Slippery Slopes

Progressive Christians often decry the use of the “slippery slope” argument when it suits them.  One example here.  On the one hand, I see their point.  I recall the old line from my early days that one drink necessarily leads to alcoholism or one rock and roll riff leads inevitably to Satan worship.  

There is a problem with such arguments that progressives would be correct in opposing if they stated the problem correctly.  It is fallacious to say that because some who have taken step A wind up at point Z, it is true that taking step A will always and inevitably lead to step Z.   Of course that is not the case, but I don’t think anybody ever said it was.

Community Organizing for the Digital Age

Interesting article by Tony Lee at Breitbart analyzing How Obama Won.  The opening paragraph reads

"President Barack Obama sees America as a salad bowl, where multiculturalists are free to pick and choose identities and cultures instead of sharing a unifying one -- the classical melting pot concept. And Obama's successful 2012 campaign -- as sophisticated as it was when it came to micro-targeting voters -- reflected his broader view.

"Instead of running a campaign based on his record or a unifying and forward-looking vision for the next four years, Obama essentially ran multiple, micro-targeted campaigns aimed at specific racial groups, scaring them into believing Republicans would take away their rights and promising them legislation on pet issues in a second term. He used the same template with women voters. He essentially united his coalition by disuniting America, one racial and gender group at a time."  (More)

Chris Matthews Latest Absurdity

Chris Matthews has claimed in essence that the pro-life position is something akin to Shariah law.  From NewsMax:

“...to have that notion that that [fertilized egg] would be a person under this personhood thing that Ryan’s pushing, and under the 14th Amendment rights, the platform that Romney’s running on. This is extremism. I say (to the) center right tonight, it's almost like Shariah."

Matthews went on to say Romney and Ryan would govern from a religious viewpoint. 

“We're going to run our country this way, to the point of making a woman's decision to have an abortion, her reproductive rights, as criminal, perhaps murderous.”

Aside from the usual hostility from the media to pro-life views, a few questions seem to be in order.

Another Reason to Oppose Government Controlled Medicine

A number of sources report this case of a Chinese woman forced into the abortion of her baby in the seventh month of her pregnancy.  While the Chinese government is apparently "investigating" the officials who had five men forcibly hold this 23 year old woman down to give her an injection that resulted in the birth of a dead baby two days later, it has been pointed out that the officials were simply enforcing the Chinese national policy of one child per family. 

For context, remember that Joe Biden has expressed sympathy for the Chinese one-child policy, and the president who has forced a number of health care mandates on us was once a champion of live-birth abortion.  When efforts in our country were made to reduce the horror of partial birth abortion, the party of Biden, Clinton and Obama could do nothing but spout talking points to ignore the substance of the issue.

Health care is too important to leave in the hands of power brokers with political agendas and collectivist tendencies.

There Aren't That Many of Us

David French blogs at Patheos under the blog name The French Revolution.  He recently wrote An Open Letter to Young, “Post-Partisan” Evangelicals.

In the article he describes his own journey of rebellion, young idealistic political views that focused on justice and the poor and eschewed the culture wars - until gradually he came to a place where he became a full fledged conservative.  It is worth a read.  A couple of highlights:  (More)

Disposable People - Culture Wars

This quote from C.S Lewis often comes to mind when pondering the current state of sexual ethics in this country.  

"…when we say of a lustful man prowling the streets that he wants a woman. Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want.  He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition,  One does not keep the carton after one had smoked the cigarettes."

Over the last 50 years, three issues keep coming to the surface in the so-called culture wars, issues which conservative Christians find themselves involved with and as a result, find themselves roundly criticized for poking their noses into "political" affairs.  (Read More)

Science Deniers

A label often attached to those who doubt either Darwinism or man-made global warming is “science-denier”. If one questions either the assumptions or the conclusions of either of those narratives, one is assumed to be anti-science, as if disagreeing with a conclusion was the same as losing all contact with reality. But I have to say in the dispute about a number of issues, I have a strong suspicion it is not really about the science. Why?

Because I have a pretty direct example of agendas driving conclusions in spite of evidence coming from the other side of the political and religious spectrum.

Partial Birth Abortion Reactions - Predictably Strident

So the Supreme Court today upheld a ban on partial birth abortions. This is a bit of good news for pro-life folks. Republican Presidential candidates were quick to comment in a positive way.

Mitt Romney: “Today, our nation’s highest court reaffirmed the value of life in America by upholding a ban on a practice that offends basic human decency...This decision represents a step forward in protecting the weakest and most innocent among us.”

Rudy Guliani: “The Supreme Court reached the correct conclusion in upholding the congressional ban on partial birth abortion...I agree with it.”

John McCain: "I'm very happy about the decision given my position on abortion. Partial birth is one of the most odious aspects of abortion."

Compelling was the concurring opinion by Clarence Thomas, short and to the point.

"I join the Court's opinion because it accurately applies current jurisprudence, including Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992). I write separately to reiterate my view that the Court's abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), has no basis in the Constitution." At least someone on the bench has a firm grasp of the obvious!

Budziszewski on Tolerance

Jim Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy has an absolute must read article on Colson's Breakpoint site.

He reports on an address by Jay Budziszewski before the Evangelical Theological Society, which addresses the very issues I have been trying to get at in recent posts about conservative evangelicals in politics, the idea that being tolerant of all views is in fact truly tolerant. Key paragraphs...

"...liberals argue that we must suspend public judgments about the nature of the good. After all, as liberal philosopher John Rawls argued, while the Christian sees the good in one way, the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Marxist, or hedonistic pleasure-seeker each see it in other ways.

"Rawls calls each system a “comprehensive doctrine.” And since comprehensive doctrines can’t all be true, and each is more or less reasonable, the only solution for public discourse is to privatize them all, that is, ban all comprehensive doctrines from the public square. This, the argument goes, creates an environment of moral neutrality in which to make public decisions."

Christians in Politics - Assisted Suicide as the Norm

Lest my last post on the responsibility of Christian conservatives to resist the trend to eschew politics, be quickly forgotten, First Things takes note today of a California law that would potentially force Catholic Nursing Homes to allow assisted suicide. It is never enough for the "progressive" and "liberal" forces to seek freedom for their own amoral and immoral views of how society should operate. It is always, it seems, necessary for them to force everyone else to accept their viewpoints as well.

Obama's Words, Obama's Actions

Been away from posting for a while. Finishing up a recording project for my son, and holiday stuff. Can't help but wonder if the country is ready for Barack Obama.
This guy is articulate, good looking, smooth as glass. And he presses the right "religion" buttons to woo a new generation of evangelical voters. I had dinner with a young man who interned for Obama and was fairly sold on him. 

Consider this quote from Obama's 'Call to Renewal' address:

...secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Jim Dobson couldn't have said it better. And the mainstream media will undoubtedly broadcast every soundbite it can that paints Obama in the light of a moderate, rational and religious man.

Here's my problem and many have written on this subject.

Obama's positions on life issues are more extreme than any candidate I have ever seen.

Randall Ballmer, Reason and the Pope

Randall Ballmer has a new book out, called Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament

I have not read the book, and I am not sure that I will. So I won’t take much issue with things that I have no direct knowledge of from the text. On the other hand, I can take a look at what Ballmer has said in interviews. My primary concern is related to Ballmer’s statement in World Magazine related to faith and reason and the hot button issue of Intelligent Design. Odd that I find Ballmer in the opposite corner from Francis Schaeffer and Pope Benedict on that one… but I must digress momentarily.

Ballmer tips his hand on the theme and tone of his book in an iterview in the Star Tribune with Pamela Miller. If the Title doesn’t say enough, try this:

I am a traditional evangelical; it is the right-wing zealots of the religious right who have hijacked my faith. They have taken the gospel, the "good news" of the New Testament, which I consider lovely and redemptive, and turned it into something ugly and punitive.
What is ugly and punitive about the “religious right” one can probably guess. One key passage in his book, quoted extensively on NPR by Linda Wertheimer, is the “Abortion Myth” which is described as “the fiction that the religious right has propagated that it was formed in direct response to the Roe vs. Wade ruling of 1973, when in fact it galvanized as a political movement to defend Bob Jones University”

Liberal Critics of Roe v. Wade

Timothy P. Carney has published a list of quotations from folks on the pro-abortion side of the fence who recognize that the Supreme Court decision in 1973 was a poorly reasoned and constitutionally ridiculous decision. Hopefully the next time there are confirmation hearings and Arlen Specter holds up a giant prop with all the decisions since that reaffirm Roe, someone will be kind enough to read a few of these quotes.

Specter's insistence that the numerous decisions made by a liberal court make Roe settled law - something ingrained in the consciousness of the country, begs the question of why, if it is settled law, it keeps getting challenged again and again and again in the courts and keeps winding up back at the highest court. Doesn't seem very settled to me.