Civil War?

One of the very conservative columnists I frequently like, Dennie Prager, has sounded the battle alarm over Obamacare as a major event. Agree or disagree, it’s well-framed.

One of his points: “Our motto: ‘The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.'” Yes, that’s probably true. But in a regime that flirts with strict “separation of Church and State,” the Church (and other mediating structures that empower people – this is the best link I can find on that on the fly) are diminished, too. And I’m not sure that individual citizens can ever be “big” without human-scale institutions – i.e., something smaller than government.

Culture war update

My posting that used my spiritual doppelganger Frank Schaeffer as a launching pad was in the works for several days, but coincidentally, the AOI blog featured Schaeffer’s odd behavior as its centerpiece just a day later.

I underestimated the depth of the problem, having only sampled what Schaeffer offers to wallow in. There’s something seriously wrong when an Orthodox Christian of Schaeffer’s reported status can write this generally and this in particular:

The [Manhattan] declaration was the brainchild of a far right Reconstructionist extremist, Roman Catholic scholar, Robert P. George. George is a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and probably the most influential Reconstructionist thinker to try to derail our democracy … Of course George would disavow being called a Reconstructionist. Rather he would claim he’s an advocate of the so-called Natural Law school of Roman Catholic theology.

Well, yes, Frank: George would deny being a Reconstructionist. Because he isn’t one. And he’d claim the Natural Law mantle. Because it fits.

And if you don’t know that, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re an idiot. (Shall I write that slower? You. Are. An. Idiot.)

Or as George put it:

I remember meeting him [Schaeffer] only once. Admittedly, it was a memorable experience. We were on a panel together at Princeton discussing contemporary politics in the midst of the 2008 presidential election. I knew nothing about the man, but he immediately struck me as an odd and, frankly, somewhat creepily emotive character who, as they say, “had issues.” He seemed pathetically desperate to be important or, at least, to be regarded as important in elite intellectual circles. I’ll leave it to the psychiatrists to decide whether this had to do with his being reared by fundamentalist Christian parents, a fact which, for some reason, he insisted on making a very big deal out of in his remarks. His speech was an emotional tirade that was perhaps the most self-referential piece of oratory I’ve ever heard. It was, you see, all about . . . him! We were supposed to be talking about the election, but what the audience got from Frank Schaeffer was autobiography—an account of the life and deeds of Frank Schaeffer. (Evidently, he was once himself connected to those dreadful right-wing fundamentlists until he “realized just how anti-American they are,” which led him to forums like the the Rachel Maddow Show and the Huffington Post where he warns the Enlightened about the nefarious plans of his former comrades in arms “to derail democracy.”) It was so painfully embarrassing that even people on his side (that would be the pro-Obama side) were rolling their eyes to make clear to the rest of us that they found his behavior as peculiar and embarrassing as we did.

Schaeffer once said Orthodoxy was his last stop in Christianity – as if he’d apostatize entirely if Orthodoxy didn’t suit him. So as a litany in the St. Ambrose Prayer Book has it:

On those who at this moment are in danger of losing Thee forever, Lord have mercy!

Society works, government is sclerotic

I have breathed much economic doom and gloom in the brief life of this blog. It is remarkable to me how many people I come in contact with who feel the same way even as the official media view seems to be this is just another down cycle like all the down cycles before.

But my view nonetheless is not unanimous. James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic, outlines How America Can Rise Again.

Fallows brings to his task considerable experience living abroad, most recently in China, where he saw its emerging economy first hand. He gives a number of reasons why each of our major economic problems is really minor or can be fixed.

The catch is, we lack the will.

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation … Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.
Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

On second thought, maybe Fallows and I are closer than first appeared. Able but unwilling eventuates about the same as unable.

Census, healthcare, Tocqueville and the tutelary state

It’s hard to imagine that I’ll read anything more timely – or timeless, for that matter – this morning than Patrick Deneen’s America’s Potemkin Village. He brings a lot of thread together into a coherent account of what’s happening.
Two comments:

He’s using “liberalism” in the classic sense – the sense in which today’s “conservatives” and “liberals” are both “liberal.”
I assume the “Potemkin Village” label alludes to the ironic Census Bureau ad – portraying mythical America while it promotes participation in the organized bribery of real America.

It’s safe to go back in the water again

(This brief blog likely will be of interest only to Orthodox readers.)

I had unsubscribed to the Ochlophobist blog for a while because he got off, it seemed to me, on an unedifying prolonged rant against the Antiochian Archdiocese. But I can report that it’s relatively safe to go back in the water again, and that this March 8 posting made me wince in a most edifying way. And of his past 25 blogs, the only one that poked at things Antiochian seemed fairly well-placed.

Conscientious Objector to the Culture Wars

(This may be the most controversial and polemical thing I’ve posted. I’ll tell you in advance, and in conclusion, that I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it. Your mileage may vary.)

* * *

One of the minor irritants in my life is Franky Schaeffer. I’ll go long spells without thinking of him, and then I get a catalogue from his publishing company, or maybe he pops up in the news (having once again found limelight). And I seethe.

But lots of people love limelight. Why does he, of all people, irritate me? Probably because his life is so parallel to mine, through all the twists and turns.

Evangelical: Check.
Produced the movie Whatever Happened to the Human Race; watched the movie as a turning point.
Now Orthodox: Check.
Religious Right activist: Check.
No longer Religious Right activist: Check.
60-something years old: Check.

But he’s too strident and angry. He’s sort of a Christian James Howard Kunstler (another approximate contemporary of mine) but without Kunstler’s ubiquitous F-Bombs. Kunstler acknowledges that his speeches are a form of theater (listen to Kunstlercast #103 here); I think that’s true of Schaeffer, too, though he’d probably deny it.

I sense, too, that my reasons for dropping out of the culture wars are different than Schaeffer’s. I sense that partly because he seemingly just changed sides, now inveighing against his former friends, writing screeds, kiss and tell books, dubious fiction (his Calvin Becker fiction trilogy was quite calculatedly ambiguous about the extent to which it was autobiographical), paranoid apologies for Barack Obama, and sucking up to media personages who call him things like “a former leader of the anti-choice movement.” (They just love to get some sound-bites from an angry ex-whatever.)

But I really dropped out because:

The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms.
I suspect that the strident tactics make most things worse rather than better.
I don’t really trust my former allies.
I don’t really trust the candidates we’re supposed to vote for.
I still don’t trust my former adversaries.
If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas.
Maybe I’m just a worn out old hippie pacifist.

1. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms. We may get a majority vote for the “right” side on this issue or that, but that will not end the war. There will be other battles. There will be guerilla warfare. There will be no peace, and there’s only a minimal chance for the “Right” to win. Not until the Right’s own culture changes.

Changing culture is the work I’m about now – feeling my way rather than barreling ahead. That’s much subtler work than culture war. I’m not sure how good I am at it. But I’m convinced, to take just one Culture War example, that we won’t stop abortion until we change the toxic combination of unchastity and avarice that gets women pregnant and then justifies aborting the innocent child to maintain prosperity (greater or lesser).

The Right is not with us on that. Fox Radio recently aired an ad, between Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly, for an online service for married men seeking adulterous affairs. (I didn’t hear it, but read about it from someone who didn’t note the incongruity of this appearing on a putatively conservative news source.)

Whaddya think? I’m betting that the ad wasn’t there for the 13 liberals who were eavesdropping on Fox that day, but for the red-meat, red state regulars.

TownHall.com syndicated columnist pages every day have ads for “conservative” slogan t-shirts draped on attractive young lasses, selling conservative politics, like everything else, with sex. Today there’s a sexy avatar for some video game, too. It’s all a racket.

This could as well go under the caption “I don’t really trust my former allies.” But on present terms I think the idiocy of modern pseudo-conservatives belongs in this “unwinnable” category, if only because their position on the sexual side of the culture wars seems to be “anything goes, so long as it’s not gay.” That’s a losing position long-term as well as being a sign of untrustworthiness.

2. The Culture Wars are unwinnable on present terms partly because stridency and contempt beget stridency, contempt and alienation.

Whichever side of the Culture Wars you’re on, think about the fundraising letters you get. Are you edified by their tone? Do you appreciate the sober, educational emphasis? Do you find yourself walking away with something of substance to ruminate on?

If so, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re an idiot. (Shall I write that slower? You. Are. An. Idiot.)

The groups who used to send me fairly sober letters have gone strident. The groups that used to send me strident letters are now frothing at the mouth. And I’m sure the other side is doing the same. Shrill is the new green.

I don’t care who fired the first volley. That’s lost in the mists of history like the instigation of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. I’d like the shooting to stop. I’d like artificial divisions to end. I suspect there’s more common ground than either side presently will admit because of how things have been framed. Let’s tone it down a bit and then explore what the real divisions are. The more we insult the other side, the more we paint both sides into corners from which dialog, let alone truce, is impossible.

3. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms, too, because there’s darned little difference between the two sides on some of the deep presuppositions.

They’re both, ironically, secular. One side is secular because they don’t believe in any divine rules. You know which side I’m talking about. (Hint)

The other side – my side – is mostly secular because they functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules. They “honor” Him by keeping his rules – sort of the way a rank amateur “paints” by number. That’s why I don’t really trust them. The tranformative significance of the Incarnation: God the Son, Who took on our flesh forever – qui sedes ad dexteram patrem (who sits at the right hand of the Father) in resurrected human flesh – is lost on them. God is up to something more than commandment monitoring and forgiving transgression of the commandments. The incarnation changes everything.

“Love God and do as you will” would strike them as modern relativism. They’re very anti-relativist. Except on Ecclesiology. Then they’re apt to utter Babbitry like “Isn’t it swell that there’s a church for every taste!”

At the other end from the relativist “conservatives,” there’s a Protestant Church in my home town that produces a disproportionate share of Religious Right activists. Several of them have been elected to public office. But they’re theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If they had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for one of those 18 capital offenses for the icons in my home prayer corner.

“And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of …” the folks I encountered who dreamed of kingdoms, feigned righteousness, broke promises, shot off their mouths, tried to set fires, escaped the edge of euphemisms …. (Cf. Hebrews 11:32-34) These are the folks with whom I’d be a “co-belligerent” (Francis Schaeffer’s coinage to distinguish temporary and unreliable political friends from reliable “allies”) were I to continue in the culture wars. And they outnumber many-fold any well-formed Christians of historical and liturgical bent.

We Orthodox have been here before. After the attempted union with the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Florence (see also here), the Orthodox decided they’d risk rule by Sultan over rule by Pope.

That is not a throw-away line: I’m not so sure a secularist regime would be worse than what Christian Reconstructionists would bring upon me and my fellow Orthodox Christians that I’m willing to be bedfellows with Recontructionists.

4. In the current terms of the Culture War, the highest form of involvement, other than sending money in response to strident or frenzied letters, is to vote for Republicans. Any Republican.

In 2000 and 2004, it was Dubya. He was, we were told, a good Evangelical Christian. He cited Jesus as his favorite philosopher. He talked about America walking humbly in the foreign policy world.

Then 9-11 came, and he turned into a fierce Commander In Chief. And, oddly, Imam-In-Chief, as he assured us that “true Islam is a religion of peace.” (Well I’m glad he cleared that up!)

And then came, too, the second inaugural, when he declared as U.S. policy the eradication of tyranny from the world and the planting of democracy. If you don’t understand how delusional that is, read it again: eradicating tyranny from the world. As national policy.

Many Religious Right figures in 2008 backed Mitt Romney, Mormon and heir of a 50s moderate Republican, George Romney. Mitt was, deep down, one of us – despite his left-leaning administration as governor of Massachusetts – they assured us. Now they’re pushing Sarah Palin, about whom I’ll not say much except that I do not now support her and see no sign that she has the goods to gain my support later. (I don’t even think she’s all that “hot,” for whatever that’s worth.)

I’m not gonna play Charlie Brown the placekicker to the GOP’s Lucy Van Pelt any more.

5. I still believe pretty much what I believed before on what makes for good living and a just society. I’ve even kept a hand in the debates by writing letters to the editor on a few hot-button issues. Those letters are far less demonizing of the opposition than the sort of letters I used to write. But I check the online comboxes and see that the other side has no lack of equally-but-oppositely mad partisans of its own, leveling vitriolic attacks on me, no matter how reasoned my argument, just because I reach conclusions they don’t like.

But even at more elite levels than smalltown cyberpaper comboxes, I’m still convinced that the other side is untrustworthy. One occasionally will catch one of them committing candor, as has Chai Felblum of Georgetown law school. Imagine a constitutional case with this issue:

Whether the inferred right to marry a member of the same sex, which is inferred from the right to engage in homosexual sodomy, which is inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from penumbra of he 4th, 9th, 10th, 14th and other consitutional amendments, is of sufficient constitutional gravity to warrant compromise of the explicit constitutional command against laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion?

Chai Feldblum would answer “yes.” I’m not making up her response (though I did make up the highly tendentious – but brutally accurate – faux issue statement). I appreciate her candor.

But her candor tells me that there’s no home for me in the left where Frank Schaeffer has seemingly pitched his tent.

The Orthodox Wedding service includes, for just one example, “grant unto these Your servants …a peaceful life, length of days, chastity, love for one another in a bond of peace, offspring long‑lived, fair fame by reason of their children, and a crown of glory that does not fade away.” You can’t pray that with integrity over a same-sex coupling, whatever you might think of it otherwise.

So while the Chai Feldblums of the world might not smash my icons like the Reconstructionists, they’ll soon enough take away my Church’s tax exemption, or otherwise put on the squeeze, because they’ll consider us a hate group for continuing the two-millennia-long practice of connecting marriage to procreation.

6. If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas of life. I was reminded Sunday how diverse my parish is. We have Romanians and Russians who were born, or even came of age, under communism. We have Greeks who think that 2nd Amendment mania is barbaric (in at least one case with justification that I can’t gainsay – a family member gunned down in cold blood by someone who went postal). We have young people and middle-aged academics who lean left. We have demographically unknown visitors most Sundays. I have something to learn from some of them.

Just as I don’t want someone to ask me “why are you here since you’re not Greek?,” I don’t want people of Right-leaning disposition to come up to me at Church and make some dismissive remark, which they assume I’ll find hilarious or profound, about a Left-leaning idea that may be held by another parishioner within earshot. I don’t want there to be ethnic, racial, socio-economic or political barriers to people. Political trash talk about trifles at Church is apt to drive people away though we have a faith in common and should be together on Sunday.

7. Maybe I should try a bit more empathy. Maybe I’m not angry because, unlike Frank Schaeffer, I have a day job, with a comfortable living, and don’t have to raise a fuss to sell my newest book. Maybe a brain or personality disorder prompted Franky to call Barack Obama’s election “miraculous” and to prophesy epochal political healing on Obama’s watch.

Maybe Frank’s suburban Boston parish (I think he’s in Brookline, Michael Dukakis‘ hometown) has a leftist litmus test and he caved in. Or maybe he’s rebelling against his upbringing in neutral Switzerland as I declare myself a Swiss-like neutral in the Culture Wars.

Or maybe I’m not angry, by and large, because I’m a child of the 60s, a former Conscientious Objector to conventional war, and now old enough that I’m kind of tired of fighting of all sorts – worn out, if you will. Maybe we really need young, testosterone-crazed Christian guys (and gals crazed by whatever crazes women) who still are eager for a fight. I see my role as one to ask questions of any such young hotheads from the perspective six decades gives. Such as the ones implied by what I’ve just written.

* * *

So who am I hangin’ out with these days if not with the Alliance Defense Fund and the acolytes of R.J. Rushdoony? Check the bloglinks to the right* – Especially Front Porch Republic (“Place. Limits. Liberty.”), Distributist Review (guardedly). Small Is Beautiful has taken on new meaning for me. (My benighted generation got a few things right before we sold out or got complacent – and appreciating E.F. Schumaker was one of them).

I can’t even rule out Father Stephen. Nothing he writes is “about politics,” but everything he writes is about sane, human and humane living, which surely connects up somehow.

Basically, I’m going back and rethinking all things political and cultural. I’m wisdom-hunting. I read Wendell Berry essays and poetry, Bill Kauffman books, Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Scott Cairns’ Poetry, W.H. Auden (“For the Time Being” is now on my list for every Advent).

My conversion to Orthodox Christianity started it in a way. I soon realized that the Church has not always prevailed, and has produced martyrs in every century. And that’s okay. Better we should lose honorably than win by selling our souls.

(Note: When I changed my blog theme, the sidebar went away and anachronistically renamed my blog, which was “Tipsy Teetotaler” when this was written.)
Update 6/14/24: I opened with “I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it,” but I re-read it today and it stands up awfully well. It meanders, stream-of-consciousness style, but I still feel the same way. And, by the way, I don’t consider Trumpist ascendancy a “win” for what I considered the Right when I wrote.

“I do solemnly swear … to uphold the constitution ….”

A reminder in the Washington Post today of one of my pet peeves: the routine disregard by politicians of their oath to uphold the constitution.

I’m not a bitter partisan on health reform, but I’m disturbed at the paucity of discussion of the constitutionality of pending proposals. The questions are not trivial.

Ultimately, there are three ways to think about whether a law is constitutional: Does it conflict with what the Constitution says? Does it conflict with what the Supreme Court has said? Will five justices accept a particular argument? Although … three of the potential constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution, and no Supreme Court precedents clearly bar their success, the smart money says there won’t be five votes to thwart the popular will to enact comprehensive health insurance reform.

If “three of the potential constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution,” why would a politician violate his or her oath to uphold the constitution by insouciantly passing the buck to the Court?

Because they think the bill’s popular? Well, I guess popularity’s a good reason to violate an oath.

Again, it’s not just health care. Politician’s shrug off constitutional objections all the time. I could respect them if they plausibly said “I have spoken to my legal advisers about this, and I believe Bill X is constitutional.” But the more common line is “the Court will have to decide if it’s constitutional.” If so, then why did you swear to uphold the constitution, sir?

Architecture and Starkitecture

In an era where Houston’s SuperDome can be a “church” for Joel Osteen and his followers, it’s good to know that there still are those who take Church design seriously. It’s especially good to know since I’m chairing my Parish’s Building Committee as we’ve outgrown our current quarters.

Our current quarters are in the American Orthodox genre of “hermit crab.” We take whatever shells other critters abandon – in this case, a “Kingdom Hall” abandoned by Jehovah’s Witnesses (I remember when it was new around 1960):

I recall our Priest, Father Charles, lavishly dousing the interior with holy water, noting that it would take a lot to drive the heresy from the place. But even after adding the cost of holy water, the price was right.

But our next move, we think, should be to something permanent, and thus properly Orthodox. More on that later.

The Wall Street Journal reviews two designs of a Notre Dame-trained Architect, Duncan Stroik, working in a traditional Latin Church vocabulary (subscription may be required). While the Narthex view of The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe left me lukewarm at best, I’m glad I clicked the slideshow link. The first aerial, showing the domed cruciform sanctuary behind the Narthex persuaded me to keep reading and looking, discovering “the splendor of the nave and sanctuary.”

The Thomas Aquinas College chapel is more appealing from the outside, but the interior disappoints with white painted plaster that reminds me too much of the Puritan minimalism of New England Congregational Churches. To be sure, the columns, flooring and aisles would give a Puritan the vapors, but the whiteness seems discordant to me – too “post-Vatican II.”

So why with such historic forms available have Catholics built modern monstrosities for the last 50 years?

10parent_cap3-articleLarge — Is this excretion a sick joke?

I’ve never been Catholic, and I well know how easy it is to misunderstand a tradition from outside it, so I’ll not speculate.

Before I published this, Ross Douthat of the New York Times picked up the same Wall Street Journal story. Follow his links for proof that butt-ugly brutalism ain’t necessarily cheap.

Meanwhile, on my side of the Great Schism, we have a rising younger architectural star, Andrew Gould, whose temple designs have only been realized once so far. Orthodox parishes in America tend to be much smaller than Roman Catholic parishes, and our temples are proportionately smaller as a result. But an advantage we have, which I think militates in favor of “doing it right” when we build our temples, is that we aren’t liturgical innovators. Our Liturgies are extraordinarily stable. We don’t need to build something cheap so we can knock it down in a few decades to erect what the folks at Fuller Seminary tell us is the Big New Thing God Is Doing to Grow Your Church. My exploration of Church design-build firms for and with our Building Committee suggests that in the current Protestant world, design is often driven by sociological Church Growth theories, and that the big design-build firms promote those theories.

Andrew’s home parish, Holy Ascension near Charleston, may now look relatively stark on the interior, but those white wall are plaster, and will be covered with icons over the decades to come. It is a work in process in that sense, as I believe has been true of most Orthodox temples over the millennia. His whole portfolio of Ecclesial design work bespeaks permanence.

The plaster walls of the properly Orthodox temple Andrew designed and we hope to build, will also receive icons in the future:

The setting is rural – the source of some personal regret for me, since not one current member of our parish will be within walking or normal biking distance – and commodious. Though I wish we could have afforded a site closer in, I’m excited by the prospects. One of the deepest human needs, I’m convinced, is worship, and an architect whose designs aren’t conducive to that should be used for kindling. (The syntax of the prior sentence isn’t what I intended, but I’m going to let it stand, if you catch my drift. Call it serendipitous.)

Market state, welfare state

“The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.” Thus saith Phillip Blond, whose name will no doubt generate a spate of “dumb blond” jokes, primarily from the Right defenders of all things Leviathan except the Leviathan state needed to keep Leviathan capital in check.

I don’t know Blond well at all, but people I know who know what’s going on in political thought are among his groupies, so I’d say the name bears watching.

Contingent executionism

One of my first posts was, by coincidence, on contingent vegetarianism: a view that it would be okay to eat meat if we raised our meat animals more humanely. A parallel crossed my mind at the time, but committing it to paper wasn’t ripe.

For close to 30 years now, you could say I’ve been a contingent opponent of capital punishment: I oppose it in most cases because, contrary to what seems to be majority opinion, I’m convinced that we have executed many who were not guilty of the crime for which they were executed.

I’m not talking lawyerly parsing of states of mind, either. I mean that we’ve executed people who didn’t do the deed; not people who did the dead but were clearly insane (even if the jury rejected an insanity defense) or who did in in “sudden heat” instead of premeditation. Nor am I talking about fresh-faced frat boys brutally framed. Most of the guys who died unjustly at the hands of the state were career criminals. But “right street, wrong address.” They didn’t do the bad deed that led to their state-sanctioned murder.

How can this happen? We maintain, after all, the ritual of requiring proof “beyond reasonable doubt” in criminal cases. We provide the indigent with lawyers now. Surely the system works.

No, it doesn’t. A notorious crime can cry out for a solution and a conviction. Elected Prosecutors are “as human as the next guy,” as an acquaintance of mine puts it. So are police, though in capital cases I’ve seen more evidence of cheating by prosecutors than by police. Some career criminal the prosecutor (or police) feel got off too lightly last time may be a convenient fall guy. (Believe me: police and prosecutors do carry grudges. There can be no other reason why Phil McCollum has lingered in prison due to a prosecutor’s veto for the last few years. He was a really bad dude who turned his life around in prison very, very convincingly, without the common plea that “you should let me go because I know Jesus now.”)

And frankly, I think fear of crime causes juries to lower that bar of “beyond reasonable doubt.” There are other causes, too: court appointed lawyers tend not to be top-tier; they’re more overworked, in my experience, than the prosecutors are. Bad lawyering for indigent defendants is pandemic.

If you doubt me on the ultimate result, get to know the work of The Innocence Project. I frankly don’t follow them closely because I was convinced of our system’s unreliability even before they began freeing people on the basis of DNA evidence that wasn’t a ripe science when the people were convicted. As I recall the stories that convinced me, prosecutorial misconduct (framing a guy, in essence, or at least withholding powerful counter-evidence) was the cause about as often as mere sloppiness in the cause of convicting someone … anyone.

But my opposition is contingent. I’m not opposed to execution for brutal murders when guilt is clear. There was a man executed in Virginia yesterday who truly seemed guilty beyond reasonable doubt, including being named immediately by a victim he left for dead (another victim did die) and his own admission.

I take no Pharisaical pleasure that I’m better than the guy who died in Virginia yesterday. I confess in my prayers that I’m “the worst of sinners,” and when you come to know what that means, you know it’s true of you, too. But my sins are not capital crimes in our systems of human justice.

* * *

I had to come back to this post 2 days later because of this illustration of my assertion that “Bad lawyering for indigent defendants is pandemic:” Public defender advises a defendant to plead guilty to a felony that isn’t even a felony. That’s not rocket science, folks. The criminal statutes would be pretty clear on what’s a misdemeanor, what’s a felony.