who belong to the day. And this is why we have hope, and why life makes sense, and why death is something that can be borne without despair; and this is why James can tell us to rejoice when we encounter various trials, and why Jesus can say, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” If this world and this life are all there is, then those things don’t make any sense; it’s all well and good for James to declare that “the testing of your faith produces steadfastness,” but is that really worth the price you pay for it? If this life were all there is, probably not; but Jesus says, “Rejoice and be glad”—why?—“because your reward is great in heaven.”

We don’t do what’s right for the sake of reward, or at least I hope we don’t; and there are far better reasons to follow Jesus than financial calculation. He wants us to do what’s right, he wants us to follow him, because we love him and we know how good he is and we recognize what an incredible thing he did for us and what an incredible gift he gave us. He wants us to walk with him because there’s no better thing to do and no better place to be. But there needs to be a reward—justice demands it. There needs to be a reward for those who serve others selflessly and without recognition, for those who do the thankless jobs without complaint or resentment, for those who spend years ministering to others and sharing the gospel and see no fruit for their work; and there needs to be a balancing of the scales for all the suffering of this life. Yes, God uses our suffering for good in our lives and in the lives of those around us, but—there just needs to be more than that. I’ve been thinking about this talking to Pam Chastain this week, thinking about the suffering of David’s foster mother, who has been dying a most unpleasant and prolonged death; it made me think of my grandfather, who spent eight years dying by inches, and various family members in the grip of Alzheimer’s. It’s easy to dismiss them with phrases like “no quality of life,” but much as we might see no reason for them to stay alive, God obviously does. Which means, it seems to me, that there has to be some good for them in it somehow. There needs to be something that makes it worthwhile, that makes everything all right.

And so we are promised our reward, not as a bribe, but as our assurance that the Judge of all the earth will do right. We are promised the resurrection from the dead—not some sort of ethereal existence as spirits floating around on clouds playing harps, but our whole selves, body and spirit, raised from the dead, perfected, the way they were supposed to be, with everything made right. We are promised the new heavens and the new earth, re-created, purified, made right. We’re promised a new life in a new-made world, all the best things about this life with all the darkness and sadness and pain and grief and loss and struggle and sin gone forever.

And we’re promised, most of all, that for which we were made most of all: life with God. There will be no separation between us and him; we will see him clearly, with nothing to obscure our view or confuse our understanding. We will live forever in the presence of the one who is the source of all goodness and beauty and joy and pleasure, including all that is good and right and true in us, and who loves us more than anyone else ever will or ever can. There will be no more doubt and no more fear; there will be no more need for faith, for we will see him face to face and know beyond any question that he is with us, and no more need for hope, because we will have every perfect blessing and all good things. Paul says that these three things remain, faith, hope, and love, and that the greatest of these is love; that’s because the time will come when even faith and hope will have fulfilled their purpose, and only love will remain. Only perfect love, the love of God. This is our promise; this is our reward; this is what everything else is for. This is what we live for, and it’s why we worship; it’s what God created us for, and it’s why we’re here.

Homosexuality and the theology of suffering

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It seems to me that all the theological arguments in support of the proposition that homosexual sex isn’t sinful boil down, ultimately, to one assertion:

God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

That’s really the bottom line right there, I think. All of the irrelevant arguments* about genetics are simply efforts to reinforce the second half of that sentence, to convince people that not acting on homosexual desires really is that hard and that painful. And yes, I do think this is the bottom line both for those who have desires and for those who don’t but who support the pro-homosex position—such folks would, on my observation, affirm this for themselves, and so they’re being logically and morally consistent in affirming that this must be true for others as well. (In that respect, I must admit they have a certain moral superiority to many who uphold the scriptural prohibition of homosexual activity, who are simply holding others to a moral standard which they would never dream of applying to themselves. The divorce rate among self-identified evangelicals bears eloquent witness to that.) In our suffering-averse, death-avoiding culture, I suspect you would find overwhelming agreement with this proposition: “God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.”

To which I can only say: You have no idea. Our difficulty squaring a loving God with one who allows us to suffer—indeed, who actively sends us trials and uses suffering and struggle (and, yes, failure) for our growth—is ours, not the Bible’s. Consider how God tried Abraham, Ezekiel, Hosea, Job; consider how he answered the disobedience of Jonah; consider how he rewarded the faithful witness of Paul. Consider the testimony of Hebrews 11, which offers this summation of the life of faith:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

And ultimately, consider Christ, and the suffering God willingly endured for us. We have a hard time when James says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,” but to him, it makes perfect sense: “for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” His priorities are not our priorities, and indeed, God’s priorities are not our priorities; we’re focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain—not necessarily in a crude, hedonistic sense, but even if the pleasures we value are intellectual and rarified, it doesn’t change the basic equation—while God is on about something else entirely in our lives.

For the sake of argument, grant everything the advocates of same-sex marriage and ordination of those who practice homosexual sex and the full societal normalization of homosexual practices claim and declare and argue about homosexual desire—grant it all, every last contention and conclusion, and set it against the biblical texts. Does it justify setting aside the historic interpretation of Scripture that homosexual practices are sinful? No, it doesn’t, because God doesn’t let us off that easily.

Indeed, as much as our culture tends to fixate on sex in various ways, and as powerful as our sexual desires and drives are, they aren’t our deepest or most fundamental desires, and they don’t fuel our strongest or most elemental temptations. When Paul references homosexual practice in Romans 1, it’s in the course of making a greater point about a deeper, more fundamental and more powerful temptation: the temptation to idolatry. Unfortunately, the 21st-century American church largely hasn’t followed him there, and thus hasn’t even confronted the lesson it truly needs to learn from that, which isn’t about sex at all: it is, rather, that yes, God could and does want me to do something that hard and that painful. He wants me to take everything, right down to the thing I most desperately do not want to give up—whatever that may be—and lay it at his feet in total self-surrender.

And here’s the kicker: he wants me to do it joyfully, and in fact he gives me every reason to do it joyfully; he wants me to lay it all down, as hard and as painful as it will be, because he has something far better to give me in return. In exchange for my life, he gives me his, which is a life that can face trials and sufferings and still sing hymns of praise from a jail cell at midnight. It’s a life that can see pain, and even struggles with temptation, not as something to be avoided or something of which we should only be expected to take so much, but rather as an opportunity to know the grace of Christ and share in his ministry.

*I say these arguments are irrelevant because they commit, ironically enough, the genetic fallacy. Desires are neither stronger nor more justifiable, nor for that matter more expressive of our sense of our own identity, for being genetic rather than the product of our experience and the choices we have made. Whatever conclusions one may draw about a neurological and neurochemical component to homosexual desires, and whatever answer one may offer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether that component is cause or effect of those desires (or, for that matter, stands in some other relation altogether to them), the whole matter is logically irrelevant to the question of what any given individual ought to do with those desires. Whatever their source, the desires exist, and they are what they are, and they must be considered on that basis. The rest is all so much smoke.

Why can’t we vote these people out before the ethics charges?

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Two weeks ago today, I cast my GOP primary vote here in Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District for Bob Thomas, who I thought had a real chance to beat the incumbent, Rep. Mark Souder. Ever since moving here, I’ve been hearing Rep. Souder denounced—by conservatives, mind you—as the worst sort of Republican; the only reason he won re-election last time around is that people held their noses and marked his name to beat his pro-card-check Democratic opponent. If Republican voters around here had felt they had the luxury of throwing away a Republican vote in the House, they would have sent him home. Running up to the primary, there was an anti-Souder direct mail campaign going, and anti-Souder TV ads . . . unfortunately, there were also too many challengers, and he took the primary with a plurality. I thought Thomas had a chance to win because he had the money to advertise, but the best he could do was a third of the vote, and that wasn’t good enough; Rep. Souder won.

IN-3 looks pretty stupid for that now.

Eight-term Rep. Mark Souder will announce his resignation Tuesday after it came to light that he was conducting an affair with a female aide who worked in his district office, Fox News has learned.

Multiple senior House sources indicated that the extent of the affair with the 45-year-old staffer would have landed Souder before the House Ethics Committee.

You know, if all the conservative challengers had been willing to get together, unite behind one of their number, and focus on the big picture rather than trying to grab the brass ring for themselves, we wouldn’t be in this mess. If conservatives can’t even put principle ahead of personal gain at this level, how in the name of all that is right and good are we ever going to reform this blasted party?

Man, I hope Chuck DeVore is paying attention . . .

The culture of death and the death of culture

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In an excellent short essay in the latest issue of The City, Baylor’s Francis J. Beckwith responds to a Washington Post column by one T. R. Reid claiming that ObamaPelosiCare would reduce the number of abortions. His evidence? There are more abortions per thousand women in the U.S. than in countries like Denmark, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Of course, the birth rate’s also quite a bit higher in the U.S. than in those countries, so his choice of statistic is more than a little disingenuous. But then, as Dr. Beckwith points out, there’s also a much deeper and more profound problem with Reid’s argument:

The prolife position is not merely about “reducing the number of abortions,” though that is certainly a consequence that all prolifers should welcome. Rather, the prolife position is the moral and political belief that all members of the human community are intrinsically valuable and thus are entitled to the protection of the laws. “Reducing the number of abortions” may happen in a regime in which this belief is denied, and that is the regime that the liberal supporters of universal health coverage want to preserve and want prolifers to help subsidize. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of the postnatal. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts by trying to pacify and accommodate the needs of those who want to procure abortions—physicians, mothers, and fathers—only reinforces the idea that the unborn are objects whose value depends exclusively on our wanting them.

A culture that has fewer abortions because its citizens have, in the words of John Lennon, “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” is a sad, dying, empty culture. Mr. Reid seems to think being prolife is just about instituting policies that result in fewer abortions. But it’s not. It’s about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one’s heritage to one’s legacy.

As Dr. Beckwith points out, that cultural emptiness—we might say, the absence of a strong pro-life impulse—has profound negative consequences:

What is going on in these nations is a shared understanding among its citizenry about the nature of its culture and its progeny: our civilization’s future and the generations required to people it are not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for each nation believes that its traditions, customs, and what remains of its faith are not worthy of being preserved, developed, and shared outside of the populace that currently occupies its borders. In practical terms, this means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans older than 55 will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly.

So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, non-voluntary, and voluntary euthanasia will certainly become the great cost containers (or as they say more candidly in Alaska, “death panels”).

That’s about it. At its heart, the pro-abortion position is a bet on power; the abortion regime is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority, the powerful abusing the powerless because they can and it suits them. Even the weakest and most powerless women are still infinitely powerful by comparison to their unborn children; and of course, many children are aborted not because women desire the abortion but because they are coerced into it by someone else, usually by the father of the child. Though there are exceptions, almost all abortions are essentially matters of convenience for somebody, driven by the unwillingness to sacrifice pleasures in the present for the sake of the future, and the refusal to allow the self to diminish so that someone else may grow.

This is malignant individualism, a cancer of the ego; and it is not only destructive of human life insofar as it drives the abortion mills, it is also destructive of human flourishing on a broader scale, because it is absolutely inimical to any sort of healthy culture. True growth depends on the willingness to sacrifice, or at least invest, the present for the sake of the future; true culture, healthy culture, arises out of love of life and openness to life, even when that love and that openness carry with them a real cost. To choose abortion is to choose the opposite: rather than choosing life at the cost of one’s convenience, comfort and pleasures, it is to choose death for the sake of protecting one’s pleasures, convenience and comfort. That may be pleasing in the short term, but in the long term, no good can come of it.