Thought experiment: on homosexuality and “discrimination”

The big argument against the traditional definition of marriage these days is that it discriminates against those who want to marry someone of their own gender. Those of heterosexual preference can marry anyone they want, runs this line, while those of homosexual preference can’t; this, it is asserted, is discriminatory.

Leave aside that this isn’t necessarily so as a matter of fact (prohibitions on bigamy/polygamy, marriage of siblings, etc.), and let’s consider it as a matter of logic. Discrimination in law is generally understood to refer to situations in which the law is actually different for different groups. Pale-skinned people are allowed to vote, but people whose skin is dark, or who are known to be related to anybody whose skin is dark, are not allowed to vote. Male adults are allowed to vote, but female adults are not. People who have never been convicted of a felony are allowed to vote, while those who have a felony conviction are not. The law defines groups of people and explicitly extends rights/privileges to one which it denies to the other.

On this standard, is the traditional definition of marriage discriminatory? No. It does not define groups of people, nor is it applied unequally; it is one common standard which applies to everyone. The law does not say, for instance, that “straight people” can marry people of their own gender, but “gay people” can’t; that would be, inarguably, discrimination, because the marriage law would be different for different legally-defined groups. It simply says: this is marriage; within this definition, do what you will.

Why then the accusation of discrimination? Because the traditional legal definition of marriage forbids everyone to do what only some people want to do—thus the restriction is felt as a meaningful limitation by some people but not others. “You can do what you want to do, but I can’t, and that’s not fair.”

That may sound reasonable, but consider: that’s true of every law; by this standard, every law is discriminatory. Laws against drug use discriminate against addicts—I can put whatever substance I want into my body, since I have no desire to take anything illegal, but addicts can’t. Laws against polygamy discriminate against those who want to enter into multiple marriage—they don’t restrict me in any meaningful way, since I have no desire for more than one wife (I agree with Rich Mullins on that one), but those folks clearly aren’t free to marry whomever they want. Indeed, even laws against discrimination are discriminatory; I’m free to hire whomever I want, and I’d be free to rent to whomever I wanted if I had anyplace to rent out, but racists aren’t. It is the nature of laws to discriminate against those who want to break them.

Now, if that’s a form of discrimination, you need to realize that it’s a form which is not only defensible, but necessary—logically, intrinsically necessary, if there is to be any such thing as law at all. Laws draw lines, it’s just what they do. If you want to argue that a given line shouldn’t be where it is, by all means go ahead; but don’t argue that the mere existence of the line is unfair. When once you start doing that, you’ve started cutting a great road through the law just for the sake of getting your own way; and as Robert Bolt memorably had Sir Thomas More argue, that’s a really bad idea.

Bumper-sticker social work

Actually, technically speaking, it wasn't a bumper sticker—it was a license-plate frame—but it's a distinction without a difference. I followed this car for quite a while yesterday before I noticed the message: "PARENTS: PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT"—an injunction that assumes an awful lot. OK, so it's better that people who owe child support pay it, but is that really the message people need to hear? Why assume the divorce and just focus on mitigating the consequences? Wouldn't it be better to say "WORK ON YOUR MARRIAGE" or "BLESS YOUR MARRIAGE" or even (if you want to stick with the original hectoring tone) just "DON'T GET DIVORCED"?

"PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT" asks nothing of people but that they write a check once a month. A message suggesting they do what it takes to avoid getting divorced in the first place asks considerably more—things like humility, self-denial, repentance, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, and putting someone else ahead of oneself and one's own desires. The real problem isn't the percentage of people who pay child support, as significant as that is—it's the percentage of people who think divorce is all about them and what they want, and who seek their own desires at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, once you start challenging that mindset, you don't just make other people uncomfortable—you put yourself on the spot, too, because you're challenging the whole cultural system of which you're a part; it makes it a lot harder to get the frisson of superiority that "PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT" can give you effortlessly. In asking something meaningful of others, after all, you inevitably require something meaningful of yourself as well.

(To be sure, there are those who would avoid getting divorced if they could, but can't, because the divorce is driven by their spouse's behavior and decisions. They're victims of the problem, not the problem; this reality doesn't make identifying the true problem any less important.)

Bill Kristol on conservative intolerance

As noted, I have my reservations about the Beck rally last Saturday, but I do appreciate the opportunity it gave Bill Kristol for this comment:

So evangelical Christian Sarah Palin spent Friday night with (mostly) observant Jews, along with various Christians, including some Amish. Then on Saturday she spoke at a rally hosted by a Mormon who went out of his way in his remarks to refer to the important role of "churches, synagogues and mosques" in American life.

Early Monday morning, as it happened, I received an e-mail from (Catholic convert) Newt Gingrich from Rome, asking for contact information for a (Jewish) scholar whose book on certain (not very religious) enlightenment thinkers he was reading.

Welcome to today's intolerant, divisive, close-minded, and just plain scary American conservatism.

Resisting the politics of character assassination

I've had a bit of an issue getting this up, but near the top of the sidebar, you'll notice a link to the Sarah Palin Legal Defense Fund. This being a congressional election year, there are a lot of demands for money out there, and a lot of worthy candidates; but if you're in a position to give political donations, I would strongly encourage you to send some money to the SPLDF.

“Acting white”/“acting girly”—whither men? (Part II)

In her Atlantic article “The End of Men,” which inspired this series of posts (the introductory post is here), Hanna Rosin writes,

Happy Independence Day!

John Adams, to his wife Abigail, in a letter of July 3, 1776:

Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their judgments, dissipate their Fears, and allure their Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and Pamphletts, by debating it, in Assemblies, Conventions, Committees of Safety and Inspection, in Town and County Meetings, as well as in private Conversations, so that the whole People in every Colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own Act. — This will cement the Union, and avoid those Heats and perhaps Convulsions which might have been occasioned, by such a Declaration Six Months ago.

But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. — I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. — Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

This is purely delightful

I don't know if they were inspired by the Sound of Music stunt last year at Antwerp's Central Station, but a couple months ago, the Opera Company of Philadelphia performed "Brindisi" from Verdi's La Traviata in the Reading Terminal Market, during their Italian Festival. Just watch, this is too good for words:

Whither men? (Part I)

In the course of a brilliant article on "The Greatest Change in the History of Media"—an article well worth reading and pondering for its own sake—Vin Crosbie made an interesting observation which applies far beyond the scope of his piece:

Most people’s ability to perceive change is inversely proportional to its scale. They hail superficial changes as transformative, dismiss moderate changes as inconsequential, and fail to perceive gargantuan changes.

The context for that comment is his analysis of the failure of media corporations to understand the actual change that has occurred in their business, but it's a general truth which has ramifications across the whole landscape of society; for most people, the truly massive changes that happen are too big to be seen, at least until it's too late to do much about them. Unfortunately, that inability tends to be reinforced by a general resistance to believing that such huge changes could actually be happening, and perhaps could actually happen at all; that's why so often, those who do perceive them are ignored or dismissed like so many Cassandras.

In that vein, it will be interesting to watch the response to Hanna Rosin's piece in the latest Atlantic titled "The End of Men"; Rosin has put her finger on a change that's been a long time building, and is far from done. The opening abstract sums it up well:

Supreme Court refuses to protect Christian group

I've been trying for a couple days now to figure out what to make of this, and I'm still not sure.

In a 5-4 decision this morning, the Supreme Court said that a California law school can require a Christian group to open its leadership positions to all students, including those who disagree with the group's statement of faith.

Planting trees in the blight

Over a decade ago now, as a seminary student, I made a foray into inner-city ministry at a street mission in Vancouver, BC's Downtown Eastside. At that time, that neighborhood had the highest rates of drug addiction, HIV infection, and deaths from both of any neighborhood in the developed world. It was a grim place to be. My time there didn't end all that well, for a variety of reasons—one of them being that I discovered I'm not well gifted for that area of ministry—but when I left, I left carrying many people in my heart. I still think about them, and pray for them, and wonder how many of them are still alive. (Given the odds, I doubt even half of them are, but I really don't know.)

Now, apparently, there's a massive development project going on right within the Downtown Eastside, putting in both high-end condos and good-quality affordable housing, combined with other efforts to turn the area around (such as cleaning up Oppenheimer Park, which boggles my mind); the National Post has one of its reporters living in one of the condos for a month, writing about the development and its effects on the neighborhood. It's a fascinating series; I've linked to the oldest page of posts, and if you have a little time, I really encourage you to check it out and follow it up to his most recent pieces. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out over time; if this sort of project can bring meaningful renewal to a neighborhood like that—well, I wouldn't have believed it possible.

Criminalizing evangelism?

You've probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here's the video they took (though I'm not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):

On liking Jesus and building the church

A church sign I passed today has up what I would guess is the title of this coming Sunday’s sermon: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” Of course, I know that isn’t original, but comes from Dan Kimball’s book of the same title, but it got me thinking. Taken purely as a cultural observation, that would seem to be hard to argue—there are indeed a great many people who like Jesus but don’t like his church at all, and there are certainly churches out there that make it easy to understand why. No question, the American church needs to do a better job in a number of ways at living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, starting with actually being committed to living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, instead of all the other junk we so often get on about instead.

But stop a minute. If we were truly a Christ-centered gospel-driven Spirit-actuated community of committed believers who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, would that mean that “they,” whoever “they” are, would like the church and we would all feel nicely validated? The thing about Kimball’s title, which our neighboring church pastor borrowed for his sermon, is that most people don’t seem to take it or offer it as merely an observation, but rather as a criticism—that if we just did this church thing right, whatever “right” is supposed to look like, that “they” would like us. The underlying assumption here is, I think, that it’s perfectly reasonable that the world around us should like Jesus, and that if we were just more like Jesus, the world would like us too, our churches would grow, and we would be more “successful.”

It’s a widespread assumption, in part because it’s a very comfortable one for an American church that, by and large, still hasn’t realized that Christendom is dead, has been given its eulogy, and is now feeling the thumps of the gravediggers’ shovels; but there are voices that demur. Above all, there is this one:

Bill James comments on the Sestak scandal

Well, OK, not exactly; but given that people are now defending the White House's job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak by reminding us that the Reagan White House may have tried something similar in California with Sen. S. I. Hayakawa 28 years ago, I think this from James' entry on Brewers Hall of Famer Robin Yount in his New Historical Baseball Abstract is very much on point:

In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.

When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can't even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he's never going to be an outstanding player. . . .

But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn't see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, but on a certain level he wasn't participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.

This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. . . . In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.

I think James' argument is well-taken, and very much applicable to the Sestak scandal. The irony of it all is that the new ethical standards that the Obama White House is now resisting, with some help from a press corps that really doesn't much want to go after them, are the product of the Obama campaign. The people now insisting that politics as usual is "perfectly appropriate" are the same people who were telling us two years ago that we needed to vote for Sen. Obama because politics as usual is unacceptable. Maybe it was unrealistic then; it still looks bad for them now. As the Wall Street Journal summed the matter up,

It's possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.

Then again, George W. Bush merely exercised his right to fire a handful of U.S. Attorneys, and Democrats made that a federal case for years even though it has since gone nowhere legally. The Emanuel to Clinton to Sestak job offer still needs a scrub under oath by the Justice Department and the relevant Congressional committees.

I believe the phrase we were looking for here is "hoist with their own petard."

What's different about Jesus (updated)

Everybody in the post-Christendom West seems to want to claim Jesus, even if they don’t actually know anything about him or like what he actually taught; the vestiges of the cultural authority the church used to have (which are, admittedly, a lot greater here in the U.S. than elsewhere) no doubt have something to do with that, along with the lingering sense that Jesus was somebody really special. The result is a great many attempts to bring Jesus down to the desired size so that his image can be manipulated without fear; Jesus must be reduced to just another great teacher—the greatest of all, perhaps, so long as the difference between him and, say, Buddha is understood to be a difference only of degree, not of kind.

The problem is, that just won’t wash if you actually look at Jesus; as C. S. Lewis pointed out, making the modern world aware of an argument dating back to the early days of the church, that's the one option Jesus doesn’t leave us. He makes claims that no good, sane person would make, and says things that no one who doesn't accept his claims would tolerate.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

If you can praise him as a great teacher, it’s proof you haven't taken him seriously. And as James Stewart points out in his book A Faith to Proclaim, this goes further even than what he taught, into how he taught.

There is nothing in the Gospels more significant than the way in which Jesus deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His message. He does not say with other teachers, “The truth is everything, I am nothing”; He declares, “I am the truth.” He does not claim, with the founders of certain ethnic religions, to suggest answers to the world’s enigmas; He claims to be the answer—“Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” He does not offer the guidance of a code or a philosophy to keep men right through the uncertainties of an unknown future; He says, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Teachers are people from whom we learn and then depart, doing whatever we will with their influence in our lives and our relationship with them; their true authority extends no further than the limits of our submission. While there are many who refuse to acknowledge Jesus' authority, it is not in reality so limited—indeed, it isn’t limited at all; and he did nothing whatsoever to encourage us to think that it was, or is.

Update: It occurred to me today that I missed an even more important distinction in that last paragraph. Teachers are, as a class, primarily important to us for what we learn from them; there may be a significant relationship there as well, but not necessarily, and even when there is, it’s almost always secondary. That’s not to say anything about teachers, but rather about the way our society understands education: the importance of teachers in our lives is all about us. Jesus is primarily important to us for who he is, for our knowing him and being united to him; what we learn from him is secondary, important not for its own sake but because it contributes to our relationship with him.

Fox News and sexual hypocrisy

It's my observation that Douglas Wilson, of Credenda/Agenda and Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, is at his best when he can let his snark ascend and just turn it loose; he's also at his best when he has something deep and profoundly important to set his teeth into and be snarky about. (This is, I think, why he was the perfect person to debate Christopher Hitchens.) As such, it's no surprise that his recent guest piece at the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, titled "Foxy News," is Wilson at his best.

Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call "a sin"—a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level—we need to start thinking about the politics of porn. . . .

A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this "socialism." And—full disclosure here—I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else. . . .

Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy's—with 40 percent off.

What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to "slavery" as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but "strange bedfellows" was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn't it?

A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.

Be sure to read the whole thing—it's truly priceless. I remember when Fox was a favorite target for ire of conservatives, because of shows like "Married . . . with Children" and, yes, "The Simpsons." (It seems a little strange now to think of that.) People would occasionally point out, as a mitigating factor, that Rupert Murdoch was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, but that was usually dismissed with the comment that the sleaze he peddled disqualified him. Until he launched Fox News, and before too long, political expediency took over . . .

The mythical meme of “cutting waste and fraud”

A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,

Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.

“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.

The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.

That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.

Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.

As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”

All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.

The culture of death and the death of culture

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.

The countercultural Spirit

Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.

—Romans 12:2a (The Message)

Whatever the culture is, if we’re following Christ, we’re going to be walking counter to it to some degree. That’s just how it is, because cultures are made up of people, and people are sinful, and thus every culture is sinful—even the best of them. Sometimes, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can influence your culture and make that less so, as William Wilberforce and the rest of the Clapham Sect did; but no one has yet succeeded in turning even one earthly society into a miniature of the Kingdom of God, and no one will until Jesus comes again. Following Jesus is always going to put you at odds with the world in any number of ways, big and small.

As such, the depressing thing about so much of the church is that we’re so comfortable, and so predictable. We can always tell ourselves that we’re countercultural, that we’re standing up for truth, because we’re happy to stand up for the truths that matter to our particular in-group in the face of opposition from those whom we do not fear and whose good opinion we do not value; but that doesn’t answer the bill at all. Even the pagans do that. When it comes to making our own little corner of the world uncomfortable, to challenging the particular subculture (or subcultures) in which we move, we tend to be missing in action. Liberals do not question the validity of same-sex marriage, nor do conservatives try to move the American flag out of the sanctuary; it just isn’t done. Why, if you tried that, the next person mad at you might be somebody you actually care about—and while that might be just what that person needs, we don’t want to face it.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Are we that unpredictable, or that uncontrollable? Are we that independent of the conventional assumptions and conclusions of our culture, or our family, or our particular set of close friends? Not really, no; most of us tend to conform pretty closely to the expectations of those whose approval we desire most. That is not Christlike living, however moral we might be by our own preferred standards; that is no sign of the life of the Holy Spirit in us.

Rather, the Spirit of God is at work in the people of God to break that conformity, to renew and transform and grow us into people who can no longer be confined by it. Being a Christian, living out the life of Christ, is not a matter of simply following a bunch of “thou shalt”s and “thou shalt not”s, as if outward conformity to some particular standard was sufficient; but neither is it about some free-form idea of “love” and “grace” that makes concrete standards of behavior irrelevant. Rather, it’s about something far greater than either: it’s about learning to walk according to the Spirit, opening ourselves up to be changed by the Spirit, from the deepest wellsprings of our behavior on out, so that our lives will be set free from the world’s mold, to be conformed instead to the character and the holiness of God.

If we’re truly living Spirit-filled lives, we’re going to make people uncomfortable—and in particular, we’re going to tick off people who, if it were up to us, we would try very, very hard not to tick off. We’re going to be countercultural, not in some cheap fashion, but in a way that truly costs us; we’re going to be reminded that we worship a Lord who said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” We’re going to realize that Jesus could just as well have said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own teachers and colleagues and close friends and best allies, yes, and even the community whose approval he most desires, he cannot be my disciple.”

That’s because Jesus doesn’t call us and the Holy Spirit doesn’t empower us to be counter someone else’s culture, but to be countercultural in our own, in the one in which we live and work and play. God isn’t satisfied for us to tear down the idols we don’t worship, he wants us to reject the ones we do, and the ones we’re tempted to worship, the ones before which our theological and ideological soulmates bow. He raises up conservatives to be labeled unpatriotic, and liberals to be questioned as anti-gay, for being unwilling to let sacred cows lie. He calls us to ask the questions we least want asked, and to be willing to accept—and to give—the answers we don’t want to hear. He commands us to speak the truth, in love, yes, but so clearly and unflinchingly that we risk being rejected by our own people. After all, we’ve been given the Spirit of Christ, and isn’t that what Jesus did?

The clash of self-righteousness

Of all the things poisoning our public discourse these days, I think the one that irritates me the most is the assumption—by people on both sides of our political divide—that we and our side (whichever side we stand on) are morally superior because of the policy positions we take. This is of course accompanied by denigration (sometimes sliding to contemptuous mockery) of the other side's claims to moral superiority. This is, I think, just one more example of the human desire to look down on other people; it's the use of dogmatic self-righteousness as a justification for arrogance and pride (which is why it so often goeth before a fall). The truth is, if you select a group based on any normal human characteristic—by their job, college, age, gender, pick one—you'll find saints and knaves both, and a lot of pretty mediocre people in between, in a typical distribution; selecting by political persuasion is no different. Confusing Republicans for Christians or Democrats for right-thinking people (or the flip side of that) is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Of course, I would like to be able to say that the church is an exception to that typical distribution. In some places, it no doubt is. In America, in far too many places, it isn't. It ought to be, but it isn't. We must grieve our Lord something fierce; and yet, in spite of everything, Jesus loves the church.

You say that you believe in us—at times, I wonder why . . .

Transparency: it isn't just for Catholics anymore

I've been wondering for a while when we'd see this. From the Anchoress:

In New York, Queens Assemblywoman Margaret Markey routinely presents a bill which seeks to open a year-long “window” into the statute of limitations on child sex-abuse cases, allowing victims whose cases may go back as far as 40 years to bring suit for damages.

Because the bill has—until now—always been limited by Markey to impact the churches, exclusively, it routinely failed, or been shelved. It is difficult to pass a bill that essentially finds some sexual abuse victims to be more worthy of redress than others.

Markey seems to have figured that out; her new bill includes suits against secular institutions, and the previously silent civil authorities, among others, are reeling . . .

So, the secular institutional world may soon find itself forced onto the same learning curve that has impacted and the Catholic Church over the past few years; that world too may find itself finally forced to confront the filth that too often stays hidden. The confrontation—painful as it may be—will ultimately be for the good. . . .

As we begin to acknowledge that child sex abuse has long infected the whole of society, and not just the churches, we will be forced to take a long and difficult look at ourselves. Church-sex stories may be sensational, but these others will quickly come to seem dreary, mostly because they will indict not just those oddball celibates and religious freaks, but our cops, our doctors, our teachers, our bureaucrats—you know, the “normal” people, all around us, in our families, attending our barbecues and graduations, healing our wounds and teaching our kids.

Extending the “open window” to include secular sex abuse cases will impact the whole of society. We will be invited to look in and—seeing the width and breadth of the problem—will be forced to ponder the human animal and the human soul in ways we have not, and would rather not. It may bring home some uncomfortable truths: that “safety” is relative; that human darkness is not limited to various “theys” but seeps into the whole of “us”; that the tendency to look at the guilt of others has, perhaps, a root in our wish not to look at ourselves; that human brokenness is a constant and human righteousness is always imperfect.

Read the whole thing—this is important. I for one hope this bill passes, not least because it will expose the sanctimonious pretense by many outside the Roman church that this is only a Catholic problem. For all the agonies of what Fr. Richard John Neuhaus called the Catholic church's “Long Lent,” and for all the opportunistic false charges that were levied, it does seem to have been a necessary cleansing that will leave the church stronger and healthier in the long run; perhaps this would indeed do the same for our society.