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.

A new Day for the tax code?

Before Stockwell Day was a screamingly ineffective campaigner for Prime Minister of Canada, he was the treasurer of Alberta; and back in those days, when I was a graduate student in BC, he came up with the simplest and best tax system I've yet run across.

Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day is proposing to de-link Alberta's provincial tax system from its federal counterpart. Instead of Albertans paying provincial tax on a percentage of their federal tax payable, a tax on a tax, they will instead pay a single rate of 11% on their taxable income, a tax on income.

This move to flatter taxation is to be applauded and Mr. Day has ensured that the move is beneficial to all income groups. [Part and parcel] with the planned move to the single rate tax is a substantive increase in the provincial basic personal exemption and spousal exemption to $11,620 up from $7,131 and $6,055 respectively. And Mr. Day has pledged to index the exemption to inflation to ensure that the hidden tax increase known as "bracket creep" is vanquished from the Alberta landscape. . . .

Alberta has now ensured that those with incomes under 11,620 pay a rate of 0% and everyone else pays 11% on their income above the basic personal exemption. So the effective provincial rate on someone earning $30,000 is 6.7% and the effective rate on someone at $100,000 is 9.7%.

Tweak the numbers to fit the current American situation, but the basic idea is right on: put all income into one bowl, exempt the first $X per person, and tax all the rest at the same rate. Cut the tax form down to a page, make the tax code transparent, drastically reduce the IRS payroll (and trim a lot of corporate bureaucracies as well) . . . what's not to like?

Oh, yeah, and boost the economy, too.

Not quite irrelevant

Jennifer Rubin does us all a small service this morning over on Commentary’s “Contentions” blog in pointing out that at this stage, polls of GOP 2012 presidential contenders are basically meaningless. Interestingly, though, if you look closely at what she says, you realize they’re not quite as meaningless as they would normally be:

They are a function of name identification. The field is not set, the candidates have not yet engaged, and the inevitable unflattering revelations haven’t come.

While it remains true that there is much to happen between now and the 2012 primary season, that we don’t actually know who will be running, and that as Rubin says, “You actually have to see how the candidates perform and who cannabalizes whose voters,” there’s one partial exception to her argument: Sarah Palin. For Gov. Palin, those inevitable unflattering revelations have come, and been rehashed, and been beaten to death, along with a whole host of attempts to invent additional ones; there’s nothing left for enemies to dig up, it’s all out there.

Those who would marginalize her like to talk about her “baggage,” but the truth is, Gov. Palin doesn’t really have baggage. Change the metaphor, think of the sort of revelations Rubin is talking about as a political plague, and there’s a much more apt way to describe her situation: Gov. Palin has been inoculated. She’s already had that plague and survived. Yes, that has lingering effects, and yes, that will be a particular challenge for her to overcome—but the upside to that is a degree of immunity that will make it hard for rivals to take her down. The polling on them (at least most of them) is indeed before the “inevitable unflattering revelations” that will wipe some of them out and cripple others; hers is after, and well after. That is no small advantage.

You will know people best by how they handle defeat

and as Jennifer Rubin pointed out recently, on the whole, the Right has a better record on this one lately than the Left:

Some liberal commentators assure us they mean “no disrespect.” Others don’t even bother. They tell us Americans are confused or crazy, racist or irrational. Maybe all of these. The left punditocracy is in full meltdown, irate at the voters and annoyed at Obama. The contrast to the aftermath of the 2008 election is instructive.

After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate—what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally?

There hasn’t been enough soul-searching and self-criticism on the Right to make me comfortable with the thought of the Republican Party apparatchiki back in power so soon, but at least there’s been enough to make a real difference; and the Tea Party taking a big broom to the party establishment has helped, too. For the sake of the good of the country, I hope we see something similar on the Left if November does in fact turn out to be the electoral tsunami it looks like being.

Barack Obama, Manichaeus, and the Pharisees

President Obama’s Rolling Stone interview is deeply troubling to me, for reasons that Commentary’s Peter Wehner captures quite well. As Wehner says, Rolling Stone

paints a portrait of a president under siege and lashing out.

For example, the Tea Party is, according to Obama, the tool of “very powerful, special-interest lobbies”—except for those in the Tea Party whose motivations are “a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president.”

Fox News, the president informs us, “is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

Then there are the Republicans, who don’t oppose Obama on philosophical grounds but decided they were “better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve problems.” Now there are exceptions—those two or three GOPers who Obama has been able to “pick off” and, by virtue of supporting Obama, “wanted to do the right thing”—meaning that the rest of the GOP wants to do the wrong thing.

What really bothers me here isn’t the irony (which Wehner notes) of this kind of calumny coming from a man who promised our country, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.” What bothers me is the blind, unshakeable conviction that anyone who disagrees with him must be doing so for nefarious motives. It simply isn’t possible, in his worldview as he presents it, that anyone could disagree with him for reasons which are as honorable and as sincerely concerned with the good of our nation as his own; no, anyone who opposes him must be by virtue of that fact evil, incompetent, a deluded tool of dark forces, or some combination thereof.

Wehner goes on from this point to argue that “President Obama is a man of unusual vanity and self-regard,” and that people close to him need to stage an intervention before things get out of hand. That may be true or it may not be—I’m a preacher, not a telepathic shrink, so I won’t claim to know. But as a preacher, I am at least somewhat trained as a diagnostician of human sin, and I will say that one thing I think I see here is an awful lot of self-righteousness, to a degree that looks a lot like Jesus’ enemies among the Pharisees. It’s a degree of arrogant certainty about one’s own rightness and rectitude that leaves no room for the concept of honest differences of opinion; any disagreement or opposition has to be malignant, is perceived as personal, and thus must be destroyed.

Now, I hasten to add, this is by no means unique to the President, or to liberals; rather, to my way of thinking, this kind of Manichaean self-righteousness is the great blight in American political discourse these days, at every point on the spectrum of beliefs. Among the prominent voices, I think it’s more prevalent on the left, but that’s not much more than comparing pot and kettle either way, and certainly I’ve heard some ugly comments of this nature from conservative friends, relatives, and acquaintances. But still, to have this kind of language coming from our nation’s chief executive is an order of magnitude worse than to hear it even from prominent figures in the media and culture. When Candidate Obama said we needed to get beyond the ugly partisan spirit in our politics, this was the root of the problem at which he was pointing; to have President Obama exacerbating it instead of seeking to make it better is deeply dispiriting.

Update: Jay Cost has a great piece on this on the Weekly Standard website this morning; he makes the argument, I think correctly, that this is really the first time Barack Obama has actually had to deal in any meaningful way with actual conservatives. On that analysis, what we’re seeing is a reaction driven by disappointment (and fury?) that conservatives are not in fact proto-liberals who just need the right presentation to convince them. It’s rather like Martin Luther’s reaction when he realized that the Jews were Jews because they believed in Judaism, not because the Roman church had done such a bad job in presenting Christianity.

America needs more people like Jim DeMint

The junior Senator from the state of South Carolina is an ordinary barbarian loose in the corridors of power; here’s hoping he stays that way, and that his efforts to bring others along with him find great success.

DeMint is a most unlikely political crusader. For the vast majority of his life, he had little interest in politics. “I’m a normal guy,” he says with the grin that often crosses his face. He was a family man—a husband and father of four children. He owned a business in his native Greenville, S.C. He was a leader in his church. At various points he served on something like a dozen community boards because to him volunteerism was a way of life.

His profession was marketing, which led him to a career as a consultant. His clients included regional businesses, schools, and hospitals. In his work, he came to see top-down bureaucracy as the enemy of organizational success. And what worked? Empowering front-line employees.

But time would prompt him to see Washington in the same way, as an increasingly bossy and centralized bureaucracy. Complex federal regulations and taxation and expanding government programs were changing America—creating a society of dependents. When DeMint speaks, you hear echoes of the long-ago anti-big government commentaries of Ronald Reagan. . . .

When he arrived in Washington to assume his House seat, no one would have pegged him as a troublemaker. He was elected president of his House class and regularly attended seminars given by the House GOP leadership.

But something happened to DeMint in these leadership seminars that would change the course of his life. The gatherings were entirely focused on the means for concentrating and preserving political power: How to milk K Street lobbyists for political contributions; how to place earmarks into appropriations bills so they would be deemed essential to the folks back home.

One day, DeMint had had enough. He rose up in a seminar to question why representatives of the party of smaller government were so focused on earmarks and political fundraising. Why aren’t we talking about reforming the federal tax code or addressing the health care mess?

Midst laughter, someone shouted, “You’ll catch on to the system, DeMint.” But DeMint never did. . . .

Many of DeMint’s colleagues dismissed his concern over earmarks, arguing they were nickel-and-dime manifestations of traditional politics. But taking a page from the late Robert Novak, DeMint believed that the appropriations system, and the power of appropriators, was the key to runaway spending and taxation and regulation in this country. (Novak likened appropriators to the Vatican’s College of Cardinals.) Without serious appropriations reform, i.e., term limits for appropriators and full transparency for earmarks, there would be no serious tax and spending reform.

To the powerbrokers of Washington, this is political heresy—and makes DeMint a menace. This is why DeMint gives so much credit to Sarah Palin for challenging the machine of the late senator Ted Stevens, because his earmarks​—most notoriously the $400 million bridge-to-nowhere​—symbolized a political system rotten to the core.

Balance the budget—make the feds pay their taxes

OK, not quite—but not too far off, either:

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along—unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

Read the rest of Andrew Malcolm's piece for the gory details. Granted, $1 billion is a small percentage of the deficit we're running these days, but that's still a lot of money—and a lot of hypocrisy.

Looking at this, I can't help thinking that one big place to start reining in spending is the federal payroll. If you were to downsize all non-military federal departments, agencies, etc. (excluding specific cases like the membership of Congress and the Supreme Court) by 10% at every level, then cut salary and benefits of all non-military federal employees who make more than, let's say, 200% of the poverty line by 10%, I wonder how much that would save? (I exclude the military because they've been dealing with cutbacks while the rest of the federal government has not.)

A Democratic loss is not exactly a Republican victory

As the indispensable Jay Cost has been pointing out—no longer at Real Clear Politics, though, as he's moved on to write for the Weekly Standard, where among other things he's doing a column every weekday morning called "Morning Jay"—the polling numbers for President Obama and the Democrats (and doesn't that sound like a '50s rock band?) are bad and getting worse, to the point where the party is starting to throw incumbents overboard. In fact, it's gotten so bad for the Dems that expectations are starting to become a problem for the GOP, prompting some Republicans to start trying to deflate them.

And for good reason, because as big as the bullseye is across the Democrats' collective back, the electorate isn't really any happier with the Republicans. As Cost notes,

Our rat-infested politics

In the list of abuses of power by our government and its members, this doesn't rank high for size—but it's telling:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Congress members from both parties have been abusing their per diem—funds accorded them to cover travel expenses, including meals. When their expenses are picked up by other people, such as foreign government officials or U.S. ambassadors, they are expected to return the unused funds, which ultimately belong to you, the taxpayer.

In many cases, however, they don’t. Some spend the leftover cash on gifts or use it to cover their spouses’ travel expenses. Others merely put the extra money in their pocket. Not that the cash, which can add up to as much as $1,000, is exactly pocket change by most Americans’ reckoning. . . .

Among the most flagrant offenders are Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), former Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC). In an ironic twist, Rep. Butterfield is—get ready for it—a member of the House ethics committee. . . .

Perhaps the cake taker among the above-named Congress members is Robert Aderholt, who claims he isn’t sure if he keeps the money because doesn’t retain receipts.

Again, the biggest division in our politics isn't between left and right—it's between "we the people" and our governing elite—and our biggest political challenge is reclaiming our government so that it will once again truly be "of the people, by the people, and for the people." We on the Right don't need to "take back our country" from the Left, just as they didn't need to take it back from us—it's the country of the whole political spectrum, and will be for as long as it endures. But we the people, conservatives and liberals alike, do have the right and the need to take it back from those who are not truly representative of us. The unlamented Mark Souder is on that list; is it too much to ask that the U. S. Representative from northeastern Indiana should be a man of Indiana, not of the Beltway?

How's that "changing Washington" thing working?

Judging by Gov. Christie's experience in New Jersey, not so well. As you may have heard, the state's Race to the Top application was disqualified, costing the state some $400 million, "because some clerk in Trenton turned in the wrong Excel spreadsheet"; out of a thousand-plus-page application, one page was incorrectly submitted, so the U.S. Department of Education threw out the whole thing. As you can probably imagine, the governor was not at all happy.

Was the administration being petty, seizing an excuse to deny funding to a political opponent? Maybe; and then again, maybe not. After all, one should never ascribe to malice what can be explained perfectly well by incompetence. Either way, though, this is exactly the sort of thing that Barack Obama promised us his administration would not be about. I don't blame him for not keeping his promise to change Washington—it was beyond human capability; but I don't think it speaks well of him that he made it, or of so many others that they actually believed it. And if preventing these sorts of occurrences is too much to ask, one would think they could at least show some sort of commitment to setting them right. (Unless, just maybe, they are in fact playing petty politics after all.)

It should be noted that the DoE did have one rejoinder to Gov. Christie: they released a video proving that NJ state education commissioner Bret Schundler had not in fact verbally given them the correct information. When the governor found out that his education commissioner had lied to him, he fired Schundler after all.

An ironic unintended consequence of Obamacare

I've posted before about Obamacare and the Law of Unintended Consequences, pointing out the great potential for government aggression in the health care sector of our economy to produce exactly the opposite of its intended purpose—but I have to admit, this one surprised me anyway:

Faced with mounting debt and looming costs from the new federal health-care law, many local governments are leaving the hospital business, shedding public facilities that can be the caregiver of last resort. . . .

More than a fifth of the nation's 5,000 hospitals are owned by governments and many are drowning in debt caused by rising health-care costs, a spike in uninsured patients, cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and payments on construction bonds sold in fatter times. Because most public hospitals tend to be solo operations, they don't enjoy the economies of scale, or more generous insurance contracts, which bolster revenue at many larger nonprofit and for-profit systems.

Local officials also predict an expensive future as new requirements—for technology, quality accounting and care coordination—start under the overhaul, which became law in March.

Moody's Investors Service said in April that many standalone hospitals won't have the resources to invest in information technology or manage bundled payments well. Many nonprofits have bad credit ratings and in a tight credit market cannot borrow money, either. Meantime, the federal government is expected to cut aid to hospitals.

Yes, you're reading that right: the expansion of government-run health care looks to be resulting in . . . less government-run health care, and more for-profit hospitals.

Two years on, the Palin Revolution is gaining steam

Two years ago today, Sen. John McCain threw the political world for a loop by announcing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Last August 29, I wrote this, considering the first year's fruits of that decision:

A call to arms: against the political machine

As the French would say: Aux armes, citoyens! Aux barricades!

If you follow national politics, you probably know that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (RINO-AK) has narrowly lost a primary challenge to an Alaskan attorney, a friend and ally of Gov. Sarah Palin, named Joe Miller. You've probably also seen the news that the GOP establishment (specifically, the Alaska Republican Party and the National Republican Senatorial Committee) has been actively working for Sen. Murkowski against Miller—urging her to attack him, running a phone bank for her out of Alaska Republican Party headquarters on election day, and now sending the NRSC's general counsel to Alaska to give her "guidance"; as well, Thomas Van Flein has filed a protest with Alaska's Division of Elections against Bonnie Jack, an observer with the Murkowski campaign, who "used confidential information outside the voter observation confines and called a voter to resurrect a disqualified ballot." The situation is such that Miller is now having to fight back against his own ostensible party. (Remember, the chair of the Alaska GOP is the guy who had to pay the biggest ethics fine in Alaskan history after Sarah Palin blew the whistle on him, and is also a personal enemy of Miller's, for reasons that will be referenced below.)

Riehl has some choice things to say about the whole situation:

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.

All about the science? Don’t be so sure

We may have gotten a lot of pious talk from this administration about setting science free from political agendas, but don’t believe it. William Saletan connects the dots on one illustrative example:

Fourteen years ago, to protect President Clinton’s position on partial-birth abortions, Elena Kagan doctored a statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Conservatives think this should disqualify her from the Supreme Court. They understate the scandal. It isn’t Kagan we should worry about. It’s the whole judiciary. . . .

Politicians at their worst

This is unbelievable:

[Thursday] night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that “deemed as passed” a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the “deeming” document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget.

The procedural vote passed 215-210 with no Republicans voting in favor and 38 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against deeming the faux budget resolution passed.

Never before—since the creation of the Congressional budget process—has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money. . . .

—This is not a budget. The measure fails to meet the most basic, commonly understood objectives of any budget. It does not set congressional priorities; it does not align overall spending, tax, deficit, and debt levels; and it does nothing to address the runaway spending of Federal entitlement programs.

—It is not a ‘congressional budget resolution.’ The measure does not satisfy even the most basic criteria of a budget resolution as set forth in the Congressional Budget Act.

—It creates a deception of spending ‘restraint.’ While claiming restraint in discretionary spending, the resolution increases non-emergency spending by $30 billion over 2010, and includes a number of gimmicks that give a green light to higher spending.

Honestly, this is a firing offense, by any reasonable standard; it is a profound evasion of responsibility on the part of the House, and a willful attempt to deceive the voters of this country, and should be rewarded with electoral defeat. I’m glad no Republicans voted for it, but I have no illusion that that was purely a matter of conservative principles, as opposed to party politics; I praise the 38 Democrats who voted against it, though I’m sure there were some who did so because Speaker Pelosi gave them permission; but any Democrat who voted in favor should be replaced by a politician with more integrity than that, whether Democrat or Republican.

Go to Human Events for more.

Gov. Straight Talk is at it again

I hope he's not even thinking of jumping into the coming presidential campaign; New Jersey needs him too badly, and he really needs to have a successful first term and win re-election before he has enough reason to be thinking about a run for the White House. But if he keeps this up, with a little luck, he could definitely make that run and win. For now, it's just really good to have someone on the national political scene willing to tell people the home truths they don't want to have to hear; there are very, very few of those, and especially few who do it as well as Gov. Christie.

"What did the President know and when did he know it?"

That was the question posed by Fred Dalton Thompson, minority counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, and asked by his boss Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking minority member of that committee, that some say ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It may be a question that now needs to be asked, in earnest, of President Barack Obama with regard to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. According to columnist Kevin McCullough,

It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.

In fact, according to documents in the administration's possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February.

Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig's fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, "They damn near blew up the rig."

It's also now being reported that BP was asking for the administration's help on this matter long before the deadly accident and the now gushing well of tar.

If this is true, then the administration's inaction—because they were unwilling to take their focus off getting ObamaPelosiCare passed?—was reprehensible. What did the President know, and when did he know it? It's easy to see why he's taking the "I was as surprised as you were" tack, telling us he accepted the assurances of others that nothing would go wrong; but if he truly, honestly didn't know about this—why not, and what does that say about his administration?

A thought on the Trinity

In the course of preparing a sermon I did the other week on the Trinity, I was going through all the usual images and analogies people use to try to illustrate or explain it (a group which runs all the way from bad to incipiently heretical) when I ran across one I’d never heard before that actually has something to recommend it. Believe it or not, there are those who argue that the structure of our government was influenced by trinitarian theology. As history, I don’t know what to make of that—it’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t seen any primary sources that support it—but as an analogy, it has its points. There is a certain hierarchy and structure to our branches of government, but none of them are dominant; each does different things; and the relationship between them constitutes our government and makes things happen. Thus, for instance, laws are passed by the legislative branch, executed and administered by the executive branch, and enforced by the judicial branch.

Of course, like any analogy, this one has its dangers (including the temptation to snipe about the tendency of government to think it’s God) and its limits: God is unlimited and perfect, while our government is limited and imperfect (though it occasionally forgets the fact) because it’s composed of limited and imperfect people. It also, however, has this advantage, that it points us to one reason why the doctrine of the Trinity matters. The structure of our government is intrinsically relational—each branch acts on the others and is acted on in turn, and it’s those actions and relationships that actually constitute the workings of our government.

Unlike the Trinity, of course, no one would ever describe the interrelationships of the three branches as a dance, but like I said, every analogy has its limits. It remains clear even so that our government is fundamentally different from what one might call a unitarian government (such as a monarchy or dictatorship)—it’s not just a different version of the same thing, but something truly different in kind. In the same way, the Triune God is profoundly different in being from any unitarian god we might imagine, and that difference is of fundamental importance.

What President Obama should have done about the BP spill

It's probably too late now, but this administration that's so fond of appointing "czars" for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria: