Reinhold Niebuhr Quote of the Day, #2

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own,; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."

~From "The Irony of American History" (1952)

To Live Is The GOP, To Die Is Gain

I would like to draw your attention to 2 recent news stories: the first involves a South African woman named Gayle Williams. Gayle was working in Afghanistan as an aid-worker when she was gunned down by Taliban forces last week. Her crime? According to a Taliban website, she was killed for spreading Christianity in Afghanistan. They claim to have been following her for some time. The full story is on cnn.com

The second story is the recent interview of Sarah Palin by James Dobson. Dobson, as you may or may not know, is one of the leaders of the religious right movement and the founder of Focus on the Family. He can, at times, make Pat Buchanan look like a pinko-commie. In his recent interview of Palin, Dobson whined that the "liberal mainstream media" has been attacking the Governor. The reason the media despises Lady Sarah so?

"It's the offense of the cross and it's one of the reasons there's such hostility tor Sarah Palin, because she is an unabashed Christian."

Oh really? So Dobson would have us believe that Palin is being persecuted for her faith. The religious right would apparently have us believe that Palin is a martyr, being crucified by the media for having "the courage to speak the name of Christ".

Here's some things we have heard Sarah Palin criticized for in the media:
1) Unethically firing a police commissioner
2) Cheating on her taxes
3) Spending $150,000 on clothes and make-up
4) Telling blatant lies at rallies
5) Claiming that certain parts of the country are more "pro-American" than others
6) Refusing to talk to the press
7) Deliberately avoiding the questions asked at the VP debate
8) In general, being unfit for office

I could go on, really, but here's one thing Palin has not been criticized for in the media: being a Christian.

Martyrdom and persecution have strong emotional pull on Christians. We believe that our Lord died for us, and ever since, Christians around the world have been called on to lay down their lives for their faith. Even to this day, Christians around the world face persecution and the possibility of martyrdom as a part of daily life in following Christ. Christians have always held those who are called to make these sacrifices in high regard, in part because nothing in the world is a more compelling testimony for the Gospel than someone who values his or her faith above their life.

Real martyrs die for their faith. Being criticized for your ethics violations and your being unfit for office does not equate to being persecuted for being a Christian. Implying that it does is frankly despicable and insulting to the memory of Gayle and so many others who have counted the cost and chose to give up what they cannot keep to gain what they cannot lose.

Dobson and his cronies know precisely what they are doing. They are playing on emotion to get political power. By making Palin a martyr, they are trying to get Christians to back a failed presidential ticket as a matter of faith. Evangelical votes are hemorrhaging away from the GOP, and Dobson wants to stop the defections by fostering an "us versus them" mentality. It has nothing to do with the Kingdom of Heaven and everything to do personal gain.

Shame on you James Dobson! Fellow Christians, we cannot allow our faith to be so sullied. We cannot continue to confuse our faith and our political affiliations. With a world in desperate need of the love of Christ, we have too much to lose. If you subscribe to any newsletters or magazines from Focus on the Family, or another organization like it, unsubscribe and let them know why you are doing so. This has got to stop.

Reinhold Niebuhr Quote of the Day, #1

What do Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, and The Berean Gadfly have in common? We share a favorite theologian: Reinhold Niebuhr. More on Niebuhr's life and thought in the days to come, but chew on this quote in the meantime.

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

~From "The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness" (1944)

Yet more trouble on the Right...

The battle lines are getting drawn in the Civil War in the Republican Party. Read this insightful piece from WaPo:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/23/AR2008102302869.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

It's amazing to me that more and more people are using the "civil war" language. Things are getting pretty ugly in the GOP. I don't think McCain could have won this year no matter how he ran his campaign, it's not the GOP's year, but he has so exacerbated the problem with his incredibly poor decisions that I don't think his party can continue the way they are going any longer.

A poem I wrote today...

I held my "choose life" sign so very high,
And I was really quite happy to note
That my Truly Christian friends and I
Always gave a Republican our votes

I stuck a pro-life sticker on my car
Right by my Jesus fish is where it stayed
I always frowned to show I disapproved
Of those who fought to uphold Roe v. Wade

But then, I died, and I was taken up
And I was sorely shocked that day to see
That Peter, standing by the Pearly Gates
Looked down, disappointed with me.

"St. Peter, please, what did I do,
To make you frown that way,
All my life I went to church
Always sang the songs, and always, always prayed"

"My child, I have to tell you this,
And I'm afraid it's going to sting
The Lord wanted an abortion
And you did not do a thing."

"How could that be?" I asked him, in a shock
My thoughts were all in quite the whirl.
"Jesus walked by you one cold night,
In the form of a teenage girl".

"Five months pregnant, hungry, tired.
She had nowhere to go from there
Her parents had kicked her out
She could not have been more scared"

"She told you this, as you both waited,
For the bus to come that night
You did not do a thing for her,
You went on about your life"

"You could have given her a meal
The number to a place to stay awhile.
You could have shared God's love with her,
And you could have adopted her child."

"Not knowing what else she could do
By abortion, she brought the child's life to an end.
She didn't know any better,
So the blood is on your hands."

"How can that be?!" I shouted,
Really quite irate
"She's the one who had the abortion,
She brought about the baby's fate."

"And I always voted pro-life, Peter!
I can't think of a better way to show
My commitment to God, and giving free hand-outs
Always seemed so socialist, you know?"

"My child, socialists we have here in heaven,
And a few more, we could afford
The thing we can't accommodate
Are those who do not serve the Lord."

Don West Poem of the Day, #3

Don West was a man deeply aware of his roots, both in terms of his family and the Appalachian mountains he came from and loved. This poem is a beautiful tribute to both, and it still gives me goosebumps everytime I read it.

Funeral Notes

We're burying part of him today
In Hickory-Grove Church Yard.
We can't put him all here,
For his grave
Spreads over a few rocky acres
That he loved-
Where peach blossoms bloom, and
Cotton stalks speckle the ground
On a Georgia hill.

Forty years he's been digging
And plowing himself under
Along these cotton rows.
Most of my Dad is there
Where the grass grows
And cockle-burrs bristle
Now that he's gone...

We're covering him in March days
When seeds sprout.
And I think next Autumn
At picking time
The white-speckled stalks
Will be my old Dad
Bursting out...

Myths and The Mythologizing Mythmakers Who Tell Them

In one of the very first assignments of the law school semester, we were asked to evaluate whether a young man should be prosecuted for burglary. The relevant statute said that burglary (which, by the way, has a much stiffer penalty in Massachusetts than just breaking-and-entering) is committed when a breaking-and-entering occurs at night, in a "dwelling house", when an occupant is present. Seems pretty straight forward, right? Here's the catch: our young man had broken into the basement of an apartment building, at night, when an occupant was doing laundry. The question we had to analyze was whether the basement of an apartment building counted as a "dwelling house" under the statute.

So we all did our research. Turns out that a series of judges had decided cases regarding burglary that were equally tricky on this matter. Over the years, the judges in this line of cases had adopted a three-requirement test to determine if a structure is a "dwelling house": (1) is it secured? A gazebo was ruled not to be. (2) Is it used for activities central to domestic life? A court felt that a shed used to store food was. (3) Is it easily accessible to the main habitation? The courts ruled that a parking garage across the street was not. Do those seem like reasonable requirements to you?

At this point, a true "strict constructionist" would cry "foul". No legislative body ever voted on those three requirements, the judges just made them up. That's absolutely true, and it gets to the heart of the debate over judges: should judges have the authority to do that? The truth that few Republicans admit is, they already do have that authority, and they have for about 900 years now.

Our legal tradition depends on what is known as the "common law" tradition in England. In fact, every state at its admission to the Union adopted a law stating, in effect, "we adopt the common law of England as it was in 1776." Many such provisions appear in state constitutions. The common law dates back to the 12th and 13th centuries in England. Essentially, the common law is an accumulated body of judicial decisions that are more or less binding on current judges by the legal principal of "Stare Decisis", Latin for "let the decision stand". What that means is that judges like to follow the principles and decisions of other judges, and are legally obligated to do so when those decisions are made by a higher court.

This practice is why, if you've ever seen a good legal drama on TV, you've seen a lawyer run into the room excitedly proclaiming "I found a precedent!" That character is telling the audience that a judge has made a decision on a case similar to his, and given some guidelines that the judge in his case can or must follow. This is of great benefit to society, because legislators simply cannot write laws that will never need interpretation. They first of all don't have the time to write "this is exactly what we mean by abc in xyz circumstance". They're too busy running for re-election. Second of all, it's impossible to foresee all of the scenarios that might need interpretation: for instance, a while back in class we read a recent case from California where a man died, but before he did he had some of his semen frozen for posterity's sake. 4 years after his death, his widow decided to have a child using the frozen semen. After giving birth to the dead man's offspring, she sued his two grown children to try to make them share the inheritance with their new sibling. Obviously, the California state legislature had not addressed this scenario when they wrote the inheritance laws for their state, so some judicial interpretation was in order.

This is where the myth comes in: during the Civil Rights Era, SCOTUS, lead by Chief Justice Warren, made some incredibly ground breaking decisions to break down segregation. To do this in many cases, they used a broad interpretation of the 13th Ammendment, which officially ended slavery in this country. And thus began the reacquaintance of the Southern conservative politician and the strict constructionist. After all, the ammendment did only say it was ending slavery, right? So SCOTUS must be overstepping its authority, right? And thus the myth of the "Judicial Activist" was born. The term was meant to convey that judges were overstepping their role and, in essence, breaking the law. Judges made decisions which they were within their legal and moral authority to make, and they were labeled judicial activists by the conservatives.

To do this, the strict constructionists had to ignore 900 year of history and the established legal practices of our nation. They did so brazenly to accomplish their own agenda. Unfortunately, when Roe v. Wade was decided, strict constructionists duped unsuspecting Christians into their camp by labeling Roe a fine example of judicial activism. Of course, in our present era most strict constructionists are not connected to the overtly racist past of the movement (for more on this, scroll down to my previous post entitled "The Once and Fututre Sting"), including, clearly, Clarence Thomas. (Law school classroom activity: get out your yarn and felt. Make a puppet out of Clarence Thomas. Tada! You're now Antonin Scalia). Nevertheless, their judicial philosophy is harmful to our country, and too many Christians advocate nominating them to SCOTUS and other high courts in the vain hope of doing something about abortion, to replace judges who are making, by and large, sound decisions.

So to summarize, the Judicial Activist is as mythological as the tooth fairy and Santa. Judges do what judges have always done, and if the strict constructionists don't like it, they can find another country.

PS: Thanks for the post name inspiration, Al Franken. Good luck in your senate race!