- Unusual if not Exceptional.
- Reasonable and decent standards.
- 7 billion, 2 million.
- You can learn a lot from GW’s Prof. Banzhaf.
- Missing Marx.
- “Toddlers with chipotle sauce and a side of puppies, please.”
- Why wouldn’t (or would) a Muslim come to Christ.
Darryl Hart at Front Porch Republic responds to fellow-Porcher Mark Mitchell’s essay on American Exceptionalism by suggesting “If Not Exceptional, How About Unusual?” His muse is an immigrant – a Yugoslavian child in World War II, who went on to an American military career:
All of this has been a great challenge to my own convictions — shared with Mark — about the virtues of a modest republic. As a native-born citizen of the United States, I have the luxury of choosing the slice of the nation’s political reflection with which I most agree. As a historian I have the advantage of identifying with an era of the United States’ past when my political and cultural sensibilities would have been the most welcome. But some citizens of the United States do not have those luxuries. And I am wondering how to break the news to [his muse] that the United States is not as special as he thinks, not simply now that he has witnessed the corruption and excess that many Americans lament, but also at the very time that the nation was losing its modesty.
Point taken.
As a lawyer, I can “reason” my way to defending the Westboro Bastard Church bunch, though I sure wanted to confront them when they came to town, gleefully to consign to hell a fallen soldier from my former Church. Still, something just feels wrong when police attack OWS demonstrators but defend the far-more-loathesome Phelps cultists.
The First Amendment, as originally understood, provides no shelter for Westboro’s antics. America’s founding generation—both ordinary citizens and legal elites—drew a distinction between liberty and license. That is, they recognized a difference between, say, the use of freedom of speech, on the one hand, and its abuse, on the other. There can be no genuine doubt that they would have classed Westboro’s outrageously lacerating rhetoric—“Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “You’re Going to Hell”—in the second category and would have accordingly judged it outside the protection of the First Amendment’s speech clause, which was intended to protect a robust public debate, conducted according to civilized standards of decency.
As recently as a century ago, this Founding understanding was at least tolerably expressed in the Supreme Court’s approach to free-speech cases. This approach was governed by the “Bad Tendency Test,” which applied a standard of reasonableness—or what came to be called “rational basis review”—to laws regulating speech. The courts did not think themselves authorized to strike down speech laws if they suppressed speech that the legislature reasonably could have considered socially harmful, or as having a “bad tendency.” The Bad Tendency Test was guided by the courts’ presumption that duly enacted laws were constitutional and that the burden of proof rested on those who sought to overturn them, a presumption that informed American judicial review from the beginning. Thus citizens who challenged speech laws were obliged to argue their unconstitutionality by showing that they were merely arbitrary or that they lacked any reasonable relation to a legitimate government responsibility.
The Bad Tendency Test, however, has long since been discarded by the Supreme Court and replaced with other standards, which make it almost impossible for the public to enact laws protecting reasonable and decent standards of public speech and conduct.
World hits 7 billion. Episcopal Church drops to 2 million.
The American Conservative asks “Do you know any Episcopalians?” Yes, I do. About half of ’em, it appears.
Since Mormons are about 3 times more numerous, maybe we’re due for a Mormon POTUS, d’ya think? We’ve had plenty from this other cute little group.
What the latest Banzhaf publicity stunt teaches us:
That there are anti-Catholic bigots whose stock-in-trade is exploiting civil rights laws to smear the church and her institutions, and drive wedges between Catholics and other faiths.
Second, if the Office of Human Rights has nothing better to do than spending six months investigating these nonsensical charges, it ought to be abolished. Give the taxpayers back the money these bureaucrats are wasting, and let them go and, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “test the magic of the marketplace.”
Catholic University, after all, is a private religious institution that, under the First Amendment, is as free to pick its students and set its rules as is Bob Jones University in South Carolina or Yeshiva in New York or Brigham Young in Utah.
The episode also reveals how the cause of civil rights has been trivialized and exploited.
I’m tiring of OWS’s inability to say anything coherent and helpful about the mess we’re in. “We are the 99%” is quickly getting old.
I wrote the preceding paragraph before coming across Rod Dreher’s similar lament, and his little aggregation of others, from right and left, who are noticing the same thing.
And one of the lefties commenting on it misses “Buckley, and the coherent and thought out conservatism he represents. Instead, we’ve got Coulter, Hannity, and Limbaugh.”
Amen!
How can [Pastors] who have spent several [Seminary] years acting as if normative Christian sexual morality doesn’t apply to them possibly enter into ministry that leads others to lives of Christian integrity and wholeness?
Rod Dreher (emphasis added), wrapping up his thoughts and recommendation of Timothy Dalrymple’s “The Young Christian’s Guide to Sex at Seminary:”
I said that pre- or extra-marital sex was the grave sin against which we, in my youth group and Sunday School classes, were most gravely and constantly warned. And, I said, I appreciated that, as it had helped me maintain my commitment to abstain from sex until marriage.
I might as well have said that I believe in eating toddlers with chipotle sauce and a side order of puppies. My friends’ and fellow seminarians’ expressions had gone, suddenly, from benign conversational interest to something that looked like rats and skunks had deposited themselves deep in their nostrils, where they were scratching and relieving themselves and spreading their odors. This, I saw, was the last thing my friends wanted to talk about. And such a “backwards” and “judgmental” attitude (as it would later be described to me) really had no place at an enlightened seminary.
…
Surely it says something that when I drove back to PTS from my chaplaincy work with the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, it felt as though I were leaving behind a place where God was real and urgent and present to a place where God was formally honored but rarely dynamically present. And surely it says something that, when I was suddenly struck with the fear of death before a surgery, I went around to my professors, essentially begging them for assurance that there was an eternity with God to be enjoyed, and the most affirmative answer I received was: “I think there’s an eternity with God; but if not, this life has been a wild ride.”
Back to Dreher:
[T]his is one place that fundamentalism comes from: ordinary people seeing that intellectual elites within a faith tradition have completely folded. They become frightened that all forms of intellectual inquiry inevitably lead to faithlessness. This is also where Moralistic Therapeutic Deism comes from: the idea that all God really expects of us is to be nice and non-judgmental and happy.
A Christianity that doesn’t expect basic obedience to its moral norms and the pursuit of holiness, especially in its seminarians, is a corrupt, decadent thing that deserves to die. If that’s what it’s like in the Mainline, no wonder it’s collapsing.
“Lives of Christian integrity and wholeness,” sadly, appears not to be the objective of much “Christian” ministry, and Mr. Dalrymple’s essay just corroborates that.
At the end of a “Morning Offering” that generally rubbed me the wrong way came a paragraph with which I wholeheartedly agree:
The Muslim understanding of Christianity has been tainted by false teachings masquerading as Christian. This false image of Christianity, together with the climate of decadence embraced by a secularized western world, offers nothing to a follower of Islam. Only a loving witness to the truth that in Christ we have a direct link to a personal God Who loves us and offers something that is life changing and eternal, has the draw that will bring Muslims to Christ.
I’m told that where I’m going for a few days, there will be no WiFi, so I’m going silent for a while.
* * * * *
Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 