Author: Lee M.

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.

Sang this one at church yesterday. (Although, for the record, I’m not crazy about this newfangled practice of conflating Palm Sunday and “Passion Sunday.” People can go to church on Good Friday, dammit! UPDATE: I realize that in one sense it makes perfect sense to observe Passion Sunday as inagurating Holy Week. Though until, I believe, Vatican II “Passion Sunday” marked the beginning of Passiontide – i.e. two weeks leading up to Easter. In any event, what annoys me is cramming the Passion reading into the Palm Sunday service so people don’t need to come to Good Friday services. End of gripe.)

Alas! and did my Savior bleed,
and did my Sovereign die!
Would he devote that sacred head
for sinners such as I?

Was it for crimes that I have done,
he groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide,
and shut its glories in,
when God, the mighty maker,
died for his own creature’s sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
while his dear cross appears;
dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
and melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of tears can ne’er repay
the debt of love I owe.
Here, Lord, I give myself away;
’tis all that I can do.

—Isaac Watts

Here’s an article in the Guardian (via Get Religion) by two British Anglicans urging the Left to realize that it has religious allies and not to cede religious faith to the Right:

Even comparatively recently things were looking up for the religious left. Tony Blair is a member of the Christian socialist movement and in Rowan Williams the Church of England has a self-confessed “bearded lefty” at the top. Yet instead of a renaissance there has been a decline. The Archbishop of Canterbury is now a virtual prisoner of the religious right. And Labour Christians seem silent and impotent. How did we get to here?

In the first place, the religious left has found itself constantly challenged by the secular left. Whilst the religious right and neo-conservatives have worked together, progressives have split and split again. Blair is too embarrassed to talk the language of faith because he knows it would alienate his allies. Some object to religion on principle. Others insist that a Christian response is inevitably intolerant, exclusive, even racist. So left secularists welcomed Jubilee 2000 but ignored the fact that the Jubilee is a biblical concept.

But progressive Christians also seem incapable of confronting the religious right on its own terms. Jesus offered a political manifesto that emphasised non-violence, social justice and the redistribution of wealth – yet all this is drowned out by those who use the text to justify a narrow, authoritarian and morally judgmental form of social respectability. The irony is that the religious right and the secular left have effectively joined forces to promote the idea that the Bible is reactionary. For the secular left, the more the Bible can be described in this way, the easier it is to rubbish. Thus the religious right is free to claim a monopoly on Christianity. And the Christian left, hounded from both sides, finds itself shouted into silence.

One thing that goes unmentioned in the piece is that there might be substantive differences between the “religious Left” and the “secular Left.” Abp. Williams, for instance, is probably rightly considered a man of the Left, but he also opposes abortion and euthanasia. And Williams and Tony Blair are diametrically opposed on the issue of Iraq. What is the Left-Christian position on war and intervention?

If Christians are going to enter into political coalitions (and it’s probably inevitable that they will), should they cede the determination of policy to their secular allies, with Christians just supplying a religious patina for whatever policies are adopted on secular grounds? Or should they contribute to informing those policies with a distinctively Christian vision?

Charles Krauthammer detects a double standard:

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he’s left office, and becomes a human rights hero — a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing — Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons — nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America’s courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

Now, I can’t speak for what “the left” thinks about anything, but I opposed the Iraq war not because I opposed bringing Saddam to justice, but because the way in which it was proposed to do it has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. But Krauthammer makes it sound as though “removing” Saddam was basically the same as arresting Pinochet.

Suppose the police are pursuing a dangerous criminal and he runs into an apartment building full of people. Would we praise the police for heroism if, to get the criminal, they dropped a bomb on the apartment building, killing all the inhabitants inside?

Today Camassia linked to this post from Rilina comparing Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics and J. H. Yoder’s Politics of Jesus. Rilina is dismayed by what s/he perceives as Wallis’ tendency to subordinate the core of Christianity to a progressive political agenda:

What’s missing is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Really. I spluttered when I finally realized what was bothering me about the book. Wallis refers often to Jesus’s teachings; the Beatitudes in particular get a good deal of play. But he never talks about how Jesus lived, why Jesus died, and what the resurrection might mean in that context. In fact, I could only find two places where Wallis even touches upon the narrative of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The first was, ironically enough, a place where Wallis calls President Bush on misusing biblical language by using the following snippet from a hymn, “power, power, wonder-working power,” in a speech. Bush used the quote to describe the power of the American people. But that actual hymn refers to the “power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb.” But Wallis doesn’t go on, unfortunately, to further dissect the significance of salvation or the crucifixion–even though Christ’s death on the cross was a hugely political act that Christians are explicitly called to imitate. Wallis just goes, “Shame on you, Bush, for coopting the language of salvation!” Later, the resurrection comes up when Wallis asserts his belief in a literal resurrection (pg 349). But the assertion isn’t followed by any discussion of the implications of that belief for his political /activist beliefs.

In contrast to the absence of the life of the Jesus, we get huge swaths of the book devoted to the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. This makes sense from some perspectives; King was an activist religious figure who led a hugely important social change movement. But what is the best thing Christianity can offer society? Martin Luther King Jr. or Jesus Christ? Progressive social change or salvation and all that salvation entails?

I still haven’t gotten around to reading my copy of GP, but when I saw Wallis speak a couple months ago I did detect what I thought was a certain ambiguity in his position:

Something that remains unclear to me (and maybe this will become clearer as I read Wallis’ book) is to what extent he is proposing a distinctively Christian political stance rather than re-casting traditional liberal/progressive politics in Christian language.

Rilina contrasts Yoder’s emphasis on faithfulness with Wallis’ emphasis on results. Whether this is fair to Wallis I will abstain from judging til after I’ve read the book. Though I definitely want to avoid any straightforward identification of Christianity with “progressivism” (or “conservatism,” or any worldly ideology).

(On an interesting side note, when I talked to Wallis briefly at the book signing he mentioned that Yoder was one of his greatest mentors.)