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A Rebuttal to the SBC on Immigration and the Gospel, Part III

2011-06-27T13:16:00.008-04:00

Having previously discussed the economic and political implications of mass immigration, particularly of the illegal variety, I’d like to consider in a bit more detail some of the thorny biblical and theological matters surrounding the issue. Here I will interact with Dr. Russell Moore’s biblical and ethical arguments. Because this will likely get a bit lengthy, I intend to write two posts. First, I’ll deal directly with Dr. Moore’s sundry assertions defending the SBC resolution “On Immigration and the Gospel”. In a second post, hopefully later this week, I’ll try to provide a brief outline and sketch of what the Bible says about nationality.

First, let me praise Dr. Moore for explicitly tying the immigration issue and other matters of public policy to Scripture. God’s Word is inerrant and sufficient for all of life and gives us a worldview grid to thoughtfully examine the issues of the day. Unfortunately, misinterpretations and poor applications of Scripture combined with faulty logical assumptions flaw his overall analysis.

The Jesus Was an Illegal Immigrant Fallacy, or There is No Such Thing as Illegal Immigration

Dr. Moore repeatedly claims that Jesus was an illegal or undocumented immigrant. He begins with this Jim Wallisesque doozy: “First of all, our Lord Jesus himself was a so-called ‘illegal immigrant’”. I’ll address shortly the truth of the statement, but take note of Moore’s choice of language. By his use of scare quotes Moore repudiates the use of the word “illegal” and implies that there should be no moral distinction made between legal and illegal immigrants. He prefers the term “undocumented” workers or immigrants, by which he appears to mean aliens who may not have followed proper bureaucratic procedures but have otherwise done nothing immoral or sinful. It stands to reason by Moore’s rationale that if the sinless, perfect Son of God was an “illegal immigrant” then there must be nothing inherently sinful about violating immigration laws.

Toward the end of his essay Dr. Moore continues the same line of reasoning by crafting a picture of the New Heavens and New Earth where believers worship together before “the throne of a former undocumented immigrant”. Via tortured and fallacious ethical reasoning Moore again normalizes law breaking because after all, Jesus did it. Dr. Moore is undoubtedly correct when he says, “this [the immigration issue] is also a question of mission.” But alongside the call for generous hospitality there must be a respect for law. Christians cannot and must not decouple the message of grace from the necessity of repentance. A central focus of the church must be the calling of sinners, those who have violated God’s law and civil law, to repentance. The church must help illegal immigrants come to Christ, confess their sins of illegal entry, repent and return to love and care for their people and families. The portrait of Jesus painted by Dr. Moore is unhelpful and his rhetoric is little different from those in the sanctuary movement while his hermeneutic smacks of the liberalism rejected by the SBC for three decades.

There are other reasons to scoff at Moore’s analogy. First, Jesus and His family simply moved from one Roman imperial province to another. Sure there were legal, cultural and linguistic differences, but the modern equivalent might be moving from Rhode Island to Eastern Kentucky (actually the distance to Egypt would have been considerably less than sojourning across parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California if you’re keeping track at home). Second, the nation-state is a relatively new conception historically and the 1st Century is a tad different from the contemporary world. The immigration restrictions enforced by modern states were not as necessary in an agrarian culture and such laws didn’t exist to be broken. Third, Joseph moved his family because of the impending threat to their lives posed by Herod--he wasn't looking for a work permit. Therefore, it would be more apt to term Christ a refugee rather than an illegal immigrant.

In an episode of “The Simpson’s” Bart took an interest in journalism and set out to get advice from Kent Brockman, Springfield’s premier news anchor. Brockman told Bart that the key to journalistic success was human interest stories that “cloud the issues and fog the mind.” The “Baby Jesus was an illegal immigrant” argument serves the same purpose. It is a flawed piece of emotion laden nonsense bandied about in order to fog the mind, preclude rational discourse and draw an erroneous equivalence between two completely unrelated circumstances separated by fact as well as 2000 years of history and legal development. As an argument it is ethically troubling, exegetically unsupportable, historically inaccurate, and logically fallacious.

The Law of the Stranger

Dr. Moore next harkens to the Old Testament law and history of Israel to ground his plea for the practical erasure of borders. He writes, “In so doing [migrating to Egypt as a boy], our Lord Jesus was re-living the life of Israel, our ancestors in the faith, who were also immigrants and sojourners in Egypt (Exod. 1:1-14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts 7:6). It is this reality, the Bible tells us, that is to ground our response to those who sojourn among us (Exod. 22:21; Ps. 94:6; Jer.7:6; Ezek. 22:29; Zech. 7:10). God, the Bible says, 'executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt'" (Deut. 10:18-19).

An appeal to biblical law is refreshing given Moore’s penchant as a proponent of Two Kingdom theology to frequently ground his defense of Christian social ethics in natural law rather than pointing to scriptural precept. Unfortunately his interpretation of these passages is flawed. Moore conflates and misapplies different Hebrew words for alien (ger) and foreigner (nekhar or zar) which have different meanings in the Old Testament Scriptures and historic Judaic cultural practices.

In his book “The Immigration Crisis: Immigrants, Aliens, and the Bible”, Dr. James Hoffmeier provides a clear definition of an alien in Israelite culture and law. The Hebrew word ger is translated variously as "stranger" (KJV, NASB), "sojourner" (RSV, ESV), and "alien" (NIV) in contemporary English translations. A ger was a foreigner living in a land outside his homeland who had received permission from the proper authority. For example, when Jacob's family wanted to flee famine they traveled to Egypt and asked Pharaoh for permission to enter, "We have come to sojourn in the land … please let your servants dwell in the land of Goshen" (Gen. 47:4). With the appropriate permission secured, Jacob’s family, which grew into the people of Israel, became legal aliens in Egypt. In short, they were allowed into the country by the host. This scenario finds its modern equivalent in the immigrant who has legally entered a foreign land with permission and secured proper documentation to that effect.

With this background we better understand the various biblical laws protecting “aliens” from oppression. It is wrong to allow people into your land and subsequently subjugate them. God gave many laws to protect aliens in Israel. Aliens were not to be oppressed (Ex. 22:21; Lev. 19:33-34). They were integrated into Israelite society, entitled to equal justice (Num. 15:15-16) and equal pay (Deut. 24:14-15), and could celebrate Passover (Ex. 12:48). They had legal standing and near equality of status in the community.

Two other Hebrew words, nekhar and zar, refer to those foreigners passing through or sojourning in Israel. They were not given the same benefits and protections as the ger (Ex. 12:43; Deut. 15:3; 17:15). The "foreigner" and the "alien" did not have the same social and legal status. Some English versions of the Bible, including the TNIV and TLV, translate ger as "foreigner," allowing the reader to think that these categories of people were the same. They were not.

Biblical supporters of “comprehensive immigration reform” and a “path to legalization” often refer to Leviticus 19:33-34, which says: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Citing C. D. Ginsburg, R.J. Rushdoony says that this "'stranger' is one who has become circumcised, fasted on the Day of Atonement, obeyed the laws of sacrifice, and has practiced the laws of chastity, as well as obeyed other moral laws." In short, once a foreigner had become part of the community, his nationality was not to be used against him. Such passages address treatment of aliens once they are part of the community.

The Scriptures do call for the extension of hospitality and justice, not an open-borders re-ordering of social life. Rushdoony says, "To call for the modern, humanistic society with an open relationship to all men would have appeared to the Israelites as the ultimate tyranny. The law did not require any such a re-ordering of any man's private life: It simply required justice in dealing with all men."

The Spiritual Equals Physical Fallacy

A perennial temptation in Christian thought is the elevation of the “spiritual” over and against the material. The acceptance of Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian categories has plagued the church from the beginning. The Christian believes that God created everything good, that sin mars every aspect of creation, and that Christ redeems it all, though we await the future perfect fulfillment of that promise.

The invisible church is composed of the elect in all places in all ages. It is a spiritual fact from age to age and consists of people from every tribe, tongue, nation, social class, ethnic group and historical epoch. This invisible, universal church is made manifest and incarnate in local bodies and assemblies. There is an on-going debate as to whether churches must, or even should be multi-racial and multi-ethnic. In his essay, Dr. Moore says, “Our commitment to a multinational kingdom of God’s reconciliation in Christ must be evident in the verbal witness of our gospel and in the visible makeup of our congregations.” I don’t feel the need to enter this debate suffice to say that I agree with the noted theologian John Frame, who says that the natural tendency to want to be with people like ourselves is clearly not sinful, whether in marriage and friendship or worship.

Elsewhere, in a defense of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Moore writes, “If God personally regenerates repentant sinners, both white and black, how can we see people in terms of ‘race’ rather than in terms of the person?” I understand what Dr. Moore is saying here and there is truth to the comment; however, it sets the spiritual directly at odds with the physical and has the flavor of Gnosticism and Manicheanism. In this view God’s salvation abstracts the individual from any and all natural attachments—not merely national and ethnic groups but presumably the family as well (Yes, I’m aware of Matthew 10:34-47). Could Moore’s logic not be applied to gender as well? “If God personally regenerates repentant sinners, both male and female, how can we see people in terms of ‘sex’ rather than in terms of the person.” If not, why? Isn’t it right there in Galatians 3:28?

The point is simple: Moore is utilizing doctrines that apply to the church, a primarily spiritual body, and imposing them on a nation, which is a physical and material entity. They are not analogous. If Moore were simply addressing the church, I would not strenuously object to his reasoning on this particular point. However, given the political nature and goals of the resolution, his comparison of apples and oranges needs to be noted. Simply because the Body of Christ is multiracial does not necessarily imply that particular peoples are not allowed to claim a land for themselves. Would Dr. Moore argue against the public policies of the state of Israel, to take one example, that are designed to maintain an ethnically Jewish state? No, in fact he has written that "Powers rage against" Israel, who as a nation merits the prayers and support of Christians, because "these are the kinsmen according to the flesh of our Messiah." In short, some ethnic groups are allowed to insulate themselves from a demographic transformation but others are not quite so lucky.

Next time I’ll labor to provide a biblical view on nationality and ethnicity (note that I said “a”, not “the”.)

A Rebuttal to the SBC on Immigration and the Gospel, Part I I

2011-06-23T07:29:00.010-04:00

On the Political Consequences of Immigration

In my previous post I dealt primarily with the economic consequences of immigration. I would like to continue by highlighting the political problems caused by the continuing high levels of immigration.

In his book “Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity”, legendary political scientist Samuel Huntington has done yeoman work pointing out the worrying features of current immigration policy. He writes: "Mexican immigration differs from past immigration and most other contemporary immigration due to a combination of six factors: contiguity, scale, illegality, regional concentration [in the American Southwest], persistence, and historical presence... Demographically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (re-conquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway."

If Huntington is correct the SBC has officially acquiesced to Reconquista and endorsed the transformation of the American nation with its call to amnesty. In so doing it is merely following the example established by our political leaders.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton embraced the coming demographic revolution: "We want to become a multiracial, multiethnic society. This will arguably be the third great revolution.... to prove that we literally can live without ... having a dominant European culture."

Shortly after these comments, Clinton headed west to exult in the fact that California's white folks were soon to lose their majority status: "Within the next three years here in California, no single race or ethnic group will make up a majority of the state's population. ... A half century from now, there will be no majority race in America."

Running to secure the GOP nomination in 2000, George W. Bush also welcomed the reconstitution of the United States. Mr. Bush said:

America has one national creed, but many accents. We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism, and culture. Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, or West New York, New Jersey... and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende. For years our nation has debated this change - some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.

Who exactly gave these hombres the right to create a "new America," and what might it look like from a political standpoint, if it survives at all? Alexander Hamilton said that “the safety of the Republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment…The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to…corrupt the national spirit…” As the old saying goes, in politics demography is destiny.

The demographic tsunami unleashed by 45 years of mass immigration will distort and change American political life in at least five ways. First, traditional political institutions and especially parties and their campaign tactics will compete for this new bloc of voters. Such is the nature of democratic polities and importing a new class of voters will reshape the way politics is conducted. Our parties and institutions will adapt to the demands, interests, and values of immigrants by abandoning issues and constituencies they have supported in the past.

A second long-term possibility is that immigrants may import new demands and interests that cannot be met by existing political institutions. The likelihood is that they will create new political vehicles to pursue their goals, further polarizing and fracturing the electorate along racial lines, which is a recipe for continued conflict. According to a Zogby poll, some 58% of Mexicans think that the American southwest belongs to Mexico. One might assume that Republican and Democrat politicians will resist such claims. In such an event, it would not be terribly surprising to see new parties form that are more amenable to be shaped by the forces of polarization and disunity.

Third, mass immigration is likely to create a backlash, creating further racial and ethnic polarization in the country. Our political elites actually relish such an outcome as it provides justification for further meddling in the lives of citizens. The management of racial and ethnic strife is bread and butter for the state and unchecked borders become a means of creating chaos to be “solved” by statist means.

The late Sam Francis coined the term "Anarcho-Tyranny" which he defined as "both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through 'sensitivity training' and multiculturalist curricula, 'hate crime' laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny."

Francis elaborates on immigration as part-and-parcel of this strategy:

The most obvious sign of what would normally be called anarchy is the immigration invasion. By some serious estimates, no fewer than 11-to-13-million illegal aliens now live in the United States, most of them from Mexico or Central America. The Mexican government actively encourages this invasion and, as the press recently reported, even provides to its own citizens a guidebook on how to carry it out. Our government does nothing serious to stop the invasion, to apprehend the invaders, or to deter the aggression that the Mexican state is perpetrating. The invaders—as residents of Arizona, where some 40 percent of illegal aliens enter the country, constantly complain—threaten the lives, safety, and property of law-abiding American citizens; depress wages; gobble welfare; and constitute a new underclass that is an object of demagogic political manipulation by both American and Mexican politicians. (The illegals in this country cannot legally vote, though that does not necessarily stop them, but they remain voters in Mexico, and Mexican politicians now routinely campaign for their votes inside the United States.) The federal government invaded Iraq, although Iraq never harmed or threatened us, but it does virtually nothing to resist the massive invasion (and eventually the conquest) of its own country and the deliberate violation of its own laws by Mexico.

Fourth, the Republican Party is finished. Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubestein have been arguing since at least 1997 that mass immigration would leave the GOP as a minority party, in spite of their best efforts to "reach out" to Hispanic voters. Large blocs of immigrant voters have typically become aligned with the party supporting big government (though that would describe both parties presently in the United States). Given the biblical limitations placed on civil government Christians ought to be concerned by the prospect of adding millions of potential voters who would likely use the state as a means of redistributing resources, i.e., theft by ballot box.

Finally, mass immigration will shift political power from the heartland to the coasts. Some seventy-five percent of immigrants settle in just six states. Between 1990 and 2000, California lost nearly a million white residents, yet the population of the state increased dramatically due to immigration. California picked up five House seats as a result of reapportionment. Texas, New York, and Florida also picked up seats while Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin each lost one seat and Colorado and Kentucky both failed to gain a seat that they otherwise would have had there been no immigration after 1990.

Immigration Undermines Social Trust

Mass immigration also dramatically undermines covenantal thinking by exalting the individual at the expense of family, community and nation. Individuals leave behind their community and desert their homeland rather than working to improve it. They move to a different place and by their presence in large numbers necessarily transform it culturally, economically and politically. Who benefits? Perhaps the immigrant himself and possibly those individuals acquiring whatever service he may provide. But community, the ties of natural affection that are produced by commonality are completely undermined.

Research by the influential political scientist Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, shows that the more diverse a community is the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone.

In the face of diversity people tend to "hunker down" and surround themselves entirely with the familiar. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us," Putnam says.

Putnam adjusted his data for distinctions in class, income, and other variables but still reached the "shocking" conclusion that untrammeled ethnic diversity is a breeding ground of distrust that spreads like an aggressive cancer, destroying the body politic. "They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching."

Putnam found that trust was lowest in Los Angeles, that heaven on earth for mulitcultists everywhere, but that his findings were also applicable in South Dakota.

Mass immigration also undermines the free market, which necessarily exists as part of social framework. While that framework needs a system of law to protect property rights, enforce contracts, prosecute practitioners of fraud, etc., it is also dependent on a rudimentary level of trust among the populace. If that trust is undermined, the foundation supporting the entire edifice crumbles, with the state being the institution forcefully putting the house back together.

A classical liberal like John Stuart Mill knew that free institutions are "next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities." But speaking of immigration, Putnam says "that immigration materially benefited both the 'importing' and 'exporting' societies, and that trends have 'been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed.'"

Conclusion

The state exists for three primary purposes: 1) to protect human life made in the image of God (Gen. 9:6); 2) to serve as a minister of justice defending the law abiding from lawbreakers (Rom. 13:3-4); and 3) to provide for a peaceful, orderly society (I Tim. 1:1-2). As it relates to immigration is the state fulfilling its charge before God?

In his essay, Dr. Moore makes one brief reference to Romans 13, a primary scriptural text dealing with the role and authority of civil government. Moore quite curtly dismisses those wacky simpletons who assume illegal immigration should be treated as…well….illegal. Moore writes, “It is easy to lash out at undocumented immigrants as ‘law-breakers,’ and to cite Romans 13 as reason to simply call for deportation and retribution. But this issue is far more complicated than that.” Indeed, I hope that I’ve shown it is MUCH more complicated than that.

Does the magistrate not have a duty to protect his people from dissolution and destruction through demographic invasion? Are Americans under some moral and legal obligation to obliterate themselves or be "socially reconstructed"? Are nationhood and nationality gifts from God? If so, is it right and proper to destroy them by appealing to the universal ethical claims of Christianity? I'm waiting for someone from the SBC to answer.

Next time: Jesus was an illegal immigrant, and other logical fallacies and a brief dissection of Dr. Moore's faulty interpretation and application of the law of the stranger...and much more fun!

A Rebuttal to the SBC on Immigration and the Gospel, Part I

2011-06-22T08:14:00.009-04:00

Introduction

At their annual meeting in Phoenix last week, Southern Baptist Convention messengers passed a controversial resolution on immigration and the Gospel. The resolution specifically calls upon "governing authorities to implement, with the borders secured, a just and compassionate path to legal status, with appropriate restitutionary measures, for those undocumented immigrants already living in our country." For good measure the resolution also condemned, without defining, that old bugaboo—nativism. Authors and prominent supporters of the decree managed to cram it through despite modest opposition from messengers.

A Tucson pastor named Richard Huff nearly succeeded in erasing the amnesty provision. Huff said, "[T]he principle is that citizenship is a right of people that are here under legal processes, and you do not want to make this something you are rewarding people who are in violation of the law and they have no interest in being here legally." Huff's amendment narrowly lost, 723-766.

Another defeated amendment would have urged illegal aliens to return to their home countries. Finally, to quell the dissenters, proponents had the audacity to add an amendment indicating that the resolution is "not to be construed as support for amnesty for any undocumented immigrant.” That thigh-slapper fails the truth in advertising test.

Writing prior to passage Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the SBC flagship seminary in Louisville, tweeted “Southern Baptists are at a crucial decision point. The immigration crisis demands a Gospel response before any political response.” Mohler here implies that disagreeing with his view on the question is tantamount to placing politics above the Gospel. That is a serious allegation.

My colorful retort: By passing this resolution the SBC eagerly hopped on the amnesty bandwagon and comes dangerously close to advocating lawlessness in the name of Jesus. In so doing, they seek the approval of men, by which I mean the editors of the New York Times, rather than God. The entire spectacle is yet another piece of evidence that even the most “conservative” American institutions have been taken hostage by the poisonous principles of political correctness and Cultural Marxism, a Satanic Trojan Horse whose purpose is to serve as a weapon wielded by the enemies of Christianity to lull gullible and guilt-ridden Christians into complacency prior to slitting our collective throat.

In a number of posts I intend to discus the economic, political, and gospel dimensions of the debate over immigration (in that order). To engage the discussion I will be critiquing an essay by Dr. Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His essay is the most cogent attempt to defend the resolution I’ve seen.

Just the Facts

Dr. Moore begins his essay with the following rhetorical salvo: “The Christian response to immigrant communities in the United States cannot be ‘You kids get off of my lawn’ in Spanish.” Later he writes, “If our response to them is to absorb the nativism and bigotry of some elements of society around us, we are showing them a vision of what the Bible calls ‘the flesh’ rather than the Spirit.” Does the portrait painted by Dr. Moore remotely describe the Christian response to immigration? Is it even an approximation of current American immigration policy? Was the draw bridge lifted up when I wasn’t paying attention? Or is Moore simply using an emotion-laden argument designed to inhibit dissent?

In 2010 alone the U.S. admitted 1 million legal immigrants. Of that total 73% were based on “family preference”, 16.7% were admitted as refugees or asylum seekers, 4.2% were based on the “diversity lottery”, and just 5.7% were admitted because they possessed employment skills in demand. In 2009 and 2008 an additional 1.1 Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs) were added each year. As recently as the 1990s America added up to 1.8 million LPRs annually.

Meanwhile the number of “undocumented workers” living in the U.S. is a matter in dispute. Typical estimates range from 7 to 20 million. Officially the Department of Homeland Security places the number at 10.8 million and other reputable sources put the figure closer to 13 million. Were there mass deportations of these law breakers? No, in 2010 there 387,242 deportations, of which 168,342 were for criminal convictions.

Average annual legal immigration in the 1990s was twice that of the 1970s and three times the flow from the 1950s. Does this comport with the picture of a nation filled with pitchfork wielding xenophobes? Or does it describe a generous nation that has broadly shared its bounty with millions with who have sought to legally become citizens?

On the Economics of Immigration

Dr. Moore largely ignores the economic consequences of immigration and only tangentially addresses the issue in a couple of terse comments. First, he chastises Evangelical Christians who “speak of undocumented immigrants in this country with disdain as ‘those people’ who are ‘draining our health care and welfare resources.’” He goes on to say that Americans send conflicting messages about immigration, largely because business interests slavishly pant after sources of cheap labor and often seek out vulnerable immigrants.

There are numerous economic costs connected to immigration, both legal and illegal, that Dr. Moore and the SBC resolution fail to note. According to Census Bureau figures poverty rates continue to increase and the number of Americans without health insurance has reached all-time highs. Mass immigration is a significant source of these problems and data show a growing chasm between natives and the foreign-born. For example, consider median family income:

Income of native households rose $135, or 0.3%
Income of naturalized citizen households fell $422, or 0.9%
Income of non-citizen households fell $1,852, or 5.6%

The poverty rate for U.S.-born citizens was 11.8%, but 21.7% among foreign-born non-citizens.

Because immigrants typically have limited job skills and are very poor they frequently become a burden on the American welfare state. According to Steve Camarota state governments spend an estimated $11 billion to $22 billion to provide welfare to immigrants. Camarota finds that welfare use remains high over time; immigrants in the country for more than 20 years still use the welfare system at significantly higher rates than natives.

Data pertaining to health insurance is likewise shocking. While 12.7% of natives lack insurance coverage, 33.2% of all (legal and illegal) immigrants did not have health coverage. Immigrants account for 27.1% all Americans without health insurance.

There are approximately 14.5 million immigrants and their U.S.-born children who lack health insurance, 31.9% of the entire uninsured populace. In 2007, 47.6 percent of immigrants and their U.S.-born children were either uninsured or on Medicaid compared to 25 percent of natives and their children. Lack of health insurance is a significant problem even for long-time residents. Among immigrants who arrived in the 1980s, 28.7 percent lacked health insurance in 2007. In short, much of the “health insurance crisis” in America is the result of surging immigration. What was the consequence? More statism in the form of Obamacare.

Finally there is education. According to a report by FAIR, expenditures for illegal immigrants from grades K-12 costs $52 billion annually, largely absorbed by states and localities in often very disparate ways. School districts are dropping programs and closing schools at least in part because they are paying instead for services to the children of non-citizens (I’ll concede that immigration is a small part of the general trouble with public education, but hey, I homeschool).

Aside from the costs to taxpayers there are also consequences for job seekers resulting from mass immigration. The intrepid Ed Rubenstein has demonstrated on repeated occasions that Mexican immigrants in particular are increasingly displacing natives in the job market. Moreover, unemployment statistics are not indicative of the entire economic picture and ignores underemployment and decreasing wages caused by immigration.

A secondary issue of economic ethics completely ignored by Moore is the redistributive impact of mass immigration. Like so much public policy the benefits of immigration are largely privatized while costs are socialized. Benefits accrue to the upper middle class while costs are borne largely by those on the lower rung of the economic ladder.

The unfairness and insanity of America’s immigration policy has been ably dissected by Harvard economist George Borjas in his book Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy and numerous other books and academic papers.

One myth Borjas explodes is that immigration adds substantial wealth to the American economy. In fact, as Borjas says, “All the available estimates suggest that the annual net gain is astoundingly small, less than .1% of GDP.” In real terms, that translates into approximately $10 billion dollars added to the overall economy, just $30 per person. It has also been estimated that between $6-$10 billion dollars is remitted to Mexico by immigrants working in the U.S.

But that’s not the end of the story. The relative skills and economic performance of successive waves of immigrants has continued to decline. Immigrants arriving on American shores in 1960 had more education and earned more money than natives. By 1998, the newest arrivals earned 23% less than natives. They also had acquired two fewer years of education than natives.

As low-skill immigrants have flooded the labor market opportunities for the least skilled among us have markedly decreased and the most vulnerable Americans have seen their wages decline as a result. Borjas estimates that immigration is responsible for half the decrease observed in the wages of high-school dropouts.

The obvious implication of these facts is that immigration policy as currently constituted has become little more than a wealth redistribution program, shifting resources from the poor to the wealthy without creating aggregate economic growth. The lawyers, politicians, business executives, journalists, and editorialists who drive the immigration debate don’t have their livelihoods, not to mention their children’s education, threatened by mass immigration, but they do acquire the cheapest pool cleaners, house-keepers, and roofers in the Western world.

If Dr. Moore's policy prescriptions are followed Americans would be asked to subsidize millions of additional outsiders at the expense of their own countrymen, children, and posterity. Studies estimate that two thirds of illegal immigrants lack a high school degree and Robert Rector of the Heritage foundation found that "the average immigrant without a high school degree will impose a net cost of nearly $100,000 on U.S. taxpayers over the course of his or her life."

Rector continues: "This means that the six million immigrants lacking a high school diploma and legally residing in the U.S. today will cost taxpayers more than a half trillion dollars over their lifetime." Indeed the average annual fiscal burden of illegal immigration is nearly $100 billion according to a recent study published by FAIR.

Dr. Moore fails to reckon with the economic fact of scarcity. Resources are not infinite. Economics is not a science but a branch of applied ethics primarily focusing on the study of human action. In a world of scarcity, a result of God’s curse on the earth due to Adam’s sin, human beings necessarily make choices among competing alternatives effecting the distribution of resources. Ethically speaking do six trillion people have a claim on scarce and finite American monetary and economic resources?

Do Americans have a moral imperative to import poverty, and in so doing divert resources and employment opportunities from our most vulnerable citizens? The primary victims of unchecked immigration are Americans with little education and skills, native-born minorities, convicts who have done their time, and the disabled. These are our fellow citizens whom the SBC would consign to dog-eat-dog competition with those who have broken American law. Surely, Dr. Moore, such citizens are among "the least of these”.

Stay tuned…more in coming days.

Remembering My Father

2011-06-19T15:15:00.001-04:00

This is the first Father's Day since the passing of my dad last Thanksgiving. He is missed. There are days it still hurts that he is gone. But there is also great rejoicing. Because of his example, because of his life, I will see him again.

It seems odd to put thoughts of this nature on such a medium. But for those who knew my dad and loved him, I want them to understand that what they loved in my father was Jesus. It was His love and grace that shown through in my father.

Below is the eulogy I delivered at dad's funeral, sans a few remarks that came to mind as I was speaking. I hope that it honors him. He was a man who deserves the honor of his son. I look toward the day when I see my heavenly Father, but my earthly father as well.

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Lloyd Dow was never big on rituals and traditions. Dad would not have wanted much made of this event. But many have come today because in one way or another, at one time or another, he was an integral part of the rhythms of our lives. We have come, rightly, with heavy hearts because a source of stability, sameness and godly consistency has been taken from us, never to return. We grieve because of the awful reality of death that rips apart body and soul in a horrible act.

The great king David captured something of our sadness as he sang of his covenant with God. From dust we have been made and to dust we will return. The life of a man, says David, is like grass, the wind passes over it and we are gone.

Yet dad’s life does not seem so fleeting and inconsequential as grass. Dad redeemed the time because he was concerned with things of permanence rather than the fleeting material trifles that fill our day. At his core, Dad loved God and he loved people. Jesus said that when fully formed a student looks like his teacher. In his life dad sought to look like his teacher and his Lord. In his own way, though a pale and imperfect reflection, dad sought to mirror Jesus through a life of self-sacrifice and service.

I could go on for hours about the ways dad served and loved others. I’m hoping that today many of you will take time to tell me stories about dad. As his son I would cherish that.

Perhaps you are here today having worked with my father or maybe were his student. Dad’s former students are everywhere and whenever I meet one his name always elicits smiles and spontaneous laughter. About five years ago I recall stopping at a McDonalds in Decatur with dad and my oldest son, Andrew. While I was trying to gulp down a quarter pounder dad was surrounded, awash in a swell of townsfolk eager to chat with “Mr. Dow” some eleven years after his retirement. It was like being with a minor celebrity.

Dad had an evident gift for making learning fun. I picture his class as a place with a slew of hands-on projects going on simultaneously with paint, glue and plaster of paris being slung hither and yon by overzealous kids with dad overseeing it all like a whirling dervish. I visualize model rockets being shot skyward and students trudging through graveyards or interviewing elderly residents of the hometown he loved. Dad could be a stern disciplinarian applying the “board of education” to the seat of learning. He was also the teacher and principal who gave kids dollar bills on their birthday, took them to eat ice cream for no reason, went to their ballgames and brought them into his home. He gave them himself. For dad teaching was

more than a career and heaven knows he didn’t become an educator so his family could live in the lap of luxury. Dad had a deep and abiding affection for his students because he wanted to serve them and saw teaching not as a cross to bear but a calling to enjoy. He labored hard because he loved.

Dad also faithfully served many in this church and various gospel ministries. Most of you know dad as the self-appointed greeter of Oakwood Bible Church, stationed near the door greeting visitors and long-time members alike with a hearty handshake and maybe a joke or quick story. In recent days I’ve heard countless times from many that they suspect dad has surely pushed St. Peter into heaven’s break room and is now greeting saints as they enter paradise.

That’s the Lloyd Dow that many Oakwook Bible Church members may know. But if you haven’t been around for longer than a decade or so that really only scratches the surface. Mom and dad joined Oakwood Bible Church in 1965 and from that time he served numerous stints on the church board as an elder and deacon. He chaired the building committee responsible for the construction of the facility we’re sitting in this afternoon. If I’m not mistaken, my father and older brothers stained the very beams that hold this roof aloft and dad and I painted several of the nursery rooms down the hall—this was the sort of thing he did in “retirement”. In fact, I’m guessing that where you see paint you see the hand of my father. That only scratches the surface of his efforts on behalf of his beloved church.

Dad also taught an adult Sunday School class for years—decades would be a more accurate description. His specialty was what might be called very slooowwww expository teaching, meaning that he sought to teach through books of the bible in a systematic, verse-by-verse manner. The only problem is that he proceeded at a pace that could only generously be termed snail-like.

Though he lacked formal theological training dad doled out Spirit-filled Biblical wisdom with the best of them, and tossed in a slew of humorous nuggets for good measure. Dad labored mightily to handle God’s Word with care. One enduring image singed into my memory is dad seated in his recliner, leaning forward hunched over a card table. He may have been grading papers, but as likely he was surrounded by stacks of notes, commentaries, bible dictionaries and theology books as he prepared his weekly lesson. He labored hard because he loved.

Dad also loved, served and provided for his family. Because dad was a teacher, Christmas break and summer were times for family vacations. Until later years, dad was always on the move and never one to enjoy relaxation and didn’t seem to much enjoy traveling. Nevertheless we visited Florida, the American West, New England, the East Coast and other locations. We were often pulling a camper and always on the move….go, go, go. Dad’s idea of a family vacation leaves me dizzy and faint when I think about it to this day. I’ll give you one brief glimpse inside a Dow “vacation.”

When I was 13, which was just a few years back, mom, dad and I traveled to Philadelphia to spend time with dad’s sister. After a week or so with Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Bob, who served as our unofficial tour guide, we departed one morning for Williamsburg, Virginia. Well, dad thought it would be a good idea for his son to see the nation’s capital. So after barreling down I-95 for about three hours we pulled into town and started walking. We proceeded to visit the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Air & Space Museum and Capitol. I think we may have also sprinted through the Supreme Court and National Archives but it is still something of a blur. For good measure, we took a tour of the White House and then drove another 6 hours to Williamsburg. All of this was a fairly typical lazy day on a Dow family vacation. Dad didn’t like to waste time.

Dad also took time for things like coaching my brother’s basketball team and showing me how to properly launch a two-handed set shot and shoot free-throws underhanded out in the driveway. Let it never be said of dad that he was huffing and puffing trying to keep up with the times. Dad was definitely old school in every way and I loved him loved him for it.

But I will be most grateful to my father for introducing me to Jesus. Dad was my first shepherd and showed me in word and deed the fatherhood of God. He taught me to be a Christian man. He taught me what it means to love my wife like Christ loves the church. He showed me how to raise my sons in the fear and instruction of the Lord without provoking them to anger. When I was in danger of straying, like my heavenly Father, he came to find me. He labored hard because he loved.

Dad was able to serve so many for at least two reasons: First, because his beloved wife was at his side. Lloyd loved Marilyn with all his heart and she graciously supported him for many years, allowing him to touch so many. Second, dad served because his faith was merely intellectual but an active faith incarnated and made alive by good works. His ethics and actions were primarily expressions of gratitude for the grace shown to him. If you loved my dad, what you really loved was Jesus working in and through him. If you loved my dad, I would plead for you to love and serve his God.

A cardiologist told me last week that dad had a weak heart. With all due respect to that doctor, his knowledge and the miraculous medical gizmos at his disposal, he had fundamentally misjudged and misdiagnosed my father. Dad had a mighty and joyous heart and it ceased beating, appropriately on Thanksgiving Day, because he had poured his life out as a drink offering to his Lord. He had presented his body as a sacrifice and simply had nothing left to give.

The passing of a loved one, the event we are marking today, is a stark reminder of an uncomfortable truth that we are inclined to avoid until it is impossible to look away. Unfortunately it is often only when staring into the face of death that clarity becomes possible. One truth we are acknowledging today is that we are all in Adam, and we all share in his curse. Because of our sin we are hurtling rapidly toward an eternal death, a death we have chosen and a death we deserve.

Scripture describes man as “dead” in trespasses and sins. We are, spiritually speaking, already corpses awaiting in history the finality of that inner reality.

But in God’s Word we find hope, life, joy, liberation and victory. The curse we share with Adam is overshadowed by the steadfast love of God. This love is not a concept or an abstraction but rather it is a person, a person who takes on flesh, blood and bone. In the brutality and suffering of His crucifixion, Christ took the curse upon Himself. In his resurrection He stood where Adam could not, crushing the head of the serpent and defeating sin and death. In His ascension to the right hand of the Father He began the process of reconquest, of restoring the creation, of reconciling all things to himself.

Because of these truths, Lloyd Dow lived his life with hope, but not a hope in his own righteousness. That could never be enough. Instead, his hope was in a righteousness outside of himself, a righteousness only found in his union with Christ. And though God has promised to put all things under the feet of His Anointed King, we see in this world of funeral homes and graveyards that the process is incomplete. Our bodies and the entire creation still groan and cry out from the corruption wrought by sin.

The hope for Lloyd Dow, and the only hope any of us can have, is something that happened in a graveyard in Palestine two-thousand years ago. The Scriptures call the resurrection a down-payment of Christian hope. The resurrection of Jesus guarantees that all who throw themselves on the mercy of God in Christ will share in this resurrection, they will conquer with Christ and His saints over death itself. This is the only hope for a man in the face of death.

Dad told me many times over the years that the one question he always asked perspective teachers was, “Who are your heroes?” For me that’s easy. There are countless men I love and admire; countless men who have taught me much. But it was my father who raised me; it was my father who held me in his arms, tucked me in at night, read me stories, taught me to serve others and daily showed me the grace of God. My hero was and always will be my dad.

As his health declined and death approached I know that dad was anticipating and longing for the resurrection of the body secured for him by Christ. Dad’s body ultimately failed him, a process that had been ongoing for many years. But he now has his rest and awaits a day when he will have a new, glorified, perfect body instead of a body wracked by diabetes and heart disease with nothing untouched by pain and decay. Dad’s mind, which had dulled in recent years, will be sharper than it ever was in life. His sense of humor, which so many of you loved, will be restored to perfection.

Like any child of God he longed to hear the words of Matthew 25:23, “‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”. We are here to affirm that Lloyd Dow led a good life, loved his students, church and family. But more than anything, he loved God. He ran the race well and persevered to the end by the grace of God. Though dad will be missed, he has entered into the joy of his master and for that we rejoice.

The Excommunication of Rand Paul

2010-05-23T22:31:00.006-04:00

After convincingly trouncing the establishment anointed crash test dummy in the Kentucky Senate GOP primary, Rand Paul ran into the screeching buzzsaw of the national press corps after his refusal to genuflect before the altar erected by the architects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On the Rachel Maddow Show (what was he doing there?) Dr. Paul was interrogated for twenty minutes about his thoughts regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the role of the federal government in protecting victims of discrimination. If you watch the interview, Dr. Paul handles the questions quite well by avoiding easy yes/no answers and laying out reasonable practical and ethical concerns associated with the state’s blurring of public and private property.

Nevertheless, in spite of his reasoned arguments and classy, soft-spoken demeanor he is being flayed mercilessly by braying banshees at the Louisville Courier Journal, lesbian talk-show hosts and in the press at large. Why the hysterical reaction of race-obsessed liberals and their neo-con water carriers?

The problem is that Dr. Paul, and the movement he represents, is uttering ideas that our secularized, pagan elites equate with heresy. Because the chattering classes among the journalistic and intellectual classes have rejected Christianity, they subscribe to another religion, the faith of Secular Humanism (SH). Moreover, they see themselves as prophets, calling down the judgement of their loving, compassionate and non-discriminatory “god”, i.e., the state. Their ideology, ostensibly a defense of individualism and free inquiry, has instead devolved, after a long flirtation, to statism. As Rushdoony wrote, "Man needs a source of certainty and an agency of control: if he denies this function to God, he will ascribe it to man and to a man-made order."

One tool wielded by this idolatrous state is the language of compassion, which is bandied about in pursuit of messianic aims. Not only does this God State seek to provide cradle to grave healing and security, through nationalized healthcare and wealth redistribution schemes, but it seeks out the “helpless” and “harassed” masses, sheep looking for a savior.

The rise of the messianic, imperial state has been ongoing for several centuries, connected to the ascendancy of SH ideology. The statism of American elites is little more than the inversion of religion and hence hostile to Christianity. The religion of SH is a dying faith. It is in a terminal condition collapsing under the weight of its presuppositions. Drowning in debt, bleeding from imperial overreach, and unable to keep the promises it has so promiscuously made, it is merely a matter of time before the ticking bomb explodes. The loss of faith in secular premises and institutions will ultimately lead to a lack of faith in statist, i.e. political, solutions and bring about a reconfiguration of the state.

Rand Paul is a harbinger of that collapse. As a result, a determined effort will be made by political, intellectual and media elites to discredit him and his movement. What is being attempted is an excommunication.

We’ve seen this before. I’ve written about the attacks on Pat Buchanan more than a decade ago. But times have changed. The new media (blogs, social networking, You Tube, etc.) may make it possible to fight back against the press corps and the apparatus of cultural dissemination. Do the elites still have the capacity to establish the parameters of “legitimate” debate, or are those chinks I see in the armor?

Evangelicals For War (Again)

2010-01-28T21:26:00.004-05:00

In a recent Takimag essay, the estimable Paul Gottfried explained that the neoconservative movement consists of two factions he describes as “ill-mannered, touchy Jews” and their “groveling or adulatory Christian assistants." In the former category, Gottfried includes the Frum-Kagan-Podhoretz-Kristol axis of evil. Occupying the “servants’ quarters” are Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, Cal Thomas and other lesser lights of the “conservative movement.”

Among conservatives of the Religious Right variety, Israel and her neocon hirelings find unqualified support among Dispensational fundamentalists and Hagee-style Pentecostals. In my denomination, the SBC, Richard Land provides political cover for neocons and supporters of Israeli policy vis-a-vis Arab states and the Palestinians.

Land is one of America’s most influential evangelicals, trolling the corridors of power armed with a huge rolodex filled with the names of Washington insiders, not to mention an educational pedigree that includes stops at Princeton and Oxford.

Prior to the Iraq war, Land organized an open letter to President Bush from leading evangelicals blessing the coming storm with the imprimatur of Just War Theory. Now Land is at it again. In December and earlier this week Land teamed up with approximately 40 Christian and Jewish leaders, sending letters to Congress urging the imposition of new sanctions on Iran.

The “tough talk” from Christians is expected but disheartening nevertheless. Christians have lost their moral compass when they endorse unbiblical and wicked means as a mechanism to bring about a good end. The goal of sanctions is to harm civilians economically and commercially so that they will pressure their government into making policy changes. In this respect, they are merely a form of state-sponsored terrorism. Sanctions, and the blockades necessary to enforce them, are acts of war according to international law. Moreover, sanctions will not work. The Iranian regime is already teetering, having lost legitimacy in the eyes of many of its own citizens. Sanctions imposed by the U.S. could entirely backfire by driving Iranians back into the arms of the mullahs.

But strategic imperatives and moral considerations are out the window. The only question on the table is, “Does Israel want it?”

Lying Pro-Lifers

2010-01-27T20:27:00.005-05:00

A gaggle of stunningly ill-informed malcontents and misfits called American Right To Life Action has published a slanderous “profile” of Congressman Ron Paul. According to ARTL, Paul is “is pro-choice state by state and therefore rejects the personhood of the unborn child.” If Paul runs for the presidency in 2012 ARTL intends to smear him as a solider for the forces of darkness and a merchant of death. "Pro-lifers will be alerted in advance to his pro-choice record," said Darrell Birkey, ARTL research director. "In the last election voters thought Ron Paul was pro-life. We want folks to know the truth."

“The truth”? Here ostensibly is a group of self-conscious Christians claiming to wage a culture war on behalf of the God of Truth (John 14:6), a God who cannot lie (Num. 25:6). Yet their language is full of falsehoods and distortions, and their tongues drip with slander and lies of the most outrageous sort.

Ron Paul has been a pro-life activist since he was in medical school, where he witnessed the horror of a late abortion. “It was pretty dramatic for me,” he says, “to see a two-and-a-half-pound baby taken out crying and breathing and put in a bucket.”

Over the ensuing years as an OBGYN, Dr. Paul delivered 4,000 babies, counseled many women out of murdering their children and often delivered their babies for free. He also has written two books about abortion.

Dr. Paul has said that granting rights to the unborn is the "greatest moral issue of our time." He wrote that the life of the fetus deserves legal protection and has repeatedly introduced legislation to define unborn children as persons under the law and to remove abortion from the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts, per Article III of the Constitution, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade and returning the issue to the states where restrictions could be imposed without the oversight of black-robed tyrants. While Paul was attempting to put feet to his beliefs, professional pro-lifers were supporting the likes of Fred Thompson and pining for an implausible amendment to the Constitution.

None of this is good enough for the folks at ARTL who want nothing short of a federal imposition to "solve" the abortion tragedy. Let me see if I can say something reeeaaally slowly, just in case someone from ARTL happens to stumble by. Ron Paul believes that abortion is murder. Last time I checked, murder was not a federal crime but is punished by the states except in rare cases where there is legitimate federal jurisdiction. How hard is that to understand?

Yet ARTL cites Revelation 21:8 in calling Dr. Paul a "coward." If you are unfamiliar, here is the text: "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death." Hmm, apparently Dr. Paul is on the highway to hell for not seeking the federalization of every crime under the sun.

The fool is one who does not fear God, His law and His judgment. The good people at ARTL, if their website is any indication, are staying quite busy violating the 9th commandment. We should pray for their repentance.

Why They Hate Us

2010-01-09T07:33:00.003-05:00

Is it because they "hate freedom"? Pat Buchanan answers provocatively:

On Sept. 11, they were over here—because we are over there...Americans are being killed for the reasons Osama said we should be killed—not because of who we are, but because of where we are and what we do...The Muslims stayed out of our Thirty Years’ War. Perhaps we would do well to get out of theirs. But as long as we take sides in their wars, those we fight and kill over there will come to kill us over here.This is payback for our intervention. This is the price of empire. This is the cost of the long war.

Similarly, Glenn Greenwald points out that our policy might have something to do with it:

It's truly astounding to watch us -- for a full decade -- send fighter jets and drones and bombs and invading forces and teams of torturers and kidnappers to that part of the world, or, as we were doing long before 9/11, to overthrow their governments, prop up their dictators, occupy what they perceive as holy land with our foreign troops, and arm Israel to the teeth, and then act surprised and confused when some of them want to attack us. In general, the U.S. only attacks countries with no capabilities to attack us back in the "homeland" -- at least not with conventional forces. As a result, we have come to believe that any forms of violence we perpetrate on them over there is justifiable and natural, but the Laws of Humanity are instantly breached in the most egregious ways whenever they bring violence back to the U.S., aimed at Americans. It's just impossible to listen to discussions grounded in this warped mentality without being astounded at how irrational it is. What do Americans think is going to happen if we continue to engage in this conduct, in this always-widening "war"?

Stephen Walt thinks it might have something to do with the countless deaths inflicted upon Muslim peoples. Using relatively low estimates, Walt calculates that 288,000 Muslims have been killed by Americans since 1990.

Meanwhile, a man elected to end the warmongering of the previous administration has doubled the contingent in Afghanistan, and is asking for a $740 billion military budget. Ah, change you can believe in.

Thumbs Up For the Pope

2009-03-22T17:49:00.002-04:00

While traveling to Africa, Pope Benedict sounded off about AIDS, saying it is "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems."

My local "newspaper", the Louisville Courier Journal, was apoplectic, calling Benedict's wisdom "dangerous advice" and inferring that Catholicism was a form of superstition.

But really if you want to avoid AIDS, here is a roadmap. Chastity prior to marriage, fidelity afterward. Don't shoot heroin with shady characters. Pretty simple, really, but completely out of bounds to the sexual revolutionaries passing as journalists.

US Bishops Endorse Lawlessness-Again

2009-03-22T17:43:00.002-04:00

Along with covering up the rampaging boy-buggering scandal among priests, the US Catholic Bishops have repeatedly endorsed lawlessness over the years with their public pronouncements on the immigration issue.

Yesterday Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and leader of the US Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference, spoke at an "interfaith" dialogue (I do hope the Unitarians were on board) calling on the INS to cease immigration raids that might break up families.

George's comments are yet another indication that the Treason Lobby (to steal Peter Brimelow's apt phrase) is alive and well--and ready to make another push for "comprehensive immigration reform".

2009-03-14T23:49:00.002-04:00

Tom Woods with a good article explaining in layman's terms how the Fed creates booms and busts.

By the way, here is a brief documentary on the Fed by the Mises Institute:

Jack Hunter on the stupidity of Frum vs. Limbaugh. Only a jackass like Frum could create sympathy for Rush.

"Evangelical" Lutherans are still "studying" homosexuality. One wonders if they are consulting Scripture.

The "credit crunch" of 2008 was a hoax.

John Taylor Gatto, former New York teacher of the year, on the conspiracy of humanists to use public education to undermine family and community.

David Ogden, Meet Charles Darwin

2009-03-13T23:12:00.000-04:00

By a vote of 65 to 28 the United States Senate confirmed David Ogden as deputy attorney general. Ogden served in the Justice Department during the reign of William Jefferson Blythe Bubba Clinton. He also had a thriving private practice defending the likes of Playboy and PHE Inc., a purveyor of “adult” materials.

In United States v. American Library Association, Ogden filed a friend-of-the-court brief for the library association arguing that the Children’s Internet Protection Act violated the First Amendment by compelling libraries who are suckling from the federal teat to install software on PCs blocking access to pornography. After all, the world would surely come to an end, and fundamental human rights violated, if a derelict couldn’t ogle porn at the local library.

Ogden has also shown himself willing to go to the mat to defend the practice of sodomy. In Watkins v. United States Army, Ogden argued that GLBT types should be allowed to serve in the military. He wrote, "Prejudice against lesbians and gay men in the Army is likely to be reduced by encouraging contact between homosexuals and heterosexuals; and there was no rational basis for the Army's exclusion of gay people."

He is clearly a big believer in a “living, breathing” constitution. In 1986, again defending homosexual sodomy, Ogden wrote, "Constitutional interpretation cannot be limited to ascertain the way a particular law would have been viewed by the Framers. While constitutional principles do not change, the society and individuals in whom they are applied do, and our knowledge about that society and those individuals improves with time."

There is more, but unpacking Mr. Ogden’s bizarre legal theories isn’t the point. Rather the point is to show how fundamental assumptions about life and reality play themselves out.

Above Mr. Ogden provides an example of Darwinism applied to legal theory. In this view, law is not something transcendent or permanent, but rather like clay to be molded by elite lawmakers and judges. The law is thus constantly evolving, but largely for the furtherance of elite objectives. Indeed the propagation of the Sexual Revolution is largely used as a tool to advance totalitarian and statist objectives wherein the “right to privacy” becomes a weapon to disrupt family and sexual order and erode traditional liberties in the name of autonomy.

Darwinism is also at the heart of pornography. Porn is fundamentally religious in nature, but the god in view is not the triune God of scripture. Rather pornographers are worshipping at the altar of chaos. For the ancient pagans, chaos was systematically ritualized into life through festivals and fertility cults. Chaos was the source of fertility, potency and primordial power. It was regenerative, in some sense the source of life.

Through the mythology of evolution chance and randomness have re-entered modern life, again becoming the source of change, power and life. And through the evolutionary paradigm chaos has again become a prominent feature of contemporary life.

If chaos is fundamental to life then a penchant for primitivism soon develops. The primitive man allegedly operates outside the law, is beyond good and evil, and thus becomes a hero to revolutionaries such as Rousseau and Margaret Mead. Soon thereafter a revival of paganism, astrology, witchcraft and magic follows as a culture seeks power in chaos.

Primitivism and chaos also spawn political movements devoted to the ideology of revolution. It is no accident that pornography flooded France prior to the Revolution.

That pornographers have the support of lawyers and government officials who claim to be “liberals” is no surprise. The Obamaites are, after all, quite eager for “change” and are revolutionaries at the core. In the 20th century liberalism had a flirtation with collectivism. The goal of contemporary liberalism is the empowerment and divination of the state. But for the state to become imperial in scope all mediating institutions must be destroyed. Families, communities, sub-national political entities—all must be flattened by the crusading state allegedly acting in the name of individual liberty.

Pornography, then, is little more than an expression of devotion to the gods of chaos and revolution. It seeks to uproot and destroy standards of morality and law. Likewise it is a dagger aimed directly at God’s primary institution, the family. Legislation alone will not stem the tide of filth flowing into the culture like an open sewer. Rather the assumptions, hidden and open, of pornographers must be unmasked in tandem with evangelization and a rigorous transmission of a comprehensive Christian worldview.

Stem Cells and the Mythology of Science

2009-03-11T21:50:00.001-04:00

While Americans increasingly distrust and detest the politicians and assorted babblers among the chattering classes, they are prone still to swallow the mythology of science. According to the purveyors of this myth with science all things are possible. Sickness, disease, even death can be abolished. Life can be created along with new organs, arms and legs grown by these magicians in lab coats. All that’s needed is your tax money and a complete lack of scruples.

On March 9th, President Obama issued an executive order allowing federal funds to be used on the experimentation of babies. This represents the complicity and imprimatur of the United States in the Mengelesque destruction of life in the name of “science” (Yes, I’m aware that Nazi references are typically out of bounds as a tool of debate. But do you have a better name for this?).

It may sound strange, but this mindset is a product of Darwinian presuppositions. Evolutionists are attempting to reverse God’s order in creation. The orthodox Christian affirms that a sovereign, omnipotent God created the universe. Evolutionists turn this on its head by insisting that an autonomous, omnipotent impersonal force, i.e., chance, led to the development of a new sovereign god—the scientist. While initially enthroning blind chance and cosmic purposelessness the evolutionist eliminates God and by default man evolves toward divinity. No longer constrained by a transcendent law man is then beyond good and evil, beyond morality and therefore can justify murder in the name of science.

Just the Facts, Sam

2009-03-08T19:57:00.002-04:00

HMM. It turns out that Sam Francis wasn't merely one of the best writers around, he was also a pretty good detective.

Writing about the abduction of Chandra Levy in 2002, Francis wrote the following: "I have no idea who killed Miss Levy or why, but I'd take a long, hard look at the chap known as Ingmar Guandique, a Salvadoran now in prison for attacks on two other young women in the same area not long after Miss Levy disappeared."

Nearly 8 years later the keystone cops on the DC police force came to the same conclusion.

Immigration and Infrastructure

2009-03-08T19:38:00.004-04:00

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $1.6 trillion dollars is needed to repair and maintain U.S. infrastructure in the next 5 years.

As with virtually every social problem immigration is a huge and unmentioned component of the problem. According to Ed Rubenstein, immigration will be responsible for more than 80 percent of the spending needed to expand infrastructure capability between now and 2050. The massive influx of immigrants is burdening America's crumbling infrastructure--airports, roads, bridges, sewer systems, etc.

You won't see this reported in the NY Times or your local "newspaper" so check out the report here.

Warmongers to the Left of me..and the Right

2009-03-08T19:28:00.003-04:00

Raimondo with an analysis of "liberal interventionism" and Obama-ite warmongering. I see that the WSJ op-ed page and Baptist "ethicist" Richard Land are also praising Obama's recent "vindication" of "W".

Updates of a Personal Sort

2009-03-08T19:24:00.002-04:00

One reason that the posting has been late for some time is that our kids are demanding more time. It isn't just the homeschooling, trips to basketball practice and Taekwondo. It's more than that...

Trying to Get Into the Swing of Things

2009-03-08T19:05:00.002-04:00

I guess I've been swept up in the aura of the New Era and been unable to gin up even the slightest amount of righteous anger. I figure that needs to change.

Hope to start blogging short items again. Not sure about longer essays. If you want to read those visit my website.

You can also find me via Facebook should you wish.

Real Numbers

2008-12-18T19:05:00.004-05:00

John Williams calculates government statistics as they were tabulated in 1970's. Since then, as you can see from these cool graphs that statisticians, likely at the behest of political patrons. You mean statistics can lie?

Planned Parenthood in the Problem Solving Business

2008-12-06T21:14:00.003-05:00

A group of pro-life college students videotaped a nurse at Planned Parenthood coaching a young girl how to circumvent Indiana's parental consent statutes. Moreover this "health care professional" explained how the young pseudo-victim could avoid reporting a case of child sex abuse.

On the tape, which is posted on YouTube.com and which made the rounds of conservative and pro-life sites Wednesday, the nurse also advises "Brianna" on how to cover for the 31-year-old man by among other things saying that the father could be a boy in school.

"You've seen him around, you know he's 14, he's in your grade and whatever. You know what I mean," the nurse says.

At another point, "Diana" coaches "Brianna" on getting around Indiana's parental-consent laws. She hands the girl a piece of paper, adding that she can show the sheet but can say nothing.

The nurse then circles the name and address of an Illinois abortion clinic on the paper. Illinois has had a parental notification law since 1994 but it's never been enforced because the Illinois Supreme Court refuses to rule on ways a girl can appeal the notification requirement.

The most disgraceful part of this story is how law enforcement in Bloomington reacted. With a Planned Parenthood employee on tape apparently committing a crime, the primary concern of "law enforcement" was that there might be a backlash against the clinic.

According to the Washington Times:

Indiana law requires health-care providers and others to report a sexual act between an adult and a person under 14 to law enforcement or the Department of Child Protective Services. Not reporting such an act is a misdemeanor punishable under state law by a maximum of 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

A city spokesman said Thursday that the Bloomington City Police is not investigating the clinic or the nurse for possibly violating the statutory-rape notification law, but is beefing up security around the facility to protect it from a possible backlash.

Schism

2008-12-06T21:07:00.001-05:00

The remaining traditional and orthodox element within Episcopalianism is on the way out the door: "Conservatives alienated from the Episcopal Church announced on Wednesday that they were founding their own rival denomination, the biggest challenge yet to the authority of the Episcopal Church since it ordained an openly gay bishop five years ago."

Miscellany

2008-11-30T16:59:00.003-05:00

The pastor who is credited with helping get under God into the pledge of allegiance has died. One wonders if we can get rid of it now.

According to this at MSNBC just the appearance of the Obama marriage may restore the Black family. Nothing like a little drivel as the world comes to an end.

Want to know what the Christian life looks like? Listen to this and this by my wonderful pastor, Ryan Fullerton.

The Obama administration is starting to look a bit like Bill Clinton's third term. When the likes of Max Boot and Mona Charen are happy with the foreign policy selections you know it can't be too great. Heck even Rush is happy.

Sigh. The editors of Reason are heralding the "Libertarian Moment":

We are in fact living at the cusp of what should be called the Libertarian Moment, the dawning not of some fabled, clichéd, and loosey-goosey Age of Aquarius but a time of increasingly hyper-individualized, hyper-expanded choice over every aspect of our lives, from 401(k)s to hot and cold running coffee drinks, from life-saving pharmaceuticals to online dating services. This is now a world where it’s more possible than ever to live your life on your own terms; it’s an early rough draft version of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s glimmering “utopia of utopias.” Due to exponential advances in technology, broad-based increases in wealth, the ongoing networking of the world via trade and culture, and the decline of both state and private institutions of repression, never before has it been easier for more individuals to chart their own course and steer their lives by the stars as they see the sky. If you don’t believe it, ask your gay friends, or simply look who’s running for the White House in 2008.

I actually used to subscribe to Reason during the editorial stint of Virginia Postrel but was always annoyed by the juvenile triumphalism present. Yes, Messrs. Gillespie and Welch are right that it is now easier to get an abortion and a divorce, not to mention practice sodomy free from social or legal censure. And it is true that I can find 300 different varieties of toothpaste at the local mega-mart. God bless the market and "freedom". This garbage makes me long for the principled and prudent anarchism of Murray Rothbard. But Murray isn't acceptable to what he called the "druggie, grifter and low-life" strata of libertarianism. The Reasonites want to see marriage tossed into the dustbin, along with the nation-state and any conception of traditional morality that circumscribes individual liberty. The road to hell is paved with such. Regrettably so is the path to statism. For if all mediating institutions are destroyed than only the state remains to rule over rootless, deracinated individuals. It is also a fact that the sexual liberation extolled by Gillespie leads to tyranny because guilty men are more easily ruled. Moreover a society that permits youth to be "sexually free" inevitably produces a primitive culture as J.D. Unwin showed in his study Sex and Culture. Unwin found that those cultures where virginity prior to marriage and chastity after are the norm produce high levels of intelligence, culture and science. "In human records there is no case of an absolutely monogamous society failing to display great energy."

Evil Party Meets Stupid Party

2008-11-28T19:18:00.003-05:00

The late Samuel T. Francis once lamented that Americans don't have two ideologically distinct parties. Rather we have an evil party (the "liberals") and a stupid party (the "conservatives"). Occasionally there is a synthesis of evil and stupidity. This is otherwise known as "bipartisanship".

To see the confluence of evil and stupidity at work, check out these remarks by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in an interview with the Detroit Free Press:

Q: With more Democrats in the Senate and the House and a Democrat in the White House, how do you see congressional efforts playing out on such issues as health care and immigration?

A: On immigration, there's been an agreement between (President-elect Barack) Obama and (Arizona Republican Sen. John) McCain to move forward on that. ... We'll do that. We have to get this economy stuff figured out first, so I think we'll have a shot at doing something on health care in the next Congress for sure.

Q: Will there be as much of a fight on immigration as last time?

A: We've got McCain and we've got a few others. I don't expect much of a fight at all. Now health care is going to be difficult. That's a very complicated issue. We debated at great length immigration. People understand the issues very well. We have not debated health care, so that's going to take a lot more time to do

Reid practically promises that health care will go nowhere, ironic given that it was a centerpiece of the Obama campaign. But perhaps we will get mass amnesty, a real crowd pleaser supported only by cheap labor whores at the Business Roundtable, professional mulitculturalist ambulance chasers and Democrat operatives who see amnesty as a means of registering millions of new voters dependent on the state.

Conservatives are in bad shape. In the mid-1970's the Democrats had a tighter hold on Congress but the GOP had a charismatic spokesman in Ronald Reagan and a host of issues moving in their direction, particularly the tax question which became a staple of Republican campaigns for twenty-five years.

The tax issue has lost its salience but no well-spoken and serious Republican has discussed immigration since the Buchanan campaigns of the 1990's. If wayward members of the Stupid Party team up with the Left to pass "comprehensive immigration reform", i.e., the legalization of lawlessness, some enterprising politician will have an issue which divides Democrats and could serve as a springboard to bigger and better things.

Marrying immigration restriction to an aggressive trade policy and America First foreign policy has the potential to create a populist backlash which if properly controlled could threaten the neocon/neolib apple cart.

Lawless Christianity is Christless

2008-11-27T11:18:00.004-05:00

Here is a question about California's Prop 8 initiative put to Michael Horton, professor of apologetics at Westminster west, in a discussion of his new book, Christless Christianity:

San Francisco, Calif.: Last week at my Catholic church in northern California, numerous people got up and walked out when the pastor urged the congregation to vote for Proposition 8 during his sermon.

If you think there should be one, where should the line be drawn today between church and state on issues like Prop 8 and others?

Rev. Dr. Michael S. Horton: There is a big difference between preaching, teaching, and applying God's Word to God's people and enforcing that Word through specific policy prescriptions. As a minister, I can say that's it's a strange and terrifying thing to step into a pulpit and speak in God's name. It's downright dangerous, not because of the people's judgment but because of God's. Am I really saying what he has told me today, right here in this passage today? Or am I full of hot air? Am I respecting the limited authority he has given me by his Word or am I using it as my own bully-pulpit to vent my opinions?

I am obliged by this Word to teach that marriage is a divine ordinance established between one man and one woman, but I do not believe that I have any divine warrant for binding the consciences of God's people to vote for or against a particular policy regarding the state's proper ordering of the common life of my neighbors. I've discussed this proposition with a number of friends and colleagues and even though we hold the same view of marriage as divinely instituted, there are differences over specific public policies.

Wow, unbelievable. Horton would countenance the wholesale redefinition of marriage in the public square. Horton's distaste for ethics devoid of the law Old Testament leads to a complete disregard for the 7th Commandment.

Horton's thoughts are a long way from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Spurgeon:

"I long for the day when the precepts of the Christian religion shall be the rule among all classes of men, in all transactions. I often hear it said, ‘Do not bring religion into politics.’ This is precisely where it ought to be brought, and set there in the face of all men as on a candlestick."

The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 27 (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1882), 225

Seems as though Christianity may be Christless if it ignores His Word: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one title shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled."

HT: Thanks to Bret McAtee, who I shamelessly ripped off.

IOUSA

2008-11-27T06:39:00.004-05:00

I went to see IOUSA yesterday. Given that we're in the midst of an economic train-wreck it was a bit dispiriting to see a carefully plotted dissection of the REAL mess that is just up around the bend.

The end of the "investment era" hit me the other day as well when I read this from Gary North:

In the first week of February 1966, the Dow Jones Industrial Average went over 1,000 intra-day and closed at 996. Over the next 16 years, the price index increased by just under three times. See the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Inflation Calculator:

http://GaryNorth.com/snip/706.htm

The Dow fell by over 200 points, to 777. The combined loss was a staggering 80%.

Let's bring this up to date. The Dow closed on November 20 at 7,552. Prices have increased since 1966 by a factor of 6.7 to one. The Dow is 7.5 times higher than in 1966. Taxes aside and dividends aside and commissions aside (there were no no-load funds in 1966), your investment of $1,000 in 1966 would have reaped a profit of $6,500. But prices are 6.7 times higher.

You would be behind.

That is what an investor, age 23 in 1966, would have to show for his faith in the U.S. stock market. He is now 65.

So much for the "buy an index fund of U.S. stocks and hold until retirement."

What retirement?

Though I suspect North's numbers focus on a peak at one end and a trough at the other it nevertheless demonstrates the power of inflation.

We'll soon find out all about inflation if the Fed and Treasury keep pumping liquidity into the market. On top of the $700 billion bailout passed by Congress, and the coming "stimulus" from the Obamaites, a new $800 billion dollar lending program was announced a few days ago. Here is the first terrifying paragraph from the NY Times reporting: "The Federal Reserve and the Treasury announced $800 billion in new lending programs on Tuesday, sending a message that they would print as much money as needed to revive the nation’s crippled banking system."

Given our current plight I'd hoped the local muliplex would be swarming with folks heading to watch IOUSA. As it turned out a friend and I were the only viewers. I guess everyone else was watching "Bolt", "Twilight" or the latest James Bond flick. Well I guess we get what we deserve. Sooner or later we will have to pay for our sins of covetousness.

But as public service you can watch a 30-minute version here. Enjoy, or perhaps weep.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Give the Gift of Abortion This Holiday Season

2008-11-27T06:31:00.002-05:00

Planned Parenthood of Indiana is offering up gift certificates, redeemable at its 35 "health centers" throughout the state. Nothing says "Merry Christmas" like giving that woman in your life a coupon to kill her baby.

On Praying For Our Leaders

2008-11-25T19:35:00.001-05:00

Scripture is clear that Christians have certain obligations to the civil magistrate. Their office and authority are to be honored. "Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king" says St. Peter.

Second, we must pay our taxes (Rom. 13:6-7, Mt. 22:15-21) and obey their legitimate and lawful commands (Rom. 13:5, Titus 3:1). Finally we are to pray for our civil leadership. "I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone-- for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness" (I Tim. 2:1-2)

Over at Baptist Press, Curt Iles writes that he learned to pray for presidents and other earthly political leaders from his grandfather:

My maternal grandfather, Sidney Plott, taught me to pray for our president. In all of my years of memory -- from President Dwight Eisenhower to the end of George H.W. Bush's term -- he always prayed for the president. At every meal, he sincerely asked God's blessings and guidance on "Our President." It didn't matter who occupied the White House, "Grandpa Sid" believed Scripture mandated prayer and respect (Romans 13:1), and he faithfully prayed it until the very day of his death.

Yet this text like Romans 13 has been distorted. Here Paul is commanding believers to intercede on behalf of Caesar. It is Christians who are a royal priesthood crying out to God on behalf of The Man. In the Roman era intercession was a royal prerogative. In short the claim made by Christians was seen as sedition in the eyes of Rome.

Moreover, Paul’s intent is not that we pray "Bless the president, congress, governor, and EEOC flunky." It is typically the case that magistrates need an understanding of justice, which necessitates a right view of man, sin and God. In short, rather than some nebulous “blessing” they may very well need conversion or even judgment.

Python on YouTube

2008-11-22T07:46:00.002-05:00

Monty Python has a YouTube channel. Here is the "Killer Rabbit" and below is the "Black Knight". When I was younger, and evidently not concerned about blasphemy, I appreciated "The Life of Brian".

Who is Sovereign?

2008-11-22T07:02:00.003-05:00

Richard Land has written a column criticizing gay marriage advocates who are petitioning the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage.

Land rests his argument on the alleged sovereignty of the people and even goes on to quote that great sage, St. Abraham. You know that whole “of the people, by the people, for the people” stuff. Here is a snippet of the essay:

A majority of Californians have exercised that right and have amended their constitution to define marriage with great specificity and precision as being only between a man and a woman -- no same-sex marriage and no polygamy. If the California Supreme Court were now to attempt to nullify what the people have chosen to do through an expression of their sovereign will, they will have attempted to usurp the sovereignty of government "of the people, by the people and for the people" and to replace it with government "of the judges, by the judges and for the judges."

If the California Supreme Court does not acknowledge its obligation to submit its collective judgment to a constitutional amendment passed by the people, then the democratic freedom reserved to the sovereignty of the people will have perished in California.

But what is sovereignty? According to Webster’s it is the "supreme power especially over a body politic." The word itself derives from the Latin super, meaning above. Thus the sovereign is one who is above all. Land is saying that the voice of the people is the highest authority. But ultimately the sovereign source of the law is the god of a nation. Vox populi vox deus, Dr. Land?

In a democracy people believe that supreme power comes through the people and is incarnated in the state. But sovereignty in fact belongs only to God and is delegated to man, who is given authority in various spheres. A Christian social order knows nothing of ultimate human sovereignty and the word itself is conspicuously missing from our founding documents. In Christendom the state is but one form of “government” among many. Indeed government should primarily mean self-government under God. Likewise the family, school, church and various associations are free to govern themselves.

The effect of “popular sovereignty” is the undermining of all these mediating institutions between the individual and the state. When power is centralized in “the people” the power and legitimate authority of the family and church are undermined. The result being that a democratic state ultimately wars on institutions and demands uniformity. As a consequence other entities such as businesses increase in size and scope leading to the further centralizing of other spheres as men seek to protect themselves from the state. Tacqueville puts it this way: “As private person become more powerless by becoming more equal, they can effect noting in manufactures without combination: but the government naturally seeks to place these combinations under its control.”

We shouldn’t oppose gay marriage because the people say so, for they may not be saying so for long. It is God who through His Word gives meaning and definition to all of life. It is He who is sovereign. And His Word defines marriage as a union between a man and woman (Genesis 2:24; Malachi 2:15; Matthew 19:5) for the mutual support of husband and wife, to yield the gift of children and spread the dominion of his kingdom (Genesis 2:18; Genesis 1:28). Hence gay marriage is unnatural and a misnomer whatever the whims of “the people” or black-robed tyrants.

Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

2008-11-19T20:23:00.003-05:00

David Frum, a giant boil on the ass of the American body politic, has been sent packing from National Review. Of course the parting is “amicable” says the Frumster, who follows Chris Buckley out the door. It’s like Kristallnacht over at NR with frauleine Lopez and commissar Lowry wielding a might axe (assuming Lowry can pick it up) and putting together an oversized enemies list, if I’m not mixing a wide ranging array of political metaphors.

Frum was purged for second guessing the selection of Sarah Palin for VP. I also saw him whining on CSPAN recently about the GOPs inability to corral the yuppie vote. Frum’s suggestion to get votes of Upper Westsiders in the GOP column is to forget about abortion, learn to love gay marriage, and cease talking about taxes. Obviously Mr. “Axis of Evil” has no problem with belligerent militarism given his worshipful paean to George Bush, not to mention another screed with the noxious neocon Richard Perle. And yet it is the buffoonery of Bush’s invade-the-world arrogance that has turned off educated voters and the electorate generally.

It is interesting that Frum’s crime was his modest critique of the vacuous Palin. Back in 2003 Frum attempted to purge the paleocons by accusing them of anti-semitism and conspiracy mongering. Among the targets were Tom Fleming, Sam Francis, Lew Rockwell, Pat Buchanan and even Bob Novak. Yet nary a peep was uttered by Trotskyites cross-dressing as conservatives. Slander has always been a weapon of choice for the neocon set.

In his 1994 book, “Dead Right” Frum even tried tag Fleming, Francis, Buchanan and even Murray Rothbard as statists!

So what does this about the once venerable National Review? Who cares. I picked up my first issue of NR as a college freshman in search of an essay by Ernest Van Den Haag. I was immediately transfixed by the writing of John O’Sullivan, Joe Sobran and, yes, Bill Buckley. I subscribed to NR for a decade. Things took a turn in the late 1990’s when O’Sullivan and Peter Brimelow were purged. Writers like Steve Sailer were no longer welcome, either. O’Sullivan was replaced by Rich Lowry, a man who has never written a memorable word. Joe Sobran was thrown under the bus along with Pat Buchanan. The straw that broke the camel's back was the trashing of Buchanan leading up the 2000 election. Buchanan, a giant in contemporary life, was slandered on all sides by a collection of pygmies.

So lets celebrate the end of Frum's run at NR, though don't hold your breath that he'll go back to Canada. But we can hope that his influence is diminished. And while we're at it, lets mutter an imprecatory Psalm directed toward those purveyors of Buckleyism at National Review.

Watching the Meltdown

2008-11-19T20:09:00.003-05:00

Paul Volker says we're in trouble:

"What this crisis reveals is a broken financial system like no other in my lifetime. Normal monetary policy is not able to get money flowing. The trouble is that, even with all this [government] protection, the market is not moving again. The only other time we have seen the US economy drop as suddenly as this was when the Carter administration imposed credit controls, which was artificial."

Just for kicks I was looking at some historic S&P data. I was interested because much of my future retirement is tied to funds that broadly track that index. In any case, eleven years ago when I took a job as a knowledge worker in the burgeoning global economy the S&P stood at 848. Today it closed at 806. What was that about investing for the long term?

DeMar, Rauch and Voting Third Party

2008-10-03T14:26:00.009-04:00

American Vision has recently posted brief essays by the estimable Gary DeMar and Eric Rauch pleading for “sanity” and griping about the “malcontents” occupying the asylum who refuse to bend the knee to Senor McCain and the GOP.

So what exactly has the GOP done to earn our trust, votes and cash?

Let’s look first at the courts. We’re always sold the snake oil that voting for a Republican president is necessary to protect the courts from being overrun by godless, secular humanist libs. But since 1968, GOP presidents have nominated 12 of 14 Supreme Court justices and Republican appointees now control 75% of federal appellate jurisdictions. Since 1968 abortion restrictions and sodomy laws have been struck down, affirmative action programs have expanded, states have been prohibited from executing kiddie rapists, and the courts have blessed the theft of private property via eminent domain, to name just a few of the more egregious dictates of our “justice system.”

The Roe decision which enshrined in constitutional law the right to murder unborn children was supported by justices Blackmun, Burger, Brennan, Powell and Stewart—all nominated by Republican presidents.

Pennsylvania's minor abortion restrictions were struck down by SCOTUS in Casey v. Planned Parenthood with the assent of justices O’Connor, Souter, Stevens and Blackmun while Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down sodomy laws, was endorsed by Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, and O’Connor. Again, all were nominated by Republicans.

Moreover federal funding of Planned Parenthood through the egregious Title X has expanded continuously under Republican misrule (click graphs below).

Title X Funding History – FY 1971 – 2004:

Moving on to the question of fiscal responsibility and economic stewardship, one must ask with a Republican administration nationalizing the mortgage industry and buying up parts of companies (an economic doctrine formerly known as fascism) whether the GOP complaint about "big spending liberals" should be greeted with anything other than hoots and guffaws.

In 2000, for example, Bill Clinton presided over a $238 billion surplus. By 2004 outlays outstripped revenues by $413 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office. Fiscal restraint, however, as never been a GOP specialty, as you can see (click graph).

Republican worship of the free-trade idol has also created problems. As the trade deficit explodes and our currency collapses the wages of Americans are lower than thirty years ago and we increasingly take on the export profile of a Third World country. We are increasingly dependent on foreign goods for the necessities of life and on foreign banks to pay for them. The chickens are coming home to roost (click graph).

Republicans and conservatives are the alleged party of prudence and responsibility. They are supposedly the defenders of traditional values and the ethnic and religious core of the American nation. And yet they have proven themselves unwilling to fight the culture war. They have created program upon program to augment and enhance an already bloated State. They've stood by as unchecked immigration has begun to chip away at the etnocultural core of the nation. They have recited the catechism of "free markets" as the industrial base of America has rotted. They have engaged in an unprovoked and unnecessary war with a state that did not attack us and they have ceded unchecked authority to the executive branch.

Mr. Rauch says that those of us who would vote for Chuck Baldwin rather than the party with the record I've enumerated above are "humanists." But as I said back in 2004, if one is a Christian, constitutionalist conservative doesn’t it make sense to vote for a Christian, constitutionalist conservative? In 2008, that means casting a vote for Chuck Baldwin. Read the party platforms of the GOP, the Dems, and the Constitution Party and ask yourself a couple of questions:

1) Will you continue to vote for candidates who do nothing to stop the abortion holocaust?
2) Will you continue to vote for candidates that unconstitutionally drag the country into illegal and unwise foreign wars?
3) Will you continue to vote for candidates that fail to enforce immigration law?
4) Will you continue to vote for candidates who won’t fight the culture war?
5) Will you continue to vote for candidates who by their words and deeds deny the Lordship of Jesus and the efficacy of His Word?

Well, will you, Mr. Humanist?

Voddie Baucham on Sarah Palin

2008-09-21T17:44:00.001-04:00

James Manning on Obama's Mama

2008-09-21T17:42:00.000-04:00

Guilt, Atonement and Foreign Policy

2008-09-13T08:02:00.004-04:00

David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand. And David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Baale-judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the LORD of hosts who sits enthroned on the cherubim. And they carried the ark of Godon a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. And Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart, with the ark of God, and Ahio went before the ark. And David and all the house of Israel were making merry before the LORD, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God.

---II Samuel 6:1-7

In I Samuel 4 the Philistines defeated the Israelites and captured the Ark of the Covenant. After being afflicted by tumors and seeing their “gods” embarrassed they returned the ark to the Jews on a cart. Soon Israel followed this example rather than the revealed law of God which required the ark to be carried by priests (Exodus 25:14, Exodus 25:14).

Though the ark would have been surrounded by priests, when the oxen stumbled Uzzah took it upon himself in an act of presumption to steady the ark. He was immediately struck dead by God.

Uzzah was guilty of presumptuous responsibility. In effect he was saying, “If you need something done right, do it yourself.” But such false “responsibility” is in fact a desire for control. It is fundamentally grounded in a desire to be God and assume responsibility and control outside one’s legitimate sphere.

The fabrication of false responsibility is a strategy employed by the elite to make men guilty so that they hand over power and authority to the state. It is an ugly strategy designed to accumulate power.

Guilty men with a troubled conscience, in other words all men, seek atonement. Christians seek a right standing before God through repentance and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us through the instrument of faith. Though as Adam’s heirs we are sinners (Rom. 5:12) dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1) we are made righteous through though Christ, our representative in obedience.

Unbelievers seek justification elsewhere through self-atonement and self-justification, effectively a form of masochism. The other option is the transfer of guilt to other parties. Politics ultimately becomes a forum for obtaining atonement and its ministers and magistrates take on a priestly function rather than serving in their God-ordained office as ministers of justice (Rom. 13:4).

How has this desire for atonement driven American foreign policy? Through the systematic propagation of guilt, Americans have been indoctrinated with a belief that their history is little more than a series of power-grabs, a desolation of innocents. We are repeatedly assured that our history is simply an account of guilt toward Blacks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, Mexicans and ultimately the entire world.

The result of this defective history is a politics loaded down with guilt, in the face of which the populace assumes a posture of submissiveness. A foreign policy elite than is able to advance its interests by claiming a “humanitarian” justification for military adventurism, effectively placing guilt on one party in the midst of great complexity (e.g., Serbs vs. Bosnians, Russians vs. Georgians, etc.). Thus we are urged to atone for our sins by “saving” a “tyrannized” people from their “oppressors.”

The other possibility is to heap the guilt upon ourselves and assume responsibility for every malady on all continents. All the guilt for the starving and oppressed of the world or the ruination and environmental degradation of the planet is thus placed squarely at our feet. Atonement in this scenario leads to foreign aid schemes and similar looting of taxpayers.

Because few men can do more than look after their families and a small circle of friends or fellow believers, the task of imposed responsibility is soon delegated to the state and its planners. By acquiring this duty the state seeks to remake the world in its image, making salvation and liberation the work of man rather than God.

What is particularly irritating is when this guilt-mongering becomes the work of prominent Christians. And I don’t mean simply leftists like Jim Wallis. Consider the messianic pretensions of our Christ-professing President. In various speeches the President has sounded more like Robespierre than Burke:

“I believe democracy can take hold in parts of the world that have been condemned to tyranny. And I believe when democracies take hold, it leads to peace. That's been the proven example around the world. Democracies equal peace.”

"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

"With the power and resources given to us, the United States seeks to bring peace where there is conflict, hope where there is suffering, and liberty where there is tyranny."

But America’s “special obligation” to the world is also parroted by evangelical theologians like Richard Land, who in addressing a gathering at Harvard said this:

We believe that America has a special role to play in the world. Now we do not believe that America is God’s chosen nation, but we do believe that God’s providence has blessed this country, and that that is a belief that brings with it obligations and responsibilities and that America has a special obligation and responsibility to be the friend of freedom and the friend of democracy in the world.

And I cannot tell you the number of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals and Catholics who told me that they were moved to tears by the president’s second inaugural address and the statement that we are going to be the friend of freedom. People of traditional religious values believe America has a special obligation and responsibility because of the blessings we have received to be the friend of the oppressed ... and to help those who want freedom for themselves.

Naturally Land believes that we are "culpable" (his word) for failing to intervene in Rwanda and our tardy excursion into the Balkans.

From where Dr. Land conjures this divine imperative is unclear, suffice to say that it is Christ, not the United States, that came to free His people, to make them sons, not slaves. We have no condemnation and guilt in Christ but are liberated by His sacrifice. The “obligation” and “responsibility” of Land’s universalist ethic leads to slavery and total power in the hands of a seemingly all powerful state where God’s predestination is replaced by that of man. Total responsibility becomes total control. Man’s duty is to control himself, his family and his work. His responsibility does not extend to the entire world and his relationships are to be governed by the Word rather than a response to the guilt engendered by those who would enslave us.

Immigration Policy and the Importation of AIDS

2008-09-07T21:40:00.002-04:00

This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen:

After more than two decades on the books, a little-known yet strictly enforced federal law barring foreigners with HIV or AIDS from entering the country is on its way out.

Tucked in a bill pledging $48 billion to combat the disease, signed into law by President Bush last week, was language stripping the provision from federal immigration law.

But that change didn't fully lift the entry ban on visitors with HIV or AIDS, which applies whether they're on tourist jaunts or seeking longer stays. The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services still needs to delete HIV from the agency's list of “communicable diseases of public health significance,” which includes tuberculosis, gonorrhea and leprosy.

An HHS spokeswoman declined to comment, noting administrators are still reviewing the new law. An April report from the Congressional Budget Office said that, based on information from HHS' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV will be dropped from the list and new regulations will be in place in two years.

Both immigrant and HIV awareness advocates, however, say the toughest hurdle has been cleared, that the lifting of the immigration provision has been a long time coming — politics finally catching up with medical knowledge.

I had thought immigration policy was designed to benefit those already here. Silly me.

A Little Prison Love

2008-09-07T21:21:00.002-04:00

A new issue for civil rights crusaders: Does homo marriage apply to prisoners who want to tie the knot?

Attacking Iran?

2008-09-07T21:19:00.000-04:00

The Dutch seem to think it is imminent.

Sproul on Statism

2008-09-06T07:26:00.001-04:00

R. C. Sproul in the latest issue of Tabletalk has an essay on the plague of Statism...

Right Now Counts Forever
Statism
by R.C. Sproul

“A decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered….” In Luke 2, the well-known passage introducing the nativity story, the title accorded to the Roman emperor is Caesar Augustus. Had this census been mandated earlier under the monarchy of Julius Caesar, the Scripture would read: “A decree went out from Julius Caesar….” Had Octavian followed the model of Julius, he would have called himself Octavianus Caesar, and then the text would read: “A decree went out from Octavianus Caesar….” But we note Octavius’ explicit change of his personal name to the title Caesar Augustus. This indicates the emerging dimension of the emperor cult in Rome, by which those who were elevated to the role of emperor were worshiped as deities. To be called “august” would mean to be clothed with supreme dignity, to which is owed the reverence given to the sacred. The elevation of the emperor in Rome to this kind of status was the ancient zenith of statism.

About thirty years ago, I shared a taxi cab in St. Louis with Francis Schaeffer. I had known Dr. Schaeffer for many years, and he had been instrumental in helping us begin our ministry in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, in 1971. Since our time together in St. Louis was during the twilight of Schaeffer’s career, I posed this question to him: “Dr. Schaeffer, what is your biggest concern for the future of the church in America?” Without hesitation, Dr. Schaeffer turned to me and spoke one word: “Statism.” Schaeffer’s biggest concern at that point in his life was that the citizens of the United States were beginning to invest their country with supreme authority, such that the free nation of America would become one that would be dominated by a philosophy of the supremacy of the state.

In statism, we see the suffix “ism,” which indicates a philosophy or worldview. A decline from statehood to statism happens when the government is perceived as or claims to be the ultimate reality. This reality then replaces God as the supreme entity upon which human existence depends.

In the nineteenth century, Hegel argued in his extensive and complex study of Western history that progress represents the unfolding in time and space of the absolute Idea (Hegel’s vague understanding of God), which would reach its apex in the creation of the Prussian state. The assumption that Hegel made in the nineteenth century was made before the advent of Hitler’s Third Reich, Stalin’s Russia, and Chairman Mao’s communist China. These nations reached an elevation of statism never dreamed of by Hegel in his concept of the Prussian state.

In America, we have a long history of valuing the concept of the separation of church and state. This idea historically referred to a division of labors between the church and the civil magistrate. However, initially both the church and the state were seen as entities ordained by God and subject to His governance. In that sense, the state was considered to be an entity that was “under God.” What has happened in the past few decades is the obfuscation of this original distinction between church and state, so that today the language we hear of separation of church and state, when carefully exegeted, communicates the idea of the separation of the state from God. In this sense, it’s not merely that the state declares independence from the church, it also declares independence from God and presumes itself to rule with autonomy.

The whole idea of a nation under God has been challenged again and again, and we have seen the exponential growth of government in our land, particularly the federal government, so that the government now virtually engulfs all of life. Where education once was under the direction of local authorities, it now is controlled and directed by federal legislation. The economy that once was driven by the natural forces of the market has now come under the strict control of the federal government, which not only regulates the economy, but considers itself responsible for controlling it. Where we have seen the largest measure of the loss of liberty is with respect to the function of the church. Though the church is still somewhat tolerated in America (in a way it was not tolerated in Mao’s Red China and under Stalin), it is tolerated only when it remains outside of the public square. In other words, the church has been relegated to a status not unlike that given to the native Americans, where the tribes were allowed to continue to exist as long as they functioned safely on a reservation, outside of any significant influence on the government. So although the church has not been banished completely by the statism that has emerged in America, it has been effectively banished from the public square.

Throughout the history of the Christian church, Christianity has always stood over against all forms of statism. Statism is the natural and ultimate enemy to Christianity because it involves a usurpation of the reign of God. If Francis Schaeffer was right — and each year that passes makes his prognosis seem all the more accurate — it means that the church and the nation face a serious crisis in our day. In the final analysis, if statism prevails in America, it will mean not only the death of our religious freedom, but also the death of the state itself. We face perilous times where Christians and all people need to be vigilant about the rapidly encroaching elevation of the state to supremacy.

Chronicles on Palin

2008-09-06T06:32:00.002-04:00

Since the McCainic's selection of Sarah Palin for Veep I've been waiting for Tom Fleming and others at Chronicles to weigh in on the matter. Well they've obliged.

Scott Richert, Aaron Wolf and Fleming are concerned that the salivating over Palin by the "Christian Right" points to their rejection of the natural order and the acceptance of feminist presuppositions.

Fleming: "If Ms. Palin is a truly a Christian conservative, she is certainly not a conservative Christian. Christians are supposed to understand the implications of “male and female created He them” and, at the very least, realize that a mother’s primary obligation is not to the taxpayers but to her children and husband. It is all very well to celebrate her prowess as a politician and moose-hunter, but I do not recall these as feminine qualities in the Scriptures. I or we are not saying that we cannot vote for a woman who did not stay home to take care of her family, but only that this decision is incompatible with traditional Christian morality."

Wolf: "I will resist the temptation to steal my own thunder for next week’s John Randolph Club meeting in Philadelphia, where I intend to talk about the most important aspect of the Palin Pandemonium: the conservative Christian rejection of the natural order...It is not an exaggeration, however, to suggest that the Palin pick is harmful. It has lured dissatisfied Christians (evangelicals, Catholics, conservative Lutherans and Calvinists) back to the GOP Roe-reversal delusion—and to an obsession with fruitless national politics in general—and it portends to put in Washington a new convert to perpetual war for Israel and petroleum pipelines and “our values."

Richert: "That doesn’t mean, however, that it is sexist to raise them. Instead, it points to the very heart of the problem: From a Catholic understanding of the complementarity of the sexes, should a woman ever find herself in the position where she has to choose between her vocation as a wife and mother and political service? Even considering this a choice that needs to be made implies that, at best, motherhood and political service are of equal value.

But they aren’t—not in the eyes of the Church. That is not to demean wives and mothers, but to raise their vocation to its proper dignity—a dignity that dwarfs any that may once have been attached to politics."

Obama Campaign Plays the "Anti-Semitisim" Card

2008-09-06T06:27:00.002-04:00

Some jackass in the Obama campaign named Mark Bubriski calls Buchanan a "Nazi sympathizer."

The all too typical charge is discussed by Joe Scarborough and company.

Some Links

2008-08-27T06:18:00.005-04:00

A very worthwhile read by Patrick Cockburn on the situation in Iraq. It turns out that the Shia won. Wow, what a shock! I've said repeatedly that the only possible outcomes of the Iraq war were utter chaos or a victory by the numerically superior Shia. Neither result is preferable to the status quo of 2002, or 1990 for that matter.

The "Damascus Road" conversion of...Joe Esterhas? Esterhas wrote soft porn "classics" like "Basic Instinct", "Sliver", and "Showgirls." He is now, apparently, a faithful Catholic and has written a new book entitled "Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith."

Daniel Ritchie writes that "Two Kingdom" theology is not a Reformed doctrine. I've not read R. Scott Clark, but I have often read and listened to Mike Horton. Horton's thinking represents a Lutheranizing tendency and must be rejected. Christian activism and engagement, the spreading of the Kingdom in all spheres of life, is part of the task of the believer. We should be about the business of sanctifying all of life.

Is Sarah Palin a Buchananite?
Apparently she was also part of Buchanan's efforts in 1996 when he won the Alaska caucuses. Ron Paul supporters were also talking her up in 2007.

Charley Reese says goodbye to his readers. Thanks to the Internet, I've been reading Charley since 2000. He'll be missed.

There are three illegals in Los Angeles for every Republican. God Bless America!

Derb on the election from hell. "I don't want either of these men in charge of the federal government, neither the crazy old fool nor the simpering sophomore. I don't want either the moralistic imperialism of John McCain or the welfare-state-to-the world sentimentalism of Barack Obama."

More on the death of west. "Deaths are expected to outnumber births in the European Union from 2015 when migration will become the only source of population growth, according to an EU report released Tuesday."

The mainstream right always tries to turn the Dem nominee into the Boogeyman. Here is another try.

The Ground of Liberty: The Word of God

2008-08-26T07:21:00.003-04:00

Henry Van Til remarked that culture is the “externalization of religion,” a product of the religious presuppositions that under gird a culture. The blessings of Western culture thus are merely the outworking and externalization of the faith of Christendom.

Constitutionalism, the rule of law and the free market are outgrowths of a Christian worldview. True liberty is found in Christ and other forms of freedom are merely derivative of that fact. The blessings of the West and the resultant freedom of men to develop property and fulfill their callings is a product of fidelity to scripture.

Trinitarian Christianity resolves the tension between the one and the many, providing for a social structure balancing order and freedom. Humanism by definition lacks any basis for law and values and ultimately collapses upon itself. For Christians, that base or foundation is God’s written law revealed in scripture. The content and the authority of the law is ultimately grounded upon and rooted in God Himself. Therefore, neither the church nor state is above the law. Economic and political freedom are thus a product of a biblical social order which places a priority on liberty in Christ, recognizes land and freedom to use land as an aspect of salvation—a place to have dominion, and condemns theft, including theft perpetrated by the messianic state.

Unbelief naturally creates conditions of lawlessness because it attempts to destroy the Lawgiver. As a result a culture of death and present mindedness arises which ultimately stifles economic growth and destroys political liberty. Consequently, humanistic cultures become imperial in nature as a means of survival.

Unfortunately the zeal of the imperial crusader can often be found in the hearts of many professing believers sitting in the pews of our churches. Such zeal is usually masked or baptized. Witness this quote from Richard Land as an example:

We believe that America has a special role to play in the world. Now we do not believe that America is God’s chosen nation, but we do believe that God’s providence has blessed this country, and that that is a belief that brings with it obligations and responsibilities and that America has a special obligation and responsibility to be the friend of freedom and the friend of democracy in the world.

And I cannot tell you the number of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals and Catholics who told me that they were moved to tears by the president’s second inaugural address and the statement that we are going to be the friend of freedom. People of traditional religious values believe America has a special obligation and responsibility because of the blessings we have received to be the friend of the oppressed ... and to help those who want freedom for themselves.

Francis Schaeffer, a hero to many evangelicals, understood that liberty was a product of culture, specifically Christian culture, and could not grow in the soil of alien worldviews. He wrote, "When the men of our State Department, especially after World War II, went all over the world trying to implant our form-freedom balance in government downward on cultures whose philosophy would never have produced it, it has, in almost every cases, ended in some form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism."

Heathen cultures reject the King and ultimately devolve into statism and tyranny, the rule of godless men (I Sam. 8:7-20). The urge to dominion, a God-given impulse, is perverted by sin. Ungodly men still yearn for power and possession, but their authority no longer stems from servant-mindedness but from the exercise of raw power.

As David Chilton says, capitalism and freedom cannot be exported to those cultures hostile to true liberty:

To unbelieving economists, professors, and government officials, it is a mystery why capitalism cannot be exported. Considering the obvious, proven superiority of the free market in raising the standard of living for all classes of people, why don't pagan nations implement capitalism into their social structures? The reason is this: Freedom cannot be exported to a nation that has no market place for the Gospel. The blessings of the Garden cannot be obtained apart from Jesus Christ. The Golden Rule which sums up the law and the prophets (Matt. 7:12)—is the inescapable ethical foundation for the free market; and this ethic is impossible apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, who enables us to keep the righteous requirements of God's law (Rom. 8:4).

Empty Cribs

2008-08-23T07:19:00.002-04:00

From the International Herald Tribune:

American women are waiting longer to have children, and more than ever are choosing not to have children at all, according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Twenty percent of American women from the ages of 40 to 44 have no children, double the level of 30 years ago, the report says, and women in that age bracket who do have children have fewer than ever - an average of 1.9, compared with the median of 3.1 in 1976.

The only group bucking the trend: Hispanic women, who average 2.3 children. Hence the demographic transformation of the country continues apace.

"The alien who lives among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower… You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the LORD your God" (Deuteronomy 28:43, 62).

For past thoughts see here, here, here, and here.

These Candidates Make Me Want to Vomit in Terror

2008-08-23T07:02:00.005-04:00

The Importance of Chalcedon

2008-08-16T17:17:00.002-04:00

"The Council of Chalcedon met in 451 to deal with the issue as it came to focus at the critical point, in Christology. If the two natures of Christ were confused, it meant that the door was opened to the divinizing of human nature; man and the state were then potentially divine. If the human nature of Christ were reduced or denied, His role as man’s incarnate savior was reduced or denied, and man’s savior again became the state. If Christ’s deity were reduced, then His saving power was nullified. If His humanity and deity were not in true unison, the incarnation was then not real, and the distance between God and man remained as great as ever."

--R. J. Rushdoony, "The Foundations of Social Order"

Bear Baiting Bubbas

2008-08-16T07:14:00.003-04:00

From the NY Times comes this thigh-slapper: "Russia’s military offensive into Georgia has shattered, perhaps irrevocably, the strategy of three successive presidential administrations to coax Russia into alliance with the West and integration into its institutions."

Who tried to do what?

Even better is this quote from the Prez: "With its actions in recent days Russia has damaged its credibility and its relations with the nations of the free world. Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century."

Though you might not be able to tell by watching his deeds, a bucket of rotten fruit if ever one existed, "W" has always claimed to be a Christian. He's just not much for the ole Golden Rule and never stumbled across this little blurb from our Lord: "You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

Clearly Americans lack the capacity to see ourselves as others see us. For since 1994 our political elites have ceaselessly advanced a strategy of encircling Russia. After pledging to Gorby that we would not move our alliance into the former Soviet bloc, the Clinton and Bush administrations expanded NATO to include numerous former Warsaw Pact nations and three former republics of the Soviet Union. After all we have a deep strategic interest in the affairs of the Slovaks and Estonians.

In the late 90s American aircraft bombed Serbia for 78 days to steal Kosovo from the Serbs and hand it to group of Islamic thugs in clear contravention of morality, international law and Russian strategic interests. We've meddled in the internal affairs of Ukaraine and Georgia to create "democratic" revolutions, overthrowing Russian sympathizing regimes. We attempted to ram-rod a "free market" ideology onto the Russian people which amounted to the looting of the Russian nation by parasitical gangster capitalists. After Moscow allowed us to use former Soviet republics in Central Asia to war in Afghanistan the United States sought permanent bases there.

After fifteen years of baiting the Bear they finally had enough and responded to the idiotic provocation of the Georgians.

Pat Buchanan asks rhetorically what we expect from the Russians:

How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western Europe into the Warsaw Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build pipelines to transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment to Asia? And cut us out? If there were Russian and Chinese advisers training Latin American armies, the way we are in the former Soviet republics, how would we react? Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior?

Pork for Pinkos

2008-08-14T21:42:00.002-04:00

That housing bailout which will hand billions of taxpayer dollars to bankers will also funnel cash to the anti-white organization La Raza and the lefty Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

Location, Location, Location

2008-08-14T21:36:00.002-04:00

Homes in Detroit are now selling for the price of double cheeseburger at Micky D's. Heck, if my son picks up the pace and completes a few more chores he could purchase a whole block.

Polygamy Comes to Holland...Sort Of

2008-08-14T20:19:00.001-04:00

In yet another sign of the impending death of Europe, it is now legal for certain foreigners to practice practice bigamy in Holland with the best wishes and legal protection of the Dutch state. While your average Mormon resettling from Salt Lake City to Rotterdam would get the boot, Islamic polygamous marriages that take place in countries where more than one wife is permitted are accepted.

Margolis on the State Worship and WWII

2008-08-12T19:55:00.003-04:00

I have yet to procure a copy of Pat Buchanan's book on Churchill, but I think Pat is absolutely right that the myths surrounding WWII continue to animate American expansionism.

In a wonderful column Eric Margolis remembers Alexander Solzhenitsyn and unmasks a few of the lies masquerading as truth:

History is the propaganda of the victors. Few photographs of the gulag have survived, evidence was destroyed, and witnesses have died. Churchill and Roosevelt could not admit they were allied to the greatest mass killer since Genghis Khan, and complicit in his crimes. Or reveal that Communist agents of influence had shaped White House policy. The feeble-minded Roosevelt even hailed Stalin as "Uncle Joe."

Revealing the truth about the Allies’ role in supporting Stalin and his crimes would undermine the whole bogus mythology of World War II that has become the state religion for the political right in North America, Britain and Australia.

Those who considered the Jewish Holocaust a unique historical crime were not eager to bring attention to Stalin’s genocide lest it diminish or dilute their own people’s suffering.

O'Cain, McBama and Slavophobia

2008-08-12T19:30:00.002-04:00

From the AP:
"Republican presidential candidate John McCain continued hammering Russia on Tuesday for its invasion of U.S.-allied Georgia, telling a cheering audience that he had spoken again with the tiny Caucasus country’s president to assure him of America’s moral support.

The longtime Arizona senator, who had adopted an increasingly tough line against Moscow well before the crisis in Georgia, told a town meeting in Pennsylvania that he had spoken with Mikhail Saakashvili, president of the former Soviet republic, to assure him that 'Today we are all Georgians.'"

McCain's propensity to patronize makes me want to puke.

What's worse is that both candidates yearning to be emperor are demanding an expansion NATO, including redoubling efforts to include Georgia in the alliance.

"NATO’s decision to withhold a Membership Action Plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia, and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision," McCain said.

Obama appeared to agree, saying, "I have consistently called for deepening relations between Georgia and trans-Atlantic institutions, including a Membership Action Plan for NATO, and we must continue to press for that deeper relationship."

Nations with sane elites typically enter into alliances to strengthen themselves. Exactly how is America strengthened by giving a war guarantee to a wack job like Saakashvili? As American forces and "allies" encircle the Russians we soothingly reassure Moscow that we have the best of intentions. Nevertheless one wonders what reaction would ensue if the Russians gave war guarantees to Mexico and began arming and training Mexican forces.

Originalism vs. the Managerial State

2008-07-29T21:36:00.002-04:00

The managerial elite grabs much of its power through the manipulation of racial and ethnic relations. Often ignored is the pernicious role played by SCOTUS in mandating desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. Brown quite naturally led to enforced desegregation through such schemes as busing.

In an excerpt from their new book entitled "Who Killed the Constitution?", Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman provide an originalist critique of Brown and explore its radical implications, i.e., the destruction of constitutional government.

Keep Fighting the Future

2008-07-29T21:27:00.003-04:00

Tom Piatak wrote a marvelous little essay causing me to recall fondly those bygone days sitting in front of television on Sunday nights. That was the era known as BC, before children. Ah, yes, Matt Groening was still pumping out great stuff and I even enjoyed "King of Hill," produced and written by another cultural reactionary, Mike Judge. It was interesting to note that the great Samuel T. Francis was also a big fan of the "X-Files."

Affirmative Action for GOP Lickspittles

2008-07-29T21:03:00.002-04:00

A Justice Department internal report released on Monday shows that aides to former AG Alberto "Fredo" Gonzales broke the law by using politics to guide their hiring decisions resulting in the hiring of less qualified applicants for non-partisan jobs.

Recall that this administration was going to restore integrity to the White House. Instead they hired Regent U grad Monica Goodling to run Google searches implicating applicants in such criminal enterprises as contributing money to...Democrats.

Conservatives claim to believe that jobs and academic placements should not be doled out based erroneous criteria such skin color, gender or (heaven forbid) sexual proclivities. They do, however, want to make sure that competence has nothing to do with it.

War on the Horizon

2008-07-28T21:14:00.003-04:00

Israeli historian Benny Morris predicts bad times in the Middle East.

Is This Evangelicalism?

2008-07-28T21:05:00.003-04:00

I wonder if this guy is an expository preacher. What do you think?

Eggheads at Work

2008-07-15T20:19:00.003-04:00

A group of scientists and congressman Dana Rohrbacher, whom I once respected, say that the earth is in danger.

What is the impending peril? Is global warming the culprit? No, it would appear we are unprepared for an asteroid strike.

According to Rohrbacher, our parsimonious and tight fisted congress is going to cut funding for the Arecibo, Puerto Rico, radio telescope, which searches for near-Earth objects. Looks like Professor Frink might be out of job. HOYVIN-GLAYVIN!

But even if we knew an asteroid was going to hit, what could be done? Well apparently options include using nukes, sending Bruce Willis or Robert Duvall to take care of matters, or calling on Green Lantern to save the day.

Rushdoony on Kenneth Stammp

2008-07-14T20:52:00.002-04:00

My wife recently purchased Rushdoony's 'The Biblical Philosophy of History' for my birthday. It is one of Rush's shorter works but brimming with insight.

For example, check it this quote by historian Kenneth Stammp from his book 'The Peculiar Institution':

"Today we are learning much from the natural and social sciences about the Negro’s potentialities and about the basic irrelevance of race, and we are slowly discovering the roots and meaning of human behavior. All this is of immense value to the historian when, or example, he tries to grasp the significance of the Old South’s ‘peculiar institution.’ I have assumed that the slaves were merely human beings, that innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less. This give quite a new and different meaning to the bondage of black men; it give their story a relevance to men of all races which it never seemed to have before."

Rushdoony unmasks the universalist abstractions propagated by Stammp that wind up undermining, in fact denying history:

"If Negroes are only 'white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less,' then, conversely, white men are only Negroes with white skins, nothing more, nothing less. this means that all cultural differences, hereditary predispositions, and historical traditions are irrelevant and meaningless. It means, in other words, that history is meaningless. And how can one be an historian if it is his purpose to deny history?

The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture, and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires. Although the white man may reject this faith and subject himself instead to the requirements of humanism, he is still a product of this Christian past. The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity is governed by radically different consideration...If you and I have our histories abstracted from us, and our heredities as well, along with all our cultural conditioning and responses, we are no longer men, no longer human beings, but an abstract and theoretical concept of man. No real history of us can then be written. Stampp’s Negroes are thus neither black men nor white men: they are an abstraction, but an abstraction to illustrate the devil in Stampp’s humanistic morality play.”

Was Rushdoony Racist?

2008-07-12T21:16:00.002-04:00

Bret McAtee who blogs at Backwater Report with yours truly, also has a fabulous blog of his own that you should check out. He is provocative and prolific.

Here he handily dismisses critics who call Rushdoony a racist for his relatively innocuous comments on mixed marriages.

Multiculturalism on Display

2008-07-12T20:54:00.000-04:00

Back in 2006, I wrote a blurb about research published by Robert Putnam indicating that ethnic diversity produces a fractured society characterized by an absence of trust.

Recently in Hartford, Connecticut, a 78 year-old-man was run over by a hit and run driver. He laid in the middle of the road while cars zoomed by without even stopping to help.

Hartford, believe it or not, is a bastion of multiculturalism with a population 19% white, 38% black, 2% Asian and 41% Hispanic.

Rodriquez, Garcia, Martinez, Oh My!

2008-07-12T20:38:00.001-04:00

In yet another harbinger of the coming demographic transformation of America, the Census Bureau says that two Hispanic surnames — Garcia and Rodriguez — are among the top 10 most common in the nation, and Martinez is close behind.

The Hispanics population grew by 58 percent in the 1990s to nearly 13 percent of the total population and current estimates indicate that the population will increase by roughly 138 million between now and 2050 with 82% of that increase attributable to immigrants arriving after 2005 and their offspring.

Miscellany

2008-07-04T07:36:00.005-04:00

Good satire from The Onion tracking Bush's tour of America to survey damage caused by his presidency.

Here is video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded. Any further commentary would sound uncharitable and unchristian.

Laurence Vance discusses double-minded, warmongering Christians.

Speaking of being double-minded on the war, Obama may be having a change of heart.

I had seen this but forgotten to comment. It's great to see open-borders loonies go down hard. Lets hope it is a harbinger of things to come.

I had never read about John McCain's first wife. Ross Perot's comments at the bottom of the story say it all: "McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory. After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history."

Seymour Hersh says the groundwork is being laid for an invasion of Iran with Democrat complicity. "In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy."

Torture and the Bible

2008-07-03T06:33:00.003-04:00

The Boumediene decision handed down recently by the Supreme Court grants detainees at Guantanamo Bay the right to seek habeas corpus hearings. It also engendered a slew of criticism from the Brownshirt faction at NRO and other “conservative” media outlets. Do these fellas assume the state has unlimited power not merely to invade the world but to imprison it as well? John McCain stepped into the fray and called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

In a largely cautious dissent from rightwing orthodoxy George Will writes, “The purpose of a writ of habeas corpus is to cause a government to release a prisoner or show through due process why the prisoner should be held… As such, the Supreme Court's ruling only begins marking a boundary against government's otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely, treating Guantanamo as (in Barack Obama’s characterization) ‘a legal black hole.’”

In other words, the court’s decision, mistaken or not, provides just a small limitation on the state’s power to imprison at will. Is that so bad? Conservatives, and regrettably lots of Christians among them, say emphatically “Yes.”

It was also reported this week that military trainers at Gitmo based an entire interrogation class on Chinese torture techniques used against U.S. serviceman during the Korean War to elicit false confessions.

In the NY Times Scott Shane writes, “The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

A truly biblical legal structure would not countenance torture. In Jewish law confession was inadmissible in criminal court. Professor Aaron Kirschenbaum writes, “Confessions, whether made in or out of court, guilty pleas, and self-incriminating statements are inadmissible. The prevailing principle is that allegations of guilty must be supported by evidence obtained from sources other than the mouth of the accused.” Justice requires the accumulation of evidence by lawful means.

The Old Testament account of Achan’s sin and execution shows the point. God had pronounced judgment on Jericho and demanded that all her residents save Rahab’s family be killed. Moreover all of the city's treasure was to be devoted to the Lord.

But Achan stole from the Lord (Joshua 7:1) and other men died as a result of his crime. God required the death penalty for the offender. The Lord also empowered Joshua with supernatural means to discover the offender. When Joshua confronts Achan he says, “My son, give glory to the LORD, the God of Israel, and give him the praise. Tell me what you have done; do not hide it from me” (7:19). The confession of the crime is thus primarily to God and only secondarily to man.

It is important to note as well that even God’s supernatural discovery of Achan, as well as Achan’s confession, did not alone constitute grounds for conviction. Achan’s story was corroborated by evidence before his conviction and punishment (7:22-23).

Biblical law was largely the ground of civil law in early Christendom and there is no evidence that canon law allowed for torture. Indeed in 866 Pope Nicholas sent a letter to the Bulgars prohibiting torture. He wrote, “If a thief or a robber is apprehended and denies that he is involved, you say that in your country the judge would beat his head with lashes and prick his sides with iron goads until he came up with the truth. Neither divine nor human law allows this practice in any way, since a confession should be spontaneous, not compelled, and should not be elicited with violence but rather proferred voluntarily.”

In contravention to Christian civilization Hellenistic society and Roman law allowed for torture of suspects and slaves using such implements as red-hot irons and lacerating hooks. As the medieval church was increasingly influenced by pagan ideas and sought the synthesis of Christianity with Greco-Roman thought torture was revived as a means of weeding out heretics. With the beginning of the Inquisition, Innocent IV issued a decree that called on magistrates to use torture as a means of eliciting confession against themselves and others.

Under the influence of pietistic Christianity and as a result of secularizing tendencies the shift toward pagan practices in the civil sphere has continued. Today it is the polis or the state that is the source of morality rather than the Christian scriptures. Following Hegel modern man says, “The State is as God walking on Earth".

The 20th Century was filled with torture, violence and bloodshed. Mussolini, a man held in high esteem by Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, spoke for modern man when he said, “Beyond the state, nothing that is human or spiritual has any value whatsoever.”

Christians are largely responsible for this sad state affairs because of their general hostility to the application of scripture in the social and civil arena. By their indifference and outright hostility to this aspect of God’s word they implicitly affirm humanism as the source of civil law—which leads directly to the Star Chamber and the torture chamber.

“Biblical law,” writes Rushdoony, “is not popular with men even though it limits civil government to a minimal dimension; sharply limits civil taxation to a small sum; preserves the person from torture; requires self-government; and furthers freedom. It has a great fault; it indicts all men as sinners before God, something man refuses to hear.”

Dual Loyalty

2008-07-03T06:19:00.002-04:00

Phillip Weiss says that Joe Klein has raised the "dual loyalty" issue with this column. Here is the relevant portion:

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.

Klein also indicts "Big Oil" in this little tirade but where is the denunciation of Klein from the ADL or over at The New Republic? Has Dershowitz been called? Where is Marvin Hier on this outrage? Perhaps I just missed it.

Statists and Parental Authority

2008-06-30T21:21:00.002-04:00

The family in the West is under attack from numerous sources. Divorce ravages the culture like a plague. Men and women are waiting longer to marry, but not to copulate, and having fewer children as a consequence. Feminist ideological claptrap has led to the “liberation” of women from the "narrow" and "constricting" roles of wife and mother while the siren song of the marketplace has drowned out God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. The culture of death has raised its ugly head not merely at the local abortuarium but even in the Christian family where the contraceptive mentality has gained a foothold. Family authority over property is threatened by an overweening state wielding the weapon of eminent domain and exacting tribute in the form of onerous taxes on property. The familial duty to provide welfare for its members and leave an inheritance for its heirs has been usurped by a godless state that has seized the role of the eldest son, demanding the double portion and promising to take care of mom and dad with Social Security and Medicare.

The family is the fundamental institution of civilization. It is the first state and church for a child. It is where youngsters begin to develop their callings. As the family weakens civilization hangs over a precipice.

Fundamental to the purpose of the family is discipline. It is parents who are commanded by God to use the rod of correction to drive evil from their children. God commands corporal discipline for deliberate defiance. Moreover, He also says that parents who refuse to ever use this form of discipline "hate" their children:

He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes. Proverbs 13:24

Foolishness [is] bound in the heart of a child; [but] the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. Proverbs 22:15

Withhold not correction from the child: for [if] thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell. Proverbs 23:13-14

Increasingly not even the church takes family discipline seriously. In 2004 the United Methodist Church passed two anti-spanking resolutions. In so doing they repudiated the teachings of their founder, John Wesley, who believed corporal punishment of infants and children was necessary "to break their rebellious wills and save their souls."

When portions of the church are negligent in providing a biblical case for discipline the culture at large is sure to be racing further down the path to anarchy. In California Jacobins on the state assembly's Public Safety Committee advanced legislation in March defining the use of switches or paddles to be child abuse. The punishment? One year in jail. Spanking is already outlawed in Scandinavia, Austria, Cypress, Croatia, and Latvia. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child is pressuring countries to ban corporal punishment.

Meanwhile in Canada it is now illegal for a father to forbid his child from going on a school camping trip. The dispute between father and daughter began when he cut off her Internet access. The Horror! She continued to use the Internet at the homes of friends and when dad found out he told his daughter she couldn't go on a three-day school trip.

That should have been the end of the story. But the girl's mother allowed her to go on the trip (yes they are divorced and in the midst of what is apparently a bitter custody dispute). Because the school wouldn't allow the girl to go unless both parents consented, the girl took legal action against her father with the support of her mother. Ultimately the father may win on appeal, but his standing has already been undermined. A court has become complicit in a daughter’s disobedience and made a mockery of his authority.

The cry of the libertines and leftists is that the state must “stay out of our bedrooms.” What about our family rooms?

Religious Liberty, Homogenization and Civil Rights

2008-06-29T14:22:00.004-04:00

The American Conservative has a short blurb in its recent edition lamenting California’s judicially imposed recognition of homo marriage. They are concerned about the thorny legal issues that await religious entities who do not recognize gay unions.

The tension between freedom and coercion, however, is a necessity in any regime that empowers the state to punish purveyors of “discrimination.” What we have effectively is a clash of visions and a struggle to define civil rights. Sometimes a civil right is a freedom right or the right of a person to act free from coercion. Such an understanding demands restraint and forbearance on behalf of the state.

Other times and in other contexts civil rights become benefit rights, whereby a person is “entitled” to something from others, who have a corresponding obligation to put their hands up and allow their wallet to be taken. The alleged right of the elderly to tax receipts taken from the mouths of children would be one example.

Civil rights may also be clothed as nondiscrimination rights, whereby others are bound to disregard various characteristics of individuals when they are pursuing employment, housing, education, and public accommodation. For example, an employer or restaurant owner may not discriminate against an applicant or customer on the grounds of race or gender.

Advocates of “civil rights” in the second and third senses actually reduce “civil rights” in the first sense. So for instance an individual’s right to dispose of his private property as he wishes (a freedom right, properly understood) is contravened by the nondiscrimination rights of others. Advocates of nondiscrimination rights and policies therefore empower the state as an agent to level any and all institutions who “discriminate” or want to maintain their own freedom of action or character. Civil rights crusaders, despite their lionization in the press and culture at large, are not interested one wit in individual liberty but wield a doctrinaire egalitarianism designed to create homogenization.

As it pertains to the question of homosexuality, we see that cherished rights to religious liberty likewise are kicked aside and torn asunder by rampaging gangs of bureaucratic thugs. The editors of TAC cite the example of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts. Rather than complying with state law requiring mandating that gays be allowed to adopt children, Catholic Charities simply got out of the adoption business. A Methodist camp in New Jersey lost tax exempt status by refusing to allow its facilities in a lesbian “commitment ceremony.” Meanwhile, the “New Mexico Human Rights Commission” fined a photographer who refused to take snapshots for a lesbian couple on religious grounds.

In short, in the name of tolerance and pluralism Christians are to be deprived their right to shun moral perversion. In so doing it is the pink lobby and its willing accomplices in the organs of cultural power that are legislating their morality in the names of the false gods of pluralism, equality, and tolerance.

Finally Back in the Saddle

2008-06-29T14:07:00.002-04:00

I received an encouraging email from someone who read an essay I penned at Antiwar.com nearly four years ago. The thrust of the email was gratitude that I had expressed such views and an encouragement to continue writing.

I've been away from the web generally of late dealing with more pressing concerns related to work, family, and church. That is as is should be. Whether helping to organize transitional activities at church, planning lessons from the New Testament, or picking school curriculum for my kids, I have better things to do than regurgitate the same laments about the various follies infecting public life. Likewise, some issues related to one of our sons has consumed not merely time but also our energy and spirit.

Nevertheless, I do enjoy writing. Not because I care who, if anyone, is reading but simply because it helps me to clarify my thoughts. My prayer is that I will be faithful in the small things--like blogging--but not consumed by them. Ultimately my calling means living a life before God that is empowered by the Spirit and aided by the sources of strength he provides. And in those roles, there is a hierarchy of obligation and duty.

So do check back from time to time. Give me about fifteen minutes though.

Vacation Pics

2008-05-26T15:36:00.002-04:00

I was going to write a bit about our family vacation to the Smokies, but my wife has done so here and here. Looks like there is more to come, too.

The Beat Goes On

2008-05-25T15:30:00.004-04:00

Headline: Radical Chicano Group Gets Millions In Earmarks

According to this article, La Raza received $15 million in federal boodle in 2006 and is further into the trough thanks to unflagging assistance from Barney Frank.

No matter who is elected the problem will be exacerbated as either Obama or McCain will try to buy influence, and votes, among the growing Hispanic population by shoveling money at them.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: democracy just doesn't work.

Marriage and Politics in Post-Christian America

2008-05-25T15:02:00.003-04:00

Watch John McCain on the "Ellen" show discussing, among other things, his opinions on the abomination of gay marriage. McCain spent years being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton but here does his best impersonation of the cowardly lion and refuses to put this ignorant women in her place. One can only surmise that ole John is either getting soft in the noggin or that he really couldn't care less about the issue. I'm thinking it could be both, but more likely the latter.

Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan addresses the matter with a bit more punch:

To say two men who live together and engage in sex can be married renders the idea and ideal of marriage meaningless. The court may declare it, but it cannot redefine an institution that nature and nature's God have already defined. As they say in Texas, you can put lipstick and earrings on a pig, and call her Peggy Sue, but it's still a pig.

"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder," Christ taught. Through the Old Testament and into the epistles of St. Paul, homosexual sodomy is an abomination leading to personal destruction and damnation, one of the five sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance. How, then, can four judges declare it to be integral to the sacrament of marriage?

Evangelical voters will still show up and pull the lever for the Mad Bomber. When Buchanan was running, it was this same group and their anointed "leaders" that sabotaged his campaign in an attempt to carry Bob Dole across the finish line in the GOP primaries. If they could vote for the likes of Dole and Dubya, there is no reason to assume they won't vote for McCain, too.

Caesar's Children

2008-05-25T14:57:00.003-04:00

Speaking to the dangers inherent in statist education, Voddie Baucham asks why we're surprised that after giving our children to Caesar they return to us as Romans. I've asked the same question:

Why are Christians so socially impotent? Why are we not light scattering the darkness? Why has the salt lost its savor? Why are we faithless in heeding Jesus’ command to occupy until He returns? I would argue that the Church has ceased to look at life in terms of the fullness of God’s Word. We have not made his Word central to our lives. Likewise, we have turned our children over to Molech. We give our children to covenant breakers and then are surprised when they don’t grow up to be covenant keepers. We’re shocked that our evangelism seems so lacking and our influence is so minute when we don’t even reach our own children with the Truth.

War on the Horizon?

2008-05-10T07:51:00.003-04:00

If Phil Giraldi is right, war with Iran may be right around the corner. Giraldi writes of "buzz" in the imperial city "suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants." This is despite the lack of evidence connecting Iran with Iraqi "insurgents". American policy in Iraq seems to be designed toward fomenting tension between Iran and Iraq for purposes of justifying the occupation. Will the Congress have anything to say about this or is The Hill truly Israeli occupied territory? In case you were wondering, that question is merely rhetorical.

Updates

2008-05-10T07:47:00.003-04:00

I haven't been posting much of late, but I did make a few updates to my website this morning. If you visit, feel free to peruse some of my favorite essays from Dow Blog and be sure to visit Kathy's blog, too.

Happiness is...?

2008-05-10T06:21:00.002-04:00

According to one of those pointy-headed, faux intellectual, egghead types at Harvard, the key to happiness is avoiding, at all costs, rearing children. I always thought happiness was all about two kinds of ice cream and sharing a sandwich.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of the book Stumbling On Happiness, says people's happiness declines after they have children, and never recovers until the children leave home. Gilbert's vast body of research indicates that playing with one's children produces less happiness than talking with friends, eating, or watching an episode of "According to Jim."

By the way, Gilbert has neither children nor pets. And in other good news the conference was organized by an outfit dedicated to the study and practice of Buddhism, so at least we can hope there were only a few "Christians" present.

For Christians, children are never mere accessories or a "lifestyle choice." Conception is an act of God (Ps. 127:3, Ruth 4:13, I Sam. 1:19-20, Gen. 16:2, Gen. 17:16, Ps. 22:9, Jer. 1:5, Gal. 1:15) and children from the womb are created to be the image bearers of God (Gen. 1:26-27). Scriptures commands us to be fruitful and multiply, for the purpose extending His dominion (Gen. 9:7) and producing Godly offspring (Mal. 2:15). Moreover, children are to be received as a gift from God:

Ps. 127:3-5
3 Sons are a heritage from the LORD ,
children a reward from him.
4 Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are sons born in one's youth.
5 Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their enemies in the gate

Get the picture? Receiving a blessed inheritance from God involves in part the gift of children. Those who despise children despise life itself, and ultimately they despise the giver of life. Listen to Martin Luther: "The purpose of marriage is not to have pleasure and to be idle but to procreate and bring up children, to support a household. Those who have no love for children are swine, stocks, and logs unworthy of being called men or women; for they despise the blessings of God, the Creator and Author of marriage."

The correlation between happiness and children sounds strange to modern ears. Fortunately the likes of Dr. Gilbert will ultimately have little significance for they carry few arrows into battle. The future belongs to the meek and obedient, to those who love God rather than death.

Napolitano on State Kidnapping

2008-05-04T17:25:00.002-04:00

Napolitano is great! I don't watch FNC frequently, but surely they must bury this guy rather than putting him on in prime time. He makes too much sense.

Napolitano says that the Texas CPS has committed a crime and that any evidence of wrongdoing they squeeze out of these poor kids should be inadmissible.

I've Been Busy

2008-05-04T17:19:00.002-04:00

The lack of posting lately is due to being busy. I have recently been elected to join the deaconate of my church and will also be shortly teaching an overview of the New Testament. Kathy and I are also trying to make curriculum decisions for next year and trying to put together some lesson plans as well. On top of those 45 hours I have to regrettably spend at work that means I haven't got lots of time at the moment.

I have a number of topics I hope to address in coming weeks, including the doctrine of the ascension and how it relates to Christian engagement broadly speaking. We'll see if I get to it or not.

School Daze

2008-04-19T06:26:00.005-04:00

Yesterday my kids went to a lovely little horse farm out in the bluegrass area around Lexington, Kentucky. They had a great time, and every picture I saw from the occasion featured my anti-social, homeschooled 5-year-old chatting incessantly to one of the guides.

Here they are in front of a little statue:

Here they are riding a pony:

In conjunction with our study of the printing press, we also took a brief tour at the local newspaper to see the printing operation:

Today we're heading to the Frazier Arms Museum, and wonderful little spot in Louisville that chronicles the history of warfare. Ah, there is nothing little boys like better than medieval weaponry--well, other than lightsabers.

That's What Woke Me Up?

2008-04-19T06:17:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I was awakened from my slumber by a loud rumbling that sounded very similar to high winds trying to remove the roof from my house. Not sure what was happening I rose from bed and headed outside to see what all the clattering was about.

Later I found out that there was an earthquake about 150 miles away. Later in the morning I was on the phone at work when my partitions started moving about. Turned out to be a small aftershock.

It is very interesting to remember that the earth is indeed in motion, in more ways than one.

Lefties Attempt to Muzzle Immigration Restrictionists

2008-04-18T16:36:00.003-04:00

The American Jewish Committee is partnering with the racist National Council of La Raza to censor immigration restrictionists and heave them from the airwaves.

According to its website, the AJC’s mission is to protect the welfare and security of Jews "throughout the world" by "promoting pluralism and shared democratic values." I suppose this means everywhere but Israel.

In any event the AJC sent a letter to the presidents of CNN, FOX and MSNBC. "It is inappropriate and offensive," whined AJC General Counsel Jeffrey Sinensky, "for major television programs to provide a microphone to individuals and organizations that promote hate, espouse vigilantism, white supremacy, or even violence in the immigration debate."

So who are the hatemongers so obviously getting a hearing from Keith Olbermann and Wolf Blitzer? Has the Grand Wizard of the KKK chatted up Larry King? Heck, did I miss Jared Taylor on the tube bantering with Jack Cafferty or Chris Matthews?

No, the alleged haters are Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox of the Minuteman Project and Dan Stein of FAIR. According the AJC, Gilchrist and company are vigilantes (?) who use sinister "code words" to propagate a message of hate.

According to La Raza president Janet Murguía, Pat Buchanan’s last book tour was "a hateful tirade about immigration" and that Pat’s views are "unacceptable in a democratic society."

Morris Dees and his ambulance chasing outfit, the Southern Poverty Law Center, are on the hunt, too. According to spokesman Mark Potok, Lou Dobbs is fueling the spread of hate groups by spinning conspiracy theories and lies from his CNN perch.

Not surprisingly, America’s corporate elite is funding the attack on immigration realists. While a journalist with the gifts and courage of Peter Brimelow has to beg and scrape for contributions, left-wing organizations tap their multi-billion dollar funding apparatus in corporate America. Here is a list of some of La Raza’s supporters that you should consider boycotting.

Day of Reckoning, Part III

2008-04-12T07:08:00.007-04:00

After my two previous posts on Pat Buchanan’s latest book, I’d like to briefly discuss the trade issue.

I’ve written elsewhere that as a younger man I hoped to one day become an economist. Over time I was tempted by the siren song of libertarian thought unconstrained by God’s law and become a methodological individualist.

But even as a student I was perplexed by the general ignorance of economists who have a very limited analytical tool kit and are often more impressed by theoretical abstraction and mathematical mumbo jumbo than history and human nature.

As I have drifted into Calvinism, I have become a Christian covenentalist. Ultimately, I concluded, free trade is the economic component of the liberal ideology, and more a religion than anything else. At the heart of free trade doctrine is the notion that all things work together for the good of those who eliminate tariffs.

In Day of Reckoning and more thoroughly in The Great Betrayal, Buchanan traces the origins of the free-trade cult to 19th liberal thinkers Richard Cobden and Jean-Baptist Say. It was the in the stew of Enlightenment thought that free trade developed into what Rushdoony has called a "god-concept."

In 1846, the year of repeal of the Corn Laws, Cobden rose to defend free trade:

I have been accused of looking too much to material interests...I believe that the physical gain will be the smallest gain to humanity from the success of this principle. I look farther; I see in the Free-Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace...I believe that the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies...will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of one's labor with his brother man. I believe that...the speculative philosopher of a thousand years hence will date the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world's history from the triumph of the principle which we have met here to advocate.

According to this apostle of free trade, it is commerce, the free and unhindered movement of consumer crap across borders that has the power to cause men to lay down arms, cast aside envy and greed and embrace one another in the bond of unity, fellowship and brotherhood.

Cobden’s rendering of Luke 18-18-20 might read like this,

A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good -- except God alone. You know the commandments: 'Do not establish tariffs or prevent the free flow of commerce across borders.'"

In the vision of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is the love of self and self-interest that drives all men to an enlightened interest which creates prosperity and the good society. There is some truth here. Indeed, a benevolent creator has ordered the universe in such way as to produce human happiness. Upon this foundation, it is true that there is a natural harmony of interests, exchange is beneficial for both parties and men are chiefly responsible for self-government, and the governing of family and other spheres within their proximity, rather than being rigidly responsible for the welfare of all men.

Sin, however, here as elsewhere creates division among men. Smith’s vision of the "invisible hand" owed much to an assumed understanding of divine providence and he wrote in a cultural context greatly influenced by Puritanism and Calvinism. This was not a non-Christian people nor were they modern men for whom “freedom” means drugs, booze, easy sex, and entertainment all around.

Where freedom is prior to a biblical morality grounded in gospel truth, all practices from narcotics to unspeakable perversion are subject to no controls other than personal preference and whim. This is the logical outgrowth of a system grounded on the premises and presuppositions of radical libertarianism.

There are also far reaching political consequences to free trade ideology as well as economic costs. According to David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage if nations specialize in the production of goods where they have some natural advantage and trade for other goods than gains from exchange will improve economic conditions in both countries. Thus Ricardo says all nations can benefit from the principles of specialization, division of labor and free trade.

The problem is that Ricardo’s theory is applicable to a world where the factors of production might be mobile nationally but breaks down in our time when production can readily move to nations with an absolute advantage.

In 19th century Britain, productivity was largely based on factors such as climate and geography, which cannot migrate. But in our time the collapse of socialism has created vast pools of cheap and willing labor. Meanwhile technological advances, particularly the internet, has either made physical location unimportant or allowed for the easy transfer of capital to nations with low labor costs.

The benefits of free trade in the form of cheap consumer goods are immediate, but the narcotic of effect of dependence on other nations will only become visible over time.

"What...the free traders fail to understand or ignore is that the transfer of production abroad is not free trade" writes Buchanan. "Unlike the export of goods, which adds to GDP, the transfer of factories subtracts from U.S. GPD and ads to Asian and Chinese GDP. When factories closed in the North and reopened in the Sun Belt, the North became a Rust Belt. The same happens to a nation when production is transferred overseas."

As the trade deficit explodes and our currency collapses the wages of Americans are lower than thirty years ago and we increasingly take on the export profile of a Third World country. We are increasingly dependent on foreign goods for the necessities of life, and on foreign banks to pay for them. The chickens are coming home to roost.

The public policy apparatus is in the hands of globalists—Democrats and Republicans, conservatives, liberals and libertarians. Their loyalties are international rather than regional, national, or local. They are anti-traditionalist and their one-worldism is the heresy of Babel.

At bottom, Pat Buchanan says, we need a new nationalism with foreign, immigration and trade policies that put American first.

"Is America on a path to national suicide?" Buchanan thinks that the twilight of America is at hand. "Our day of reckoning is at hand. Time to mind our own business. Time to lay down the burden and come home. Time to put America first."

Homeschooling and Public Schooling

2008-04-09T05:42:00.002-04:00

Via the LRC blog...

Political Hurdles in Iraq

2008-04-06T20:36:00.002-04:00

So how goes the war? A commenter posted a blurb earlier today saying that the surge is going just swell. Only if you're reading the Weekly Standard.

Earlier in the week, 1,500 Iraqi soldiers deserted or refused to fight against Moqtada al-Sadr's Shia militia in Basra.

Another report out today says that political progress in Iraq is so slow and fragmentary that U.S. forces are no closer to leaving than they were one year ago.

On Committing National Suicide

2008-04-06T07:11:00.003-04:00

Here is a stunning graph that I saw over at Taki Mag. We have ceased to be a nation held together by the common bonds of religion, cultural traditions, and ethnicity. Who are we? Who knows. As Pat Buchanan has written, "America is indeed coming apart, decomposing, and that the likelihood of her survival as one nation through mid-century is improbable—and impossible if America continues on her current course. For we are on a path to national suicide."

Beating the Drums for More War

2008-04-06T07:06:00.003-04:00

From the London Telegraph:

A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran's intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment. In closely watched testimony in Washington next week, Gen Petraeus will state that the Iranian threat has risen as Tehran has supplied and directed attacks by militia fighters against the Iraqi state and its US allies...

The Wall Street Journal said last week that the US war effort in Iraq must have a double goal.

"The US must recognise that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq," wrote the military analyst Kimberly Kagan.

There are signs that targeting Iran would unite American politicians across the bitter divide on Iraq. "Iran is the bull in the china shop," said Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi'ite groups, whether they be political or military."

So is Petraeus just a marionette parroting the words of Dick Cheney? We will know soon enough.

A New Blog

2008-04-06T07:03:00.002-04:00

Not only is The American Conservative running Eunomia, there is now a group blog for TAC writers which will surely become a daily must visit.

Raising the Barr

2008-04-06T07:01:00.001-04:00

Bob Barr announces the formation of an exploratory committee here.

Charlton Heston, RIP

2008-04-06T06:58:00.002-04:00

A larger than life figure has left us.

Have Americans Have Been Misled About World War II

2008-04-02T21:12:00.003-04:00

A new book by novelist Nicholson Baker says yes. As this reviewer puts it, "All wars have to be sold, but World War II, within the memory of the pointless carnage that then became known as World War I, was a particularly hard sell. Roosevelt and Churchill did it well, and their lies have been with us ever since."

In a brief essay reviewing some pre-Pearl Harbor provocation, Robert Higgs writes:

In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. Its warmaking took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy conducted “shoot [Germans] on sight” convoys, which might include British ships, in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping route from the United States to Great Britain, even though German U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating attacks on American shipping. The United States and Great Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated with the British military in combat operations against the Germans, for example, by alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines, which the British then attacked. The U.S. government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government provided military and other supplies and assistance, including warplanes and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with Japan. The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch (government in exile) had embargoed.

Best of all, we still have Pat Buchanan's forthcoming book, "Churchill, Hitler, and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World". You can order it now.

Real Preachers of Genius

2008-04-02T21:04:00.003-04:00

A funny parody of "Seeker Sensitive" worship.

The Squeeze Is On

2008-03-30T16:47:00.003-04:00

Here's a graph demonstrating the present-minded obsession of Americans. In 2007, 18% of 401K plan participants took out a "loan" from their plans, effectively stealing from themselves, presumably to pay for something that they don't actually need.

Keep in mind that these are relatively wealthy people with high incomes. If they are in a bind, what about the average schmo on the street?

Buchanan on Obama

2008-03-22T08:00:00.002-04:00

Pat Buchanan provides a "Brief for Whitey":

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks—with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas—to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks...

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

Krauthammer on Obama

2008-03-22T07:53:00.003-04:00

Charles Krauthammer is a monster. He is, however, a frequently insightful monster. Though any neocon critique of Obama, or anyone else for that matter, is suspect, Kruthammer's summary of the main thrust of Obama's speech is on the money:

The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

Our Election Choices

2008-03-22T07:39:00.002-04:00

From Lawrence Auster:

"A great nation that elected as its leader a man of such questionable and marginal background and upbringing as Barack Obama, Jr., a man who has no real identity, but who, like a mixed-race Zelig, is constrained to go through life manufacturing new identities for each situation, would be a country that had lost its way. Of course, a country that elected as its leader a brainless embittered 72 year old wreck of a man whose only two ideas were to open America's borders to the Third World and keep our troops in Iraq for a thousand years would also have lost its way."

Gerson on Obama and Theonomy

2008-03-21T08:53:00.008-04:00

One fairly typical commentary about Barack Obama’s “race” speech came from neocon Mike Gerson. Gerson, an evangelical who graduated from Wheaton College, was formerly the wordsmith of that fine rhetorician, George W. Bush. From his perch at the Washington Post, Gerson is what passes for a Christian in the public square.

So to whom does he compare Jeremiah Wright? Greg Bahnsen and R. J. Rushdoony. According to Gerson’s sharp theological mind, theonomy is comparable to Wright’s crackpot assertions that the CIA is filling urban America with crack and created AIDS to destroy Black America. Writes Gerson,

The better analogy is this: What if a Republican presidential candidate spent years in the pew of a theonomist church -- a fanatical fragment of Protestantism that teaches the modern political validity of ancient Hebrew law? What if the church's pastor attacked the U.S. government as illegitimate and accepted the stoning of homosexuals and recalcitrant children as appropriate legal penalties (which some theonomists see as biblical requirements)? Surely we would conclude, at the very least, that the candidate attending this church lacked judgment and that his donations were subsidizing hatred. And we would be right.

Let’s forget the stoning of homosexuals and discuss Gerson’s claims regarding recalcitrant children. Here is the passage from Deuteronomy:

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard." Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

The law serves, first, as a limitation on family authority. In pagan antiquity, fathers had absolute jurisdiction and authority over their children and could kill them, leave them victim to exposure, etc. Here the Mosaic Law establishes a limitation on family authority, and civil authorities enter the picture only at the behest of upholding God’s law.

Second, the law requires that a family line up with law and order, God’s order, even against flesh and blood. In other words not blood, but law is to govern.

The point is that no Hebrew could be a professional criminal. This law is not meant to apply to small children. The purpose of this case law was to eliminate those whose way of life was systematically and habitually criminal.

How might this work in the real world? Take for example the recent murders of Abhijit Mahato and Eve Carson (pictured above). They were murdered by two “incorrigible delinquents” named Laurence Lovette and Demario Atwater.

Lovette’s career as a criminal was quite productive despite his youth. Here is a newspaper blurb:

Lovette turned 17 last November. Within weeks, he was on probation. Within months, authorities allege, he embarked on a crime spree that started with the slaying of a graduate student at Duke University and ended with the fatal shooting of the University of North Carolina's student body president.

Police charged Lovette with first-degree murder Thursday in the January death of Abhijit Mahato, just hours after Lovette surrendered in last week's death of North Carolina student body president Eve Carson.

In between those killings, court records show, the teenager from Durham was arrested several times and charged with felonies ranging from burglary to car theft to resisting arrest.

Trials were pending on nine charges. He paid a fine for a traffic violation. And the whole time, he was on probation for a pair of crimes committed ten days before his 17th birthday: misdemeanor larceny and breaking and entering, pleaded down from felonies.

Atwater’s criminal resume included convictions for larceny, drug possession, breaking and entering and felony possession of a firearm.

Instead of dealing with these thugs in a manner befitting their crimes, the “criminal justice system” saw fit to send them back into society repeatedly so that they could ultimately murder two young people to steal their Ipods. The “fanatical” theonomist would simply have purged the evil from our midst before it was allowed to engulf and snuff out the lives of two innocents.

May God give us fewer Mike Gersons and more "fanatics."

Review of "Day of Reckoning"--Part II

2008-03-20T17:33:00.003-04:00

Aside from his able discussion of the unsustainability of American foreign policy, in Day of Reckoning, Pat Buchanan predicts the dissolution of America. “It is the belief of this author and the premise of this book,” writes Buchanan, “that America is indeed coming apart, decomposing, and that the likelihood of her survival as one nation through mid-century is improbable—and impossible if America continues on her current course. For we are on a path to national suicide.”

The existential crisis identified by Buchanan is largely a byproduct of the immigration invasion unleashed by elites enthralled by the dual ideologies of homo economicus and multiculturalism.

Before 1965, immigration was shaped by the national origins quota system, which granted visas primarily based on an immigrant’s country of birth. As a result, 70% of visas went to three countries--Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany. Modifications to the 1965 law established family reunification, and to a lesser extent employment preferences, as the new criteria for admission and led to a demographic tsunami that is changing the political, economic and cultural landscape.

Coupled with a falling birthrate among American whites and the wholesale slaughter of a generation as a consequence of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. is undergoing an epic demographic transformation. Writes Buchanan,

According to the U.S. Census Bureau…our minority population rose 2.4 million to exceed 100 million. Hispanics, 1 percent of the U.S. population in 1950, are now 14.4 percent. Since 2000, their numbers have soared 25 percent to 45 million. The U.S. Asian population grew by 24 percent since 2000, as the number of white kids of school age fell 4 percent. Half the children five and younger today are minority children.

Apologists for mass immigration point to the assimilation of prior waves of immigrants. The Wall Street Journal rhapsodizes, “These newcomers by and large aren't listening to the left-wingers pushing identity politics. Mexican immigrants, like their European predecessors, are assimilating. Their children learn English and by the end of high school prefer it to their parents' native tongue. They also marry people they meet here. Second-generation Latinos earn less than white Americans but more than blacks and 50% more than first-generation Latinos."

Likewise, political whiz Michael Barone, who ought to stick to politics, said, "I believe the likelihood is strong that Latinos will eventually become interwoven into American life. With luck, it will take less than 100 years."

But immigration from Mexico is an entirely different animal. "Mexican immigration," writes Samuel Huntington, "differs from past immigration and most other contemporary immigration due to a combination of six factors: contiguity, scale, illegality, regional concentration [in the American Southwest], persistence, and historical presence... Demographically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (re-conquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway."

The happy twaddle that “diversity is our strength” is recited by editorialists and politicians sounding like a five-year-old reciting a catechism. But it is in unity that strength resides and an excess of diversity goes hand in hand with Balkanization, social isolation and the breakdown of community.

Buchanan suggests terminating birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens who become anchor babies, eliminating subsidies for illegals in the form of welfare, health care, and education, and punishing lawbreaking employers with steep fines and jail terms.

What will be the consequences of failure to stem the tide? Tyranny-- for immigration and multiculturalism are inextricably tied to statism. A social order constructed on the sure foundation of broad ethnic and religious unity provides a framework for trust, fraternity, and security, but syncretizing ethnicity and culture produces collectivism and imperialism, a bureaucratic order governed by social engineers and meddlers. States with diverse populations ultimately require authoritarian governments as the only alternative to anarchy. Hence, mass immigration is welcomed by those who manage racial, ethnic, and religious conflict.

“History teaches,” writes Buchanan, “that multiethnic states are held together either by an authoritarian regime or a dominant ethnocultural core, or they are ever at risk of disintegration in ethnic conflict.”

The post-Christian West is in the process of committing suicide. Is it too late, or can we yet save what remains of the common culture and destiny we have inherited from our forefathers?

Tyrants in Black Robes and Messianic Educrats

2008-03-15T19:44:00.002-04:00

I know that I’m late to the party, but I wanted to proffer a few thoughts on the decision of a California court forbidding parents who lack teaching credentials from educating their children at home.

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in his opinion on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws."

According to the court, your children belong to the state, and it is the purpose of professional, accredited, and certified educrats to turn little Johnny into a shill for The Man.

"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare," Croskey wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.

Those shocked by the totalitarian premises and presuppositions of the court are laboring under the delusion that such tyrants have infected the public square only recently. In California, there is a longstanding tradition of undermining parental rights in the sphere of education in furtherance of a totalitarian and godless social order.

California has always been filled with rootless and displaced residents, and when it became a state in 1850 its constitution called for a state superintendent of public instruction. While private schools existed, there was neither an established tradition nor deep roots, as opposed to states in the east where private and church schools were typically the norm before the machinations of Horace Mann and his satanic spawn.

The third state superintendent was a dedicated educator named John Swett, who presided in imperial fashion over California’s schools from 1863-1868. Speaking to a group of teachers in 1863, Swett spoke of two fundamental axioms of statists everywhere:

"...early in the history of our country these two fundamental principles were enunciated and adopted: That it is the duty of a Republican Government, as an act of self-preservation, to educate all classes of the people, and that the property of the State should be taxed to pay for that education."

There are, of course, numerous problems with Swett’s careless remarks, but lets consider his statement that, "The property of the State should be taxed to educate the children of the State" (see page 115 at this link). Note the language; these are not children living in the state, but children that are the property of the state.

Swett went on to affirm that indeed he was not joking, "But children arrived at the age of maturity belong, not to the parents, but to the State, to society, to the country." Ostensibly what Swett was saying is that the state has the right to reach into the home and claim jurisdiction over its property—children.

Swett went even further in his 1864 Biennial Report, where he wrote that the state accredited teacher should be the locus of authority:

In school, where the mind is first placed under care to be fitted for the grand purposes of life, the child should be taught to consider his instructor, in many respects, superior to the parent in point of authority.

Likewise, parents have no rights as against teachers:

It is true that the school officers have certain rights in the schoolhouse; but the law will not allow even them to interfere with the teacher while he keeps strictly within the line of his duty. Having been legally put in possession, he can hold it for the purposes and the time agreed upon; and no parent, not even the Governor of the State, nor the President of the United States, has any right to enter it and disturb him in the lawful performance of his duties…The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous….Parents have no remedy as against the teacher.

In Swett’s view, schools are extensions of state sovereignty rather than parental authority. Kids are simply wards of the state and parental rights in the ambit of education are forfeited except in private schools. Swett, incidentally, did recognize the existence of private schools. Unfortunately, others did not, and in 1874 California law was rewritten to make it a penal offense for parents to send their little ones to private schools without the consent of local school trustees.

What Rushdoony called the Messianic Character of American Education is not a new phenomenon (please, please read his book with the above title published in 1961). Indeed education being necessarily religious, the fight for control over the future, children, is an ongoing struggle in each generation.

Revolutionaries from Jacobins to Nazis to Bolsheviks have sought to control the future by controlling children. American liberals, and their ideological cousins, the Neocons, are no different with their propagandizing on behalf of universal daycare, expanded Headstart, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and the whole panoply of statist programs looking to supplant mom and dad and become the universal parent.

Christians ought to think long and hard about a collective exit from the public schools. As Christian parents, we ought not hand our children over to the enemy, and can anyone argue persuasively that these ignorance centers, spewing vile anti-Christian propaganda, are anything other than godless?

Some Christians argue that we must send our precious children into these Temples of Atheism so that they can be salt and light to a dying world. We must, they say, sacrifice our children to Molech in order to fulfill the cultural mandate. The problem with this argument is that the evangelism process usually works in reverse. The Nehemiah Institute and the Southern Baptist Council on Family Life have and continue to document the ongoing destruction of Christian children, whose faith is shipwrecked as they are unable to sweep past the Scylla and Charybdis of American culture, caught up in the siren song of liberation from family and faith. Are we to assume that this sad state of affairs has no connection to the fact that secular public education divorces God from creation and science, history, mathematics, and philosophy?

Immigration and "The Church" in Indiana

2008-03-07T22:04:00.003-05:00

A group of "Protestant ministers" stepped up to the podium to oppose a bill in the Indiana legislature that would punish businesses and employers who are utilizing the services of illegals. One minister, Mark Powell, said "Christ is clear in the Gospel: Love your neighbor." Actually, Rev, what you are asking me to do is hate my flesh and blood, my two brothers, both real men who do real work and see themselves undercut by law-breakers.

The ministers were part of an organization called Disciples Justice Action Network, which describes itself as "a multi-racial, multi-ethnic grassroots network of individuals, congregations, and organizations within the Christian Church, all working together for greater justice, peace and diversity in our churches, our communities, our nations and the world. As an organization, they are committed to "social justice issues" (a misnomer if ever one existed) and are pro-choice and supportive of gay and lesbian rights.

Senator Mike Delph, the author of the immigration proposal, did not attend the news conference and issued a short statement: "Jesus obeyed the law."

Delph's simple eloquence in defense of law in the face of an antinomian onslaught by clergy preaching the heresy of unconditional love speaks volumes.

Who Caused the Housing Collapse?

2008-03-07T21:48:00.002-05:00

Well, Alan Greenspan is surely one culprit. But here is an interesting article by economist Stan Liebowitz, arguing that government mandated political correctness, all in the name of preventing "discrimination" and "redlining" is largely to blame.

The Bush Legacy

2008-03-07T21:32:00.003-05:00

Approaching the conclusion of the Bush Era, we have 150,000 troops tied down in a war we can't win, oil prices have topped $106 per barrel, foreclosures are at record highs and for or the first time the amount of debt tied up in American homes now exceeds the equity homeowners have buil. On the politcal front, come this fall we could have 60 Democrat legislators. Meanwhile, the trade deficit in 2007 topped $700 billion and the dollar collapsed against the Euro and Yen.