Month: March 2005

Another item from today’s Inquirer: Santorum shifting on a key issue:

Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa), a longtime supporter of the death penalty, says he is reexamining his stance but not to the point of saying it is wrong in all cases.

“I still support the death penalty, but what I’m suggesting is, number one, we have to be more cautious,” he said Tuesday, saying capital punishment should be limited to the “most horrific and heinous of crimes.”

Santorum, who is running for a third term, said he was “not saying that I fundamentally believe the death penalty is wrong.”

In an interview published in Tuesday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Santorum, a Roman Catholic, said he agreed with the Pope that the use of the death penalty should be limited.

Some thoughts:

• The Catholic bishops have recently stepped up their advocacy for ending the death penalty. Is Santorum worried about getting the Kerry treatment in ’06?
• Bob Casey, Jr. is both anti-abortion and anti-death penalty. Does Santorum thinks that this consistent ethic of life approach will play well with voters?
• What does it really matter if a U.S. Senator is against the death penalty anyway? Federal death penalty cases are rare, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the states can deploy it pretty much at their discretion (with certain exceptions like juveniles).

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens in a little over a month. They have a pretty nifty website here.

(One question: where is Zaphod’s second head??)

The Inquirer has an article this morning discussing various religious groups’ responses to the Schiavo case. As you might expect, Philadelphia’s Cardinal Justin Rigali condemns the removal of Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube as an unequivocally “evil” act. Reform Rabbi and medical ethicist Mark Washofsky said “A person need not be at the doorway of death to decide medical therapy is not justifiable and… doesn’t belong.” On the other hand, Msgr. Kevin McMahon, professor of moral theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, pointed out that “you are discontinuing nutrition and hydration to someone who is not dying. You are introducing the cause of death. You are killing somebody, and killing is evil.”

Then we get this from Eileen Lindner, identified as “an official at the National Council of Churches”:

“The church might give guidelines,” Lindner said, “but in the end, my conscience must be guided by my own notions of God. That’s what the Protestant Reformation was about.”

(That scraping sound you hear is Martin Luther and John Calvin rolling over in their graves, by the way.)

Really? “My own notions of God”? And where might I get those notions? Not from any mainline Protestant church since the Reformation was all about individualism and freedom of conscience apparently. It was not, contrary to what some might be tempted to think, about reforming the church to bring it back in line with the catholic faith from which the Reformers believed the Medieval church had departed.

If Ms. Lindner’s understanding of the Reformation reigns at the NCC, we’re in worse shape than I thought.

Speaking of the Schiavo case, in today’s Inquirer analyst Dick Polman writes that it’s emblematic of the GOP’s shift from the party of limited government to the party of using the federal government to enforce a particular morality:

Barry Goldwater said in 1964, “I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow.” Ronald Reagan said in 1975, “The basis of conservatism is a desire for less governmental interference, or less centralized authority.” And Newt Gingrich vowed in 1994 that a Republican Congress would hasten “the end of government that is too big, too intrusive.”

But today, as evidenced by the Republican Congress’ intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, it’s clear that the traditional conservative credo no longer guides the GOP. The core mission has radically changed during the Bush era. “Small government” and “state’s rights” are out; wielding federal power to advance moral issues at the local level is in.

Now, there’s an entire of genre of analysis, going back, say, ten years or so, in which liberals, who would never be caught dead voting Republican, attempt to rescue the lovable old GOP from horrible Christian Rightists and steer it back to the noble legacy of Goldwater and Reagan. Never mind that Goldwater and Reagan were denounced as fascists and extremists in their day!

But more to the point, has the GOP ever been the party of limited government? From its very inception it was dedicated to “wielding federal power to advance moral issues at the local level” (we call that Civil War and Reconstruction!). The rhetoric of Reagan was largely just that (as even most conservatives now concede). The priorities of the GOP when in power have usually been tax cuts, huge increases in military spending, pork and corporate welfare, and modest cuts in programs for the poor. Combine this with a lot of mostly empty rhetoric on family values and you’ve got a recipe for electoral success! But little principled devotion to limited government or genuine federalism and localism.

I have nothing of substance to add to the debate (there’s plenty of that elsewhere). I did think this article today at Slate was pretty good. It’s by Harriet McBryde Johnson who is a disability-rights lawyer in South Carolina.

One thing in particular she says is worth highlighting:

Despite the unseemly Palm Sunday pontificating in Congress, the legislation enabling Ms. Schiavo’s parents to sue did not take sides in the so-called culture wars. It did not dictate that Ms. Schiavo be fed. It simply created a procedure whereby the federal courts could decide whether Ms. Schiavo’s federally protected rights have been violated.

In the Senate, a key supporter of a federal remedy was Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a progressive Democrat and longtime friend of labor and civil rights, including disability rights. Harkin told reporters, “There are a lot of people in the shadows, all over this country, who are incapacitated because of a disability, and many times there is no one to speak for them, and it is hard to determine what their wishes really are or were. So I think there ought to be a broader type of a proceeding that would apply to people in similar circumstances who are incapacitated.”

I hope against hope that I will never be one of those people in the shadows, that I will always, one way or another, be able to make my wishes known. I hope that I will not outlive my usefulness or my capacity (at least occasionally) to amuse the people around me. But if it happens otherwise, I hope whoever is appointed to speak for me will be subject to legal constraints. Even if my guardian thinks I’d be better off dead—even if I think so myself—I hope to live and die in a world that recognizes that killing, even of people with the most severe disabilities, is a matter of more than private concern.

Clearly, Congress’s Palm Sunday legislation was not the “broader type of proceeding” Harkin and I want. It does not define when and how federal court review will be available to all of those in the shadows, but rather provides a procedure for one case only. To create a general system of review, applicable whenever life-and-death decisions intersect with disability rights, will require a reasoned, informed debate unlike what we’ve had until now. It will take time. But in the Schiavo case, time is running out.

I’ve been reading Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism in which Radosh discusses the views of the “isolationist” conservatives of the World War I & II eras. The book, a sympathetic portrayal of its subjects, was written during Radosh’s “New Left” phase, before he went neocon and started writing for David Horowitz’s Front Page Mag. Radosh even collaborated for a while with libertarian isolationist Murray Rothbard on the short-lived journal Left and Right. The book jacket actually has a postivie blurb from Horowitz (still in his New Left phase at the time) and Horowitz’s bête noire Noam Chomsky!

Anyway, in the chapter on historian Charles Beard, Radosh writes:

Beard supported Herbert Hoover’s definition of national defense: the armed forces existed only to prevent an invasion of the mainland. The armed forces had to protect the nation’s continental heritage, not move to defend the American dollar wherever it happened to be threatened. (p. 21)

That Herbert Hoover! What was he, some kind of America-hating peacenik?

Interesting article detailing how left-right coalitions have passed several local environmentally friendly measures.

Environmental issues, especially at the state and local levels, are bringing together conservatives and liberals who agree on little else, providing common ground in an increasingly polarized nation.

One of the benefits of federalism and localism is that local politics seem to be less driven by these grand ideological divides and more amenable to compromise. It’s a lot harder to demonize people who are your neigbors or the parents of your kids’ friends.

Conservatives such as pro-gun hunters and antiabortion evangelicals are making common cause with pro-abortion-rights, gun-control liberals on land conservation, pollution, and endangered-species protection.

“We’ve heard a lot about the death of environmentalism, but I think what we’re seeing is the rebirth of environmentalism. We’re going back to where we were in the 1970s,” said Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters. “We’re building a populist movement.”

[…]

“You have a new politics overlaid on the old that talks about the environment,” said Robert J. Brulle, associate professor of sociology and environmental policy at Drexel University. “About 70 percent of the issues still break down along the old lines, but for 30 or 40 percent of them, the traditional left-right dichotomy doesn’t work anymore.

“The strangest bedfellows I’ve ever seen are Earth Firsters and evangelical Christians.”

The piece highlights how “red state” voters and evangelical Christians in particular are taking a much more active interest in environmental issues:

In “red” Montana, voters rejected a proposal to repeal a 1998 ban on cyanide leaching, a gold-mining method. The debate pitted concerns about water pollution against proffered economic gains from mining.

Colorado voters, who put their state in the “red” column for Bush, also approved a measure requiring electric utilities to obtain 10 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2015. And they elected a Democratic U.S. senator, Ken Salazar, whose slogan was “our land, our water, our people.”

In conservative Gwinnett County, Ga., where 66 percent of voters picked Bush, voters by the same margin approved a one-cent sales-tax increase to pay for $85 million to protect open space. In Indian River County, Fla., voters went overwhelmingly (61 percent) for Bush, and even more overwhelmingly (67 percent) for spending $50 million to preserve open space. Nationwide, 162 of a record 217 land-preservation ballot measures were approved, according to the Trust for Public Land, a land conservation organization.

Denver-area voters approved a $4.7 billion mass-transit plan to vastly expand the region’s commuter-rail system and pay for it with a 0.4-cent sales-tax increase. Around the country, 23 of 31 transit-ballot measures passed.

[…]

And most evangelical Christians, a pivotal conservative group for Bush in the last election, say they favor strict rules to protect the environment even if they cost jobs or result in higher prices, according to the 2004 National Survey of Religion and Politics.

“Evangelicals are more sympathetic to the environmental movement than people think,” said Rich Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. “The stereotype of evangelicals is that we’re all sitting at home reading Left Behind or out pillaging and plundering the environment. That’s just not the case.”

[…]

Conservative voters who typically oppose increased government spending or tax increases often support spending for land preservation because it “delivers tangible results, close to home,” said Ernest Cook, senior vice president and director of conservation finance for the Trust for Public Land.

He noted that 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing counties voted for Bush last November but that many of those same counties recognize “a great need to set aside land for conservation purposes.”

Seems to me that conservation should be a bedrock value of conservatives, since they are in favor of preserving the patrimony that has been handed down to us. And just as Christians should want to honor and protect God’s creation, a patriot should want to preserve the beauty of the American land.

Michael Gilleland (you do read his blog, right?) has a great quote on reading from M. Somerset Maugham.

Speaking of the Passion, the sermon preached by our associate pastor yesterday made what I thought were some very good points, and some that I was less sure about. She started off by noting that we in the advanced industrialized West aren’t all that good at dealing with suffering. She attributed this to the fact that our prosperity and technology enable us to go through at least large swaths of life relatively insulated from the kind of suffering that folks elsewhere in the world are all too familiar with. The idea that we can somehow totally abolish suffering from human life is a pernicious illusion that blinds us to important features of reality.

This strikes me as right, and importantly so. Not only do I think our obsession with insulating ourselves from suffering is ultimately doomed to failure, it also tends to be used to justify a great deal of evil inflicted upon others. War, abortion, economic exploitation, euthanasia, etc. have all been justified as part of the grand plan to eliminate suffering.

Our pastor then went on to talk about how Jesus’ Passion teaches us about the true nature of suffering. It’s here, though, that things started to get a little murky, I thought. She said that Christianity teaches that “suffering is redemptive.” Now, I certainly agree that the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are redemptive, but is suffering per se, or even generally, redemptive? On the contrary, it seems to me that suffering, considered in and of itself, is intrinsically bad. After all, isn’t the promise of the Gospel that God will “wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more: the first things are passed away”? (Rev. 21:4) The fact that God can bring good out of evil does not make evil good, I would think.

The attitude of the NT seems to be that suffering is something Christians endure for the sake of following Jesus, but not necessarily that it’s something redemptive in itself. Followers of Jesus should certainly expect suffering, but not seek it out. And Paul says that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us,” (Rom. 8:18) which seems to indicate that they are relatively unimportant.

I think part of the issue at hand is that we moderns tend to take human suffering to be a much bigger theological problem than the ancients did. Entire theologies have been written to show that the whole point of the Gospel is that God “identifies with us in our sufferings.” I don’t want to deny that this is a part of the story of redemption, but focusing on it tends to obscure the elements that cast us in a less than flattering light. If God’s purpose is to identify with us in our sufferings, it means that we’re the victims and the onus is somehow on God to do something about the situation. But in the traditional understanding of the Passion, God is the victim (literally!) and we are the victimizers. In fact, to say that “suffering is redemptive” may in a way tend to exculpate us from complicity in Jesus’ death. Rather than a crime visited on the Son of God, it becomes an illustration of a general truth offered for our edification.

(In fairness to my pastor I may be reading way too much into what she said. Regardless, I think the idea that “suffering is redemptive” has enough general currency that it’s worth thinking about.)

That seems to have been the message of such anti-war demonstrations as there were this weekend to mark the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. As an opponent of the war I might be expected to sympathize with this message, but I’m far from certain that this would be the best course of action.

Relevant concerns include whether a withdrawal would lead to (more) chaos and perhaps a civil war. It doesn’t seem that domestic Iraqi security forces are anywhere near to being up to speed to maintain order.

Now it would be nice to send in a multilateral UN-sponsored force to oversee the transition to full Iraqi autonomy, but it ain’t gonna happen. Other countries aren’t exactly itching to send troops in (and who can blame them?). Much as it pains me every time more U.S. troops are killed, I’m not sure that staying on isn’t the best available option at this point.