One Hand Clapping

Whatv is a rabbi, and was Satan leading Mel Gibson astray?
A Jewish reader has some thoughts, and I respond

I'm not sure how it started, but I've had a brief email exchange with a gentleman named Ronnie Schreiber on the clerical status of rabbis - are they laity or clergy? I appreciate Ronnie's compliment emailed yesterday, "I have to say that you are one of this Jew's favorite pastors. Your writing is always thoughtful, even when I rarely disagree with it." Thank you! (I have received similar compliments from Buddhist readers and practitioners of other Easterm traditions as well, which I find very heartening.)

I claimed recently that rabbis in Jesus' time were laymen. Jesus himself was called rabbi by many people. Ronnie said the distinction that we make between clergy and laity today doesn't really overlay on first-century Judaism. So here is Ronnie's "insider" look at the rabbinic tradition; it's quite read-worthy for anyone interested in religious matters.

In the sense of not having a pulpit, yes they were mostly laymen with 'day jobs' like R. Yose HaSandlar (Yose the sandal maker), and other sages whose professions were mentioned.

I recall one, whose name escapes me, who was a tanner, not a very nice job. However, calling it a lay movement is not fully descriptive since the sages were, in fact, the primary religious authorities of their day [it was actually the Pharisees, not rabbis, I described as a lay movement - DS]. The priests of the Temple simply administered the temple rite. It was the rabbis who adjudicated the law.

Also, I have a hard time believing that those sages with very large schools of students (e.g. Akiva, Hillel, Shammai, Rava, Abaye, Rabban Gamliel, and of course Yohanan ben Zakai, aka "Rebbe") were anything other than full time scholars. They might have had business interests, but their primary pursuit was scholarship.

Of course, most rabbis throughout history, including today, were not professional clergymen in the sense of how Christians use the term. Even today, the vast majority of those with Orthodox ordination do not hold pulpits. Some teach in Jewish schools (the primary role of a rabbi, anyway), and many have secular jobs. Ordination in the Orthodox community is no big deal. You go to a yeshiva high school, continue with your studies at a mesivta or beis medrash gevoha, and sooner or later you get ordained.

Actually, there are two levels of ordination, yoreh yoreh [I think it's from the same source as Teacher, like Moreh and Torah are], and yadin yadin [capable of being a rabbinic judge]. Even many with the higher level of ordination aren't professional clergy. Also, the title "reb" is an
honorific that is often appended to just about any male (orthodox) Jew's name in many contexts.

For example, an internet friend of mine is a former minister who converted to Judaism. While studying at a yeshiva in J'lem, just before his conversion ceremony he was walking down the street, dressed in the black suit that is the 'uniform' of the yeshiva student, someone approached him and said, "Excuse me, Reb Yid, do you know what time it is?" Amos replied, "It's not Reb Yid, it's Reb Goy and it's 9 a.m. So between the many who are ordained and the many who carry the title as an
honorific, we just don't make a big deal about who is and who isn't a rabbi (at least in the Orthodox community).

That being said, rabbis should be accorded some level of honor, not for them, but in recognition of their status as a 'living book of Torah'. When your own rabbi enters a room you should stand and also stand in recognition of any great Torah scholar. R. Shmuel Irons, considered one of North America's great Torah scholars is a friend of mine. He's the Rosh Kollel (dean) of a post-ordination Jewish seminary here in Detroit. I've been at weddings when he's been called up to the bridal canopy to recite one of the seven wedding blessings and the entire audience will rise, very briefly, in his honor, or rather in the honor of the Torah he has learned.

Ronnie also had a thought about The Passion of the Christ:

I'm too lazy to go in the other room and get out my Jeremiah, but I think the verse is in Chap. 29, and it talks about someone or something that appears, at first, to be Godly, but is in fact the opposite. [Maybe this is what he is thinking of. Jer 29:8-9:
Yes, this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: "Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them," declares the LORD. - DS
Is it possible that Gibson has let his personal vision become an obsession to make the film. Obsession is not a healthy state and can bring with it many unhealthy influences. Is it possible that this obsession has resulted in something that will harm relationships between Christians and Jews?

To use a Christian concept, is it possible that Satan sent Gibson to sow strife? The film is not evangelical in the sense of trying to spread the faith, but rather it seems to be directed at those who are already Christians, and may do the opposite of evangelism to those who are not Christians. It certainly won't convince any Jews to accept Christianity.

Ronnie, thank you for this thoughtful and informative missive.

Whether The Passion will harm Christian-Jewish relations has yet to be seen. I predict, with all care, "not from our end." Over and over, prominent Christians have emphasized that there is no justification for blaming the Jews for what happened to one man two millennia ago.

I have talked personally with a large number of Christian people who have seen the movie, and none have indicated the movie made them think "the Jews" are responsible for Jesus' death. They understand that whomever had a hand in killing him, the events were closed two millennia ago. After all, the prophet Jeremiah said in foretelling the new covenant embodied in Jesus Christ, punishment for sins does not carry down through generations.

But this kind of issue cuts both ways. Will most Jews harbor ill will toward most Christians for one Christian's movie? Are Christians in aggregate to be held responsible for one man's movie? So far I haven't seen such suggestions, but chew on the implications awhile. . . .

A near-universal reaction from Christians has been that the movie makes them ponder introspectively about whether the life they are leading was worth the suffering Jesus endured to give them salvation.

(BTW, this is exactly the same question Jewish director Steven Spielberg wants the audience to ask itself at the end of his even more violent and bloody movie, Saving Private Ryan, though the question is secularly phrased rather than religiously. However, I think it's no accident that only character whose religion we specifically know is the Jewish GI, Pvt. Stanley Mellish. Like all but one of his squad mates, Mellish dies in battle, brutally knifed to death by an SS soldier. Was Spielberg sending a not-too-subtle message to Americans not to forget that Jews died for their liberty along with Gentiles?)

(Also BTW, the actress who play Mary in The Passion, Romanian Jewish actress Maia Morgenstern, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her grandfather perished at Auschwitz.

Like her, she says, both her mother and her father found the script moving, philosophical, and not the least bit anti-Semitic.

As for satanic influence on the set - whether most Jews think that Satan is a real, external influence at work in the world today I can't say. My guess (not having looked up research on it) is that a very substantial number of Christians do not; in fact, I'd say easily the majority. We moderns have pretty much rejected "the externality of evil," as French philosopher Paul Ricouer termed satanic concepts, in favor of psychological and social explanations.

If though, Satan is a really-existing being as the Gospels indicate (i.e., Luke 4:1-13), then I would have no doubt that Satan was trying to lead Gibson astray throughout the whole process. The passage I cited indicates that Satan tempted Jesus pretty much throughout his whole ministry, and for that matter, tempts me to stray with every sermon I write.

I think Ronnie is right that Gibson was not making an "outreach" movie. As is said in my review, the movie assumes the viewers are already familiar with the whole Jesus story. Like Ronnie, I don't expect any Jews to see the movie and convert to Christianity, but I am also sure that is not what Gibson was trying to do. I don't think he was trying to covert anybody, actually. This movie is his very personal statement of faith and understanding that I think he was offering for the edification of the already-believing. I understand that a large number of viewers, especially but not only non-Christians, don't find it edifying. That's okay by me, but they have no very persuasive argument against it edifying others.

As I indicated before somewhere, Roman Catholic theology, orthodox or post-Vatican II, draws a much clearer distinction between the events of Holy Week (the week preceding Easter) and Easter than almost all Protestant denominations. Protestants generally tend to gloss over the passion-and-death part to get straight to the party on Easter morning. Christ's suffering figures more prominently for Roman Catholics during Holy Week than it does for Protestants.

As I said, though, I wonder what a movie of Christ's passion would be like if it was made by Steven Spielberg. I think it would be a better movie than Gibson's.

by Donald Sensing, 2/29/2004 02:08:16 PM. Permalink |

Mel Gibson, blacklisted? Never happen.
The New York Times reported that

The chairmen of two major [movie] studios said they would avoid working with Mr. Gibson because of "The Passion of the Christ" and the star's remarks surrounding its release.

Neither of the chairmen would speak for attribution, but as one explained: "It doesn't matter what I say. It'll matter what I do. I will do something. I won't hire him. I won't support anything he's part of. Personally that's all I can do."

Bill Quick, who has experience in tinseltown as a screenwriter, says that's just bunkum:

Speaking as a longtime writer and produced screenwriter, let me tell you a little secret: Despite the supposed threats against Gibson emanating from certain Hollywood quarters, if this flick does anything like the now-predicted gross (which would stick 50-75 million dollars in Gibson’s personal pockets), not only will Mel Gibson have no trouble finding work, he’ll have to fend it off with a club.

And ten bloody religious Christian epics will be greenlighted immediately by everybody from Disney to Sony, with Spielberg being the biggest name to dive into the “First In Line To Be Second” pool.

Actually, I was wondering today what The Passion would have looked like if Spielberg had made it; I have a gut feeling that I'd find it more satisfying than Gibson's movie because I think Spielberg has a better sense of timing and nuance than Gibson.

While on a hospital call today, a gentleman told me that in Tullahoma, Tenn. this week the line to get into the theater stretched around the block. Anyone paying attention in Hollywood? You bet your sweet bippy they are, even Martin Scorcese, whose 1988 passion-of-Jesus movie, The Last Temptation of Christ had a total gross for its whole run of - get ready - $8.4 million, or $11.6 million in today's dollars.

Gibson's movie made $26 million just last Wednesday, more than twice as much as Scorcese's flick made total. You betcha movie producers of all faiths or no faith at all are paying careful attention. I have no doubt that come Monday, producers' inboxes will be filled with 20-page screenplay treatments of the next great Jesus movie. "Jesus Returns" anyone? Maybe "Son of Ben Hur - bar Judah's Revenge."

Link via James Joyner, who says "there won’t be a sequel." Why not? The New Testament has a sequel.

by Donald Sensing, 2/28/2004 08:55:15 PM. Permalink |

Now your car works for the police
And cooperates with them in giving you a ticket. At least, that what Toyota's new concept car does.

Wireless technology would allow the car to communicate with the speed camera, and the fine could be deducted from the driver's credit card before he or she even made it home. But would anyone buy such a car?

Which is one darn good question.

by Donald Sensing, 2/28/2004 07:41:35 PM. Permalink |

Works in progress
I have a fair amount of non-blog writing and family things to do today, so don't look for a lot more posting. But I thought I'd cue you in on some "upcoming attractons:"

Christ, Capt. Miller and Oskar Schindler - the unifying themes of The Passion of the Christ, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List.

Why the Gospels are not "objective" biographies

And a closing thought, not a post: why are so many people upset with the dramatic liberties that Christian Mel Gibson took with the story of Jesus, who had no objection to the much greater number of dramatic and non-scripturally-justifiable liberties that Jewish Steven Spielberg took with the story of Moses in The Prince of Egypt?

by Donald Sensing, 2/28/2004 02:24:06 PM. Permalink |

This is a problem
Headline and lead paragraph:

Bishop says church's sex-abuse problem mirrors society's

The sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests reflects a sad episode in the church's history and underscores the prevalence of child sex abuse in society, Bishop Edward Kmiec of the Nashville Diocese said.

While not exactly excusing the church's abuse because "society does it," I saw nothing in the story indicating the bishop understood that the church, especially its clergy, are supposed to transcend the standards of society, indeed, set standards for society to follow. Because I also know that reporters don't write every quote, I give Bishop Kmiec benefit of the doubt, but it needs to be more clearly stated, and not just by Catholics.

In related news, a study commissioned 20 months ago by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reveals that more than four-fifths "of sex crimes committed against children by Roman Catholic priests during the past 52 years were homosexual men preying on boys." Link

Martin Luther in the 1500s urged the Roman Catholic Church to permit priests to marry (Luther was a Catholic monk) partly because so many priests were holding mistresses covertly and siring children. Luther believed that the Bible held marriage a sacred, positive and desirable estate and that Scripture did not justify the church's celibacy requirement.

Some homosexual activists such as Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic, have urged the R. Catholic Church to accept homosexual marriage. I wonder whether he'll try to use this study to buttress his argument.

BTW, the church's prohibition of priests being married was made official only about a thousand years ago, although it was a non-doctrinal practicde for some centuries before. Its origins are mainly twofold.

In the first place, having a wife and children ties you down, but the priesthood was always understood to be itinerant; priests must be available on short notice to be sent where they are needed. I see little doubt that predominantly married priests would have been unable to expand the reach of Christian evangelism in the first several centuries AD nearly as well as it was done. Married men, whether priests or not, are much less likely to uproot themselves from their families and property, especially when the journey is very long and dangerous. Did I say, "very long"? I meant, "permanent," because an evangelical trip for priests in the first millennium was likely a lifetime commitment.

An even earlier origin of celibate priests actually springs from Greek asceticism, founded upon radical Greek philosophical dualism. Greek philosophy was the dominant world view of the Mediterranean world at the time fo Christ and for a long time afterward. It held a sharp distinction between the spiritual realm, which was divine and permanent, and the physical world, which was corrupt and temporary. Since there is nothing more, well, physical, than sex, spiritual purists maintained that sex was a corrupted way of flesh and polluted the pure spirituality of the human soul. Priests were supposed to be the most spiritual of men, so priestly celibacy found a niche in the church early.

(Greek philosophy was the religion of the Roman world's intelligentsia, who controlled the political apparatus of an empire hostile to Christians. The early church relied heavily on Greek philosophy to explain itself to them. It was the language they spoke and was the world view most of the post-apostolic church father were raised in, anyway.)

However, it was economics and politics that impelled celibacy to be decreed a doctrine, rather than merely an approved practice. With the rise of European feudalism, kings, barons and other nobility began exerting economic control over priests, many of whom were married, through taxes of various kinds, including estate taxes. The church's hierarchy saw a danger that their priests' fealty was being misdirected to the feudal Lord rather than the authority of the church. The main impetus to acquire property, which the feudal Lord could control through taxation and contract, was marriage and family. Remove that and the foundation of feudalism itself was removed.

So to keep the church independent of political control the decree was made that priests could not be married. Acquisition of property by priests was also suppressed.

by Donald Sensing, 2/28/2004 10:40:50 AM. Permalink |

Jeff Jarvis - Christ figure?
Jeff wrote a lament:

I supported the war and people called me a right-winger and refused to accept my liberal credentials. Now I go after the Bush administration over free speech and Howard Stern and also don't like Gibson's Passion and the right-wingers call me a left-winger. Those who hated me one week love me the next; those who loved me one week hate me the next.

Does that make Jeff a Christ figure? To wit:

Matt 11:16-19:
16 "To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others: 17 "'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.'

18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon.' 19 The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners." 'But wisdom is proved right by her actions."

And -

John 12:12-13:
12 The next day the great crowd that had come for the Feast heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. 13 They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, "Hosanna!" "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Blessed is the King of Israel!" ...

John 19:15a:
15 But they shouted, "Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!"

Fortunately, Jeff, no one is coming after you with whips and nails.

by Donald Sensing, 2/28/2004 09:17:42 AM. Permalink |

Yep.

by Donald Sensing, 2/27/2004 05:38:55 PM. Permalink |

More on liberal anti-Semitism
Just read "Peddling anti-Semitic Myths" by Thomas Lifton, Harvard Ph.D. and former faculty member of Harvard and Columbia University’s Graduate School of International Affairs. The essay is short but fierce, as it should be, considering the subject.

by Donald Sensing, 2/27/2004 05:26:58 PM. Permalink |

Thanks!
Norman Geras profiles blogger James Joyner, who is a former artillery officer as I am (ergo, a class act). James says my blog is one of his three favorites. The others are PoliBlog and VodkaPundit.

by Donald Sensing, 2/27/2004 05:12:44 PM. Permalink |

Maureen Dowd needs therapy. Now.
The anti-Semitic character of the American Left stands exposed

Continuing the saga of Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, and the charges that the movie will inflame viewers to anti-Jewish violence, I have to wonder, who will be inflamed?

Well, the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, apparently.

But this is a Mel Gibson film, so you come out wanting to kick somebody's teeth in.

In "Braveheart" and "The Patriot," his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an ax into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history . . .

Why does Ms. Dowd tend toward such violence? Lord forbid she ever obtains a real weapon - who could feel safe? Why does a movie - a movie, for crying out loud! - whip her into such a killing frenzy? She admits that Braveheart made her want her to axe-murder the nearest limey! Now she, yes she, the oh-so-liberal, "tolerant" (hah!) and exquisitely correct Maureen Dowd confesses that The Passion made her want to kick in some Jewish teeth. That's what she said.

This woman needs some serious therapy. Quickly.

Funny though. I saw all three movies Dowd cites and I didn't exit the theater wanting to hurt anyone - and I'm a retired Army officer! I know how to hurt people in carload lots! Maybe Dowd has some character defect that allows her to be sent over the edge by audiovisual media. I guess if she watched German director Leni Riefenstahl's propagandistic masterpiece and paean of praise for Hitler, Triumph of the Will, Dowd would head straight for the nearest skinhead chapter and try to join the Neo-Nazis. Maybe even become a Holocaust denier. Who knows?

On the other hand, I remember what my mother always said when I was a lad. "People tend to find fault in others what they see in themselves." So why does Dowd, a solidly established member of the Eastern upper-class, liberal Establishment, see an anti-Semite inside this movie? Could it be that the combination of Catholic Mel Gibson and The Passion's subject matter provide her with the happy confluence of two deeply rooted prejudices of the Eastern upper-class, liberal Establishment - anti-Catholicism and anti-Judaism? George Will recently observed,

It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals. Today, anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.

But they haven't discarded anti-Catholicism, either, have they, Maureen?

I am serious here: this kind of vitriol from Dowd seems to me to be indicative of a deep sickness in the liberal soul. In fact, anti-Semitism is about the only point of contact between the religious left and religious right, expressed by the Left in hatred of Israel, and by the Right in opposition of and intolerance for the Jewish faith itself.

The most vociferous verbal hostility I have ever personally heard against Israel came from some of my liberal-to-Leftist colleagues in ministry. I can hardly describe the venom I have seen and heard poured out about Israel from pastors who spend other time claiming how tolerant and peace-loving they are. Yet many of the Left have excellent personal relationships with individual Jews and in domestic politics often are allied with them. It's Israel they despise.

OTOH, the religious right generally supports the state of Israel, but is deeply suspicious of Jewish people. They tend to see Jews as misguided religious rivals who must be converted to Christianity. (Just so you know where I stand, I would like everyone to respond to the Gospel, but see no particular reason to single out Jews for special conversion efforts.)

About a year ago, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in The New Republic (not exactly a journal of the VRWC),

From the musty precincts of the Old Right, the contention that Israel and a powerful "cabal" of its American supporters have manufactured the present crisis with Iraq has become canonical. [Pat] Buchanan, who writes that President Bush has become a client of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the "neoconservative war party," has transformed his new magazine, the American Conservative, into a regular forum for those who share this conviction. One of its contributors, University of Illinois history professor Paul W. Schroeder, deems it self-evident that the plan for an invasion "is being promoted in the interests of Israel." . . .

Meanwhile on the left -- where many cannot fathom why, absent the urging of Israelis and their American co-religionists, the Bush administration would be so eager to topple Saddam Hussein -- the socialism of fools has been enjoying something of a vogue. Writing in The Nation, Jason Vest reports that the Bush team's "attack-Iraq chorus," working in tandem with "far-right American Zionists," subscribes to "articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests." The respected liberal intellectual Ian Buruma has managed to locate the reasons for a U.S. war against Iraq in, among other places, "Jewish-American hysteria" and the fact that "macho images of suntanned Jewish soldiers gathered round laughing tough guys such as Ariel Sharon wiped out, as it were, 2,000 years of being Woody Allen."

Nor is this sort of fare the exclusive property of the political fringe. The ubiquitous talk-show host Chris Matthews pins blame for the impending war on "conservative people out there, some of them Jewish, who are very tough on foreign policy. They believe we should fight the Arabs and take them down. They believe that if we don't fight Iraq, Israel will be in danger." Matthews even thinks that Sharon is "writing [Bush's] speeches sometimes" and that Sharon's cabinet ministers are "in bed with the vice president's office and the Defense Department." . . .

But the real problem with claims such as these is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic.

Harvard University President Larry Summers decried in September 2002,

But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.

Hello, Maureen, you listening?

David Brooks, a Jew who regularly appears on NPR and PBS, wrote,

Not long ago I was chatting with a prominent Washington figure in a green room. "You people have infested everywhere," he said in what I thought was a clumsy but good-hearted manner. He listed a few of "us": "Wolfowitz, Feith, Frum, Perle." I've never met Doug Feith in my life and Wolfowitz and Perle I've barely met. Yet he assumed we were tight as thieves.

He says in the same column,

Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail, and in my mailbox. ... Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It's just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite right, but on the peace-movement left.

This is no mere American phenomenon. Across the big pond revulsion of the Jews is growing stronger every day. Wrote a French essayist in "The Coming Anti-Semitism,"

After a brief interlude, the grand simplifiers are back. We have seen, since the end of Communism, a stupefying re-Stalinization of part of the intelligentsia and the progressive movement… [The] image of an all-powerful America breathes new life into the pernicious notion that politics is responsible for everything: all disasters are perceived as crimes; the objective universe appears to be made up of subjective wills, those that fight against evil and those that foment it. Thus conspiracy thinking is again taking over simple minds, and conspiracy leads sooner or later to the Elders of Zion.

I find it informative and more than revealing that not one right-of-center editorialist - not one - has said that The Passion of the Christ has made him/her want to commit violence against Jews. The only writers who have said that the movie makes them think about attacking Jews are liberal writers.

And that fact is indeed very revealing about who really feels what about the Jews.

by Donald Sensing, 2/27/2004 04:21:09 PM. Permalink |

My review of The Passion of the Christ
My senior year in college I took a one-month, concentrated English course on movies and movie criticism. We watched four or five movies every day, including mandatory viewing of every Alfred Hitchcock film ever made (except his final one, which he had not yet made) and had to write scholarly papers on two movies. Most of the films were silent, many of them very obscure, including some Eastern European silent flicks.

Despite all this training, I confess that I am not a skilled movie reviewer. Roger Ebert's job is safe from me. So what follows about The Passion of the Christ is less a real review, really, than my impressions and thoughts.

I tried hard to dismiss all the buzz, pro and con, that we've been force fed for months, especially in the last two weeks. Maybe I succeeded. So here goes:

Jesus' mother, Mary, is a meta-narrator of the movie. In fact, the events are almost told through her eyes. She is present at every moment of Jesus' suffering. She is also the only character except Jesus who knows, theologically, what is going on. Hence, she alternates between shock and grief at what is happening to her son, and acceptance of its necessity. I found very powerful and moving a scene when Jesus falls while carrying the cross, evoking a flashback memory of Mary. At the end, when Jesus is lowered dead from the cross into her arms, Gibson reproduces Michelangelo's Pieta, one of the most sublime works of sculpture in Western art.

Is it anti-Jewish? Well, neither my son nor I (he is 18) left the theater angry at Jews or thinking that "the Jews" were - or are - responsible for Jesus' death. Anger simply is not an emotion I experienced during or after the movie, and I saw and heard no indication that any other viewer did.

That being said, the Jewish hierarchy is presented almost uniformly flat-charactered. In Jesus' arraignment just after he is arrested, two or three members of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high council, protest vehemently that the proceeding violates both Jewish law and common sense. They are quickly marginalized by the others. After some reflection, I have to agree substantially (not completely) with one of my former professors, Dr. Susan Bond, who told The Tennessean, referring to the visual presentation of Jews in movies,

Historically, Jesus movies have done a very bad job of this by caricaturing the Jews. One of the ways you know who the bad guys are is that you see the guys with the big hats, guys with too many jewels on their robes. Mel managed to make the religious leaders in this movie even more grandiose than in other movies, which I would interpret as an anti-Jewish spin on it. He made the additional artistic decision of giving them all bad teeth, and making them less physically attractive as a distinct group. ...

OTOH, these are also stock ways that movie makers help the audience identify the antagonists to the hero; the Jews who sympathize with Jesus or who attempt to show him compassion are visually more appealing than those who oppose him. The Roman soldiers are visually as repulsive as Jesus' Jewish foes - except for one who is compassionate toward Mary. He's a handsome fellow.

It also needs to be recognized that Jesus himself is not visually presented as a Jewish man - he wears no fringes that I saw (as the Gospels explicitly say he did), no headcovering, has no phylacteries, worn by every male Jew more than 13 years old.

While I see why critics claim anti-Judaism on Gibson's part, I think it is just as likely that he simply used a stock movie-maker's paradigm to help the audience keep track of the sides, even if a little crudely or insensitively done. Does that mean he thinks the audience is too stupid to keep track on its own? Well, yeah. Directors generally think that. (Alfred Hitchcock said that actors and the audience alike were "cattle.")

(However, a writer in Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine, observes, "... concerns about The Passion stirring anti-Semitic attitudes in the American movie-going public have been largely misplaced, but I do not for a minute hold these fears to be misbegotten or disingenuous." Read the whole thing.)

Is the movie accurate to the Gospels? On the whole, yes, in the main events: Jesus was arrested, tried, condemned, probably flogged, condemned and crucified. But the movie conflates the Gospel accounts together and dramatizes them strongly. Gibson tried to make a single, coherent film narrative out of four accounts that don't always match.

Gibson obviously picked some scenes and not others from the Gospels. The result is a movie that, while generally according with the Gospels, isn't really a movie of the Gospels. Gibson is Catholic, as critics have endlessly reminded us, and Catholic tradition about the passion influences the screenplay quite a bit: the Gospels, for example, do not relate Mary following Jesus along the Via Dolorosa but some Catholic tradition does. Again, it makes for some compelling drama and I have no problem with it, but it is not in the Gospels. Neither do the Gospels relate that Caiaphas the high priest himself went to Golgotha as he does in the movie. The scene where Caiaphas personally accosts Jesus on the cross is not in the Gospels, although Matthew says other priests were there:

41In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, 42‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.a 43He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, "I am God’s Son."

However, one authority of the Jewish practice of the day whom I trust emailed me that the presence of Caiaphas himself at the cross was quite unlikely because the high priest was never to contact corpse uncleanness (even by accident, I might add),

In addition to including scenes in the movie that aren't in the Bible, Gibson does omit some things that are: Judas does hang himself, but does not fall and burst open upon the rocks, for example, and the centurion at the crucifixion does not proclaim, "Surely, this man was the son of God" (a really curious omission, I think). At Jesus' death we do see the earthquake that splits the veil in the Temple, but the Gospels do not say the Temple itself was wrecked as the movie shows. Nor do see the dead of Jerusalem come forth from their tombs. The crowd around the cross disperses before Jesus cries out to Elohim, but in the Bible the crowd debates the meaning of what Jesus is saying.

So IMO, the quote attributed to the Pope about the movie, "It is as it was," is problematic because it presumes we know with certainty exactly how it was in the first place.

I personally did not care for the satanic figure who hovered over many of the scenes, though I know what Mel was trying to do dramatically with it. There are a lot of other invented sequences, a necessity since a movie made strictly according to the Gospels' narrative would be pretty short. Hence, this movie is not a documentary of any kind. It is Mel Gibson's imaginative retelling of the passion story.

The movie ends with a very brief resurrection scene. While I found the scene very powerful, it is not biblical. So as not to ruin its impact for you, I'll not describe it here. It is a wonderfully imaginative scene, but strays from the book.

The flogging scene was overdone and dramatically overshadows even the crucifixion. Three Gospels say Jesus was flogged but provide no details. In the movie, Jesus' beating begins with rods, severe enough in themselves, but they are discarded at a count of 32. Then the Roman flagellum is used, which shreds his flesh. However, the Gospels don't agree on the context of the flogging. If the flogging was done after Jesus was condemned by Pilate, then using the flagellum would have been expected, because the Romans generally wanted prisoners to die quickly on the cross. The scourging alone would half kill a man. But if a man was not condemned, just sentenced to be punished, a flagellum would not have been used because it was potentially lethal itself. Matthew and Mark agree that Jesus was flogged before being sentenced to die, but John says he was condemned after being flogged. Gibson's movie goes along with John, but he has to account for the discrepancy of the Gospels. Hence, when the soldiers see that Jesus isn't properly subdued by the rods, they turn to the flagellum. The centurion enters and halts the flogging precisely because Jesus was not condemned. By then, however, Jesus has been flogged to a bloody rag of a human being.

Luke says, though, that Pilate said he would have Jesus flogged, but the crowd insisted he be crucified. So Pilate caved and sent him straight to die without being flogged.

A longstanding Christian tradition says Jesus received 39 lashes. The precision of the figure springs from the fact that Jewish law (Deut. 25:3) forbade more than 40 lashes; by stopping the count at 39, the possibility of a missed lash was accounted for. But Jesus was flogged by the Romans, not the Jews. Roman law had no count limit. We do not really know how many lashes Jesus really received; in the movie it is close to 100.

David Whidden wrote that this movie badly needs a prequel. I somewhat agree. It does appear to me that Mel presumed that viewers would know Jesus' story before the point his movie begins. Yet this assumption is not justified, I think. Huge numbers of Americans do not.

What viewers never discover within the movie is just why some Jews were so enraged by Jesus as to call for his death at Roman hands, apart from Jesus claiming he is the son of God - but this happens after he is arrested, not before. Clearly, the Sanhedrin (most of it, anyway) believes he has committed blasphemy, but crucifixion for that? Even Pilate rolls his eyes at that one.

In fact, Jesus had a substantial record of challenging the Jewish power structure of the day; he called some Pharisees, a socially powerful laity group, children of hell one day, certainly not something that would make them feel kindly toward him. Jesus drew large crowds as well; Pilate had sent cavalry to ride into other leaders' crowds with swords swinging. The details of all that are more than I want to go into in this post, but there is reason to believe there was a fear on the part of the high priest and others that Pilate would see Jesus as an insurgent leader and falsely think he was sponsored by the hierarchy. They seemed to fear that Pilate's well-known bloodthirstiness would fall upon them and the people because of Jesus. (John's Gospel is clear that a large number of ordinary Jewish people, not just the hierarchy, were hostile to Jesus because he claimed divine identity. Luke 4:18-29 relates that even the people of his own synagogue tried to throw him off a cliff - because he promised God's blessings not only for Jews but equally for Gentiles.)

Again, though, none of this presents in the movie, and I believe that lack is a major shortcoming. Just why do they want Jesus dead? We aren't really told. (Pilate kills him just to placate the Sanhedrin.)

Remember, though, that Gibson is emphasizing not the historical explanation for Jesus' death but a theological one. Jesus' death is presented more as a self-sacrifice than a murder. He is undergoing his passion deliberately. Arising from the ground along the road to Golgotha he tells Mary, "Behold, I am making all things new." However, this saying of Jesus comes from Revelation 21:5, not the Gospels, and refers to the coming again of Christ into the world. This isn't a criticism per se, just a clue that the historical question is not of primary interest to Gibson. A theological interpretation of Christ's suffering and death is.

I found the use of flashbacks very effective. Several times in his suffering, a glimpse of something reminds Jesus of an event in his ministry. A Roman sandal, for example, takes him back in memory to his foot washing of his disciples recorded in John's Gospel. Some of the flashbacks are of Jesus' moral teachings, such as to love one's enemies, not just friends. Others are of his teaching about himself. I thought the sequencing and selection of the flashback scenes were exquisitely well done; they deeply moved me.

About the violence: apart from the overdone scourging, there are scenes where Jesus is beaten by Temple police en route to the Sanhedrin, they even throw him off a bridge and Jesus is painfully stopped just short of the ground by his chains. Neither the blows nor the fall are biblical, although it's believable that his captors struck him since Jesus' disciple Peter had offered armed resistance. But the bridge toss isn't credbile at all and serves no purpose other than to bring Jesus face to face with a disciple hiding under the bridge. What's the point? None. Gratuitous violent scene? Unquestionably.

Jesus is struck and spat upon at the Sanhedrin hearing. That's biblical. Roman soldiers strucks and whipped him along the Via Dolorosa, en route to die. Not specifically biblical but completely credible. These blows are not very graphic. The crucifixion is graphic and indeed illustrates why even Roman political leaders worked for decades to abolish the practice. Said Seneca,

Can anyone be found who would prefer wasting away in pain dying limb by limb, or letting out his life drop by drop, rather than expiring once for all? Can any man by found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly wounds on shoulders and chest, and drawing the breath of life amid long drawn-out agony? He would have many excuses for dying even before mounting the cross (Dialogue 3:2.2).

What the movie does not show, though, is just why crucifixion was so, well, excruciating. Painful with the nails and all, no doubt, but why were even its ancient advocates agreed it was the worst death a person could suffer?

The crucified person could not exhale properly and this eventually would lead to painful muscle cramps. Furthermore, adequate exhaling required the crucified to lift his body by pushing up on the feet and rotating his elbows. This, of course, resulted in searing pain in both feet and hands. ... On the cross every breath would be an agonizing affair and finally in combination with exhaustion would lead to asphyxia. This also explains why the legs of the crucified were often broken, as was the case with the two robbers who were crucified with Jesus (John 19:31-33;). ... Without the support of their legs, the crucified were unable to raise up their bodies, which in turn made it impossible for them to exhale properly thus greatly speeding up death, often within minutes. All of this means that the seven sayings of Jesus were uttered with great difficulty, for speaking takes place during exhalation. [link]

There can be no question that hanging on the cross was the greatest suffering Jesus endured, yet the movie mostly glosses over his cross agony. Yet, as Gibson has said, unblinkingly showing Jesus' suffering is a major dramatic intention of the movie.

Roger Ebert says that the movie is the most violent film he has ever seen. I simply don't see how. Saving Private Ryan was by far more violent and more graphically, revoltingly violent in my view; Ryan had a far more powerful effect on me emotionally than The Passion. In fact, I think Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) was considerably more violent. Other commentators have mentioned last year's Kill Bill as more gratuitously violent than The Passion, but I have not seen it.

Where does the movie leave me? One day in class, Dr. Bond told of a classmate in her undergraduate days who had never been to church, never read the Bible. She loaned him a Bible and advised him to start with the Gospel of Mark, it being the shortest and simplest to read. She said that he told her later that he opened Mark not long before bedtime and became so engrossed in it that he couldn't put it down. He read through the passion with increasing dismay at what was happening to Jesus.

When he read of Jesus' death on the cross, he said he was too shocked to continue. He put the book down and went to bed.

But, he said, he discovered the story did not end there. The next morning he learned that death did not conquer Christ.

Tonight, as the credits rolled (we stayed until they ended) I was filled with a deep sadness - indeed, shame - at the profound deficiency of my own discipleship. Gibson has said that the movie's answer to the question, "Who killed Jesus?" is, "We all did." That is not what I felt at the end. Instead, I felt a deep sense of having betrayed the great trust given me by Christ, a enormous awareness of my own sin and sinfulness and my total reliance on God's gracious mercy.

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
that we to judge thee have in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted!

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!
'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
the slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered.
For our atonement, while we nothing heeded,
God interceded.

For me, kind Jesus, was thy incarnation,
thy mortal sorrow, and thy life's oblation;
thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
for my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
not my deserving.

"Ah, Holy Jesus," Johann Heerman, 1630

Update: I meant to include this little episode: As my son and I entered the theater, we met a classmate of his coming out. She had just seen the movie. She told my son that she had read the Gospels but did consider herself a Christian. But she said the movie made her understand for the first time what Jesus' story meant.

Update: The United Methodist Church's General Board of Discipleship has published a special web site devoted to issues related to The Passion of the Christ. The GBOD's site is called, "The Passion - Opportunities for Discipleship." A review published by the UMC's communications agency is here.

by Donald Sensing, 2/26/2004 10:58:26 PM. Permalink |

Off to see The Passion
I'll post about it tonight.

by Donald Sensing, 2/26/2004 03:57:39 PM. Permalink |

Guide to Passover
Passover is still a little ways off, but for those who are interested, The Jerusalem Post has a 2004 Guide to Passover online. You can even win a Passover Vacation for Two to Disneyworld (I am not making this up),

At Disney's Contemporary Resort in Orlando, Florida.

MatzaFun Tours and TotallyJewishTravel.com together offer two adults the opportunity to win a world class Passover 2004 vacation at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

Passover is a crucial thing for Christians to understand the saving work of Christ, so I always urge my Christian brethren to learn as much about it as they can.

by Donald Sensing, 2/26/2004 03:56:23 PM. Permalink |

Bringing a knife to a gunfight
Yep, it still happens (via Instapundit):

A senior citizen using the men's room yesterday at a popular Middletown eatery was approached by a would-be robber waving a knife. The potential victim responded by pulling out his own weapon - a handgun. ... No shots were fired and the suspect fled.

The senior citizen was 68 years old. I posted (with pictures!) about a news report that said for the first time ever, Americans 65 and up are more likely to own a gun than any other age group.

Said one of the men interviewed, "I can't run and I can't fight 'em. ... What a burglar fears the most is a homeowner who has a gun." Not only in the home, but in public restrooms too, I guess.

by Donald Sensing, 2/26/2004 03:50:17 PM. Permalink |

"The Passion of the Christ" - United Methodist web site
The United Methodist Church's General Board of Discipleship has published a special web site devoted to issues related to The Passion of the Christ. The GBOD's site is called, "The Passion - Opportunities for Discipleship." A review published by the UMC's communications agency is here.

I'll post my own review tonight, after viewing the 5 p.m. showing.

by Donald Sensing, 2/26/2004 10:33:56 AM. Permalink |

How can we know anything about the historical Jesus?
Dr. Mark Roberts has a detailed, excellent, six-part series. Not a quick read, but highly rewarding.

by Donald Sensing, 2/25/2004 08:54:07 PM. Permalink |

Passion of the Christ - reviewing the reviewers
Two pieces that I am aware of today discuss the review of the A. O. Scott's NYT review of The Passion of the Christ , which, as everyone knows who isn;t in a coma, opened in 2,800 theaters today. (I drove by the local 20-screen cineplex at 1 p.m. today and the parking lot looked like it looks Friday night.)

Disclaimer: I have not yet seen the movie. Today being Ash Wednesday, my work load is a little higher than most Wednesdays. I will see it tomorrow.

First is Doug Payton's post. Doug characterizes his post as a fisking of the NYT review and I would agree that it is critical thereof, but not wholly. Citing Scott, who dwells at length upon the graphic violence of the suffering and death of Jesus,

The Gospels, at least in some interpretations, suggest that the story ends in forgiveness. But such an ending seems beyond Mr. Gibson's imaginative capacities. Perhaps he suspects that his public prefers terror, fury and gore. Maybe Homer Simpson was right after all.
Or maybe Mr. Scott would like a revisionist ending, contrary to any of his protestations. The problem is, the story of Jesus' life isn't simple, isn't neatly packaged, and is frankly not all that sanitary. Early on in this review, Mr. Scott said "Mr. Gibson did not need to change the ending", and now says that the ending ought to be "forgiveness". Yet the violence he decries here is, in fact, the conduit for that forgiveness. I have to wonder what Mr. Scott would consider to be the real ending.

Actually, forgiveness is not the end of the passion story, resurrection is. Having said that, though, I should point out that Catholic theology has always tended to distinguish story of the suffering and death of Christ from his resurrection more than Protestants do. Gibson, as we have been exhaustively reminded, is a Catholic - worse an "extreme, traditionalist" Catholic, according to Scott. Personally, I am sure that had an "extreme, traditionalist" Protestant made the movie the resurrection would be the pi éce de resistance of the movie.

Next, Michael Williams "meta-reviews" Scott's review because Williams hasn't seen the movie either, but since he's read the book, okay. Scott says,

But without their fathomless cruelty, the story would not reach its necessary end. To halt the execution would thwart divine providence and refuse the gift of redemption.

To which Williams replies that speculation about halting Jesus' execution is basically futile, but,

It would have been far more just and right if Jesus' life had been spared and if all of humanity were forced to stand, unredeemed, before God's perfect judgement.

I don't agree with this at all because it uses a fallen, sin-ridden concept of "just" and justice. God is just, no doubt, but on his terms, not our own. God's justice is gracious rather than judicial because God's justice redeems and saves rather than condemns. In God's justice we do not get what we deserve, which is sort of the whole point of the Jesus story.

At any rate, Bill Hobbs has a capper to the discussion:

In the end, the important question to be answered is not: Who killed Jesus? The important question is: WHO raised Jesus from the dead?

And also, "Why, and what does it show?"

BTW, Blogs4God has an extensive collection of links about this and other "Christ and culture" posts by a wide variety of bloggers.

Update: Theology student David Whidden saw the movie and says it left him "deeply ambivalent." About its violence: "The phrase that went through my mind right after watching the movie was, 'it’s a religious snuff film.'" This is an essay written with perceptiveness and insight, especially when he says the movie badly needs a prequel. As I said, I'll see the movie tomorrow afternoon and report afterward.

by Donald Sensing, 2/25/2004 04:40:51 PM. Permalink |

What's the threat?
Ask the wrong question and you get unusable answers;
why I think the state should issue me a license to practice medicine, just because I want one

Neal Boortz, who otherwise seems mostly sane (example, his idea to repeal the 17th Amendment), asks a question which he says has no answer:

I've been trying for weeks to get listeners to explain just how their marriages will be adversely affected by the presence of "married" gays and lesbians in their community. Thus far I've had no good examples of potential damage.

Okay, fine, no one has called in to his show to be granted 25-30 seconds to explain a complicated issue. How unsurprising.

But consider: Marriage is licensed by the state. The practice of medicine is also licensed by the state. Tomorrow I will go to the state office concerned and apply for a license to practice medicine. I have no medical training above first aid, but so what? Equal protection under the law means that if the state issued medical-practice licenses to some people, it has to issue them to all.

Homosexuals comprise between one-two percent of Americans, so I have read. (The old "10 percent" claim was a canard from the beginning). So let's imagine that 1.5 percent of Americans without medical training apply for a get a license. Using Boortz's rationale, I would like any medical doctor reading this blog to explain just how your practice will be adversely affected by me and the maybe four million others simply being given a medical license and hanging out a shingle.

So Dr. Smith or whatever your name might be, how would granting a medical-practice license to anyone who wants one adversely affect your practice?

There is, or course, an answer, but before I post it I'll give readers a chance to comment their own.

Hint 1: Don't waste your time posting that there is a compelling public interest in regulating medical practice but not in regulating marriage practice. That dog don't hunt. As I have explained, society's interest in what marriage is and what it is for is in fact its premier interest, trumping all others.

Hint 2: Boortz and others who frame the question in that way - the same way I framed the medical license question - proceed from false premises. See whether you can identify what they are.

Update: I knew my brilliant readers would home like a laser on the real issue, and you did (see comments). The question is not whether "come one come all" issuing of medical licenses will injure Dr. Smith's practice in particular, but whether it will adversely affect the practice of medicine overall to the detriment of public health.

Likewise, whether SSM will injure the marriage of any particular couple is not the point. The queston is whether it will injure marriage as a social institution itself, to the detriment of the public good. I see little doubt that it will. More on that later; I've got to go abck to work now.

by Donald Sensing, 2/25/2004 02:23:36 PM. Permalink |

Why it has come to amending the Constitution
President Bush today endorsed amending the US Constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

In recent months, however, some activist judges and local officials have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage. In Massachusetts, four judges on the highest court have indicated they will order the issuance of marriage licenses to applicants of the same gender in May of this year. In San Francisco, city officials have issued thousands of marriage licenses to people of the same gender, contrary to the California family code. That code, which clearly defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, was approved overwhelmingly by the voters of California. A county in New Mexico has also issued marriage licenses to applicants of the same gender. And unless action is taken, we can expect more arbitrary court decisions, more litigation, more defiance of the law by local officials, all of which adds to uncertainty.

After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence, and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization. Their actions have created confusion on an issue that requires clarity.

On a matter of such importance, the voice of the people must be heard. Activist courts have left the people with one recourse. ...

I instinctively shy away from amending the Constitution on this issue for much the same reason that I oppose the proposals to amend to forbid protest-burning of the American flag: that's not what the Constitution is for. The Constitution was written to set forth the form and nature of the government and by its first 10 amendments guarantee that certain rights should never be abridged.

An amendment to define marriage Constitutionally is not "structural" in nature. So it does not seem to me to be Constitution-related business.

Except.

Except that the "full faith and credit" (FFC) clause of the Constitution's Article IV, Section 1 makes this issue a Constitutional one:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. ...

In the context of marriage, this clause has always meant that a couple married in, say, Michigan, who then moved to Tennessee, would not have to get a new marriage license from Tennessee. And that's the rub when it comes to homosexual "marriages."

What the FFC clause does, so pundits say at least, is this: compel legal recognition by all states of same-sex marriages done in San Francisco or Massachusetts. In effect, the Constitution would be used as the instrument to force a nationwide redefinition of the most fundamental way society is ordered, and it basically does so by fiat, by the whim of five judges in Massachusett's supreme court and of the mayor of a California city. Why, pray tell, should those persons have such enormous power over the people of Tennessee, or any other state?

In fact, the Congress agreed in 1996 that they shouldn't and passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which permitted states to decide on their own whether they would honor same-sex marriage licenses issued in other states. This act has been neither invoked by states nor challenged in court. The act's sponsors say that the Congress has the authority under the FFC clause, which in addition to the sentence quoted above, also says,

And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

In a calmer time, DOMA would be pretty much the end of it until a same-sex couple sued a state for failing to give full faith and credit to their union licensed in another state. I assume that federal rather than state court would have original jurisdiction because of the interstate character of the issue.

But these are not calm times. This issue became rapidly polarized to its extreme positions because of the scofflaw actions of San Francisco's Mayor Newsom and the provocative judicial overreach of the Mass. supreme court.

In legislative terms, the issue is settled at the federal level. DOMA is still on the books. But when President Bush denounced "activist judges" in his statement today, he was speaking for millions of Americans (we'll see whether a majority) who believe, as I do, that the very nature and character of the judiciary today far surpasses what the country's founders intended or envisioned, and hence traditional means of settling Constitutional questions have been abrogated. What else, they think, can they do but go to the source?

Yet there will be no quick resolution of this matter. Same-sex-marriage activists and proponents shut the electorate out of the decision by bypassing the hard legislative work they would have to do to win their case in the public mind. Instead, they went straight to courts and a usurping mayor. But their tactic has set the stage - and the justification - for opponents' strategy. For if courts and public officials can simply dismiss the law on one side, they can on the other.

A Constitutional amendment won't happen quickly, if it happens at all. Until then, it will be nothing but a backdrop to a culture war I fear has hardly begun. The possibility of a compromise is decreasing rapidly. Both sides are girding to fight for all-or-nothing victories. It won't be pretty.

Update: This quote of Gloria Steinem seems revealing as to why the SSM advocates deliberately shunned a legislative process:

“We have to abolish and reform the institution of marriage…By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God…We must understand what we are attempting is a revolution, not a public relations movement.”

This from an article called, "The Left’s War on the Family." Take a look.

by Donald Sensing, 2/24/2004 07:16:19 PM. Permalink |

Worth remembering
Ralph Peters reminds us of The Best We've Got:

Iraq remains a brutally dangerous place, a country that will struggle for years with its disastrous past. Progress will be imperfect. Success will be inconsistent. Disappointments will intoxicate the media. But, when all is said and done, Iraq is now the only major country in the Middle East with hope for a better future.

Our soldiers created that hope. ...

Far from the crude babykiller of campus legend, the American soldier has proved that he is as humane as he is competent, as creative as he is valorous, and as optimistic as the best traditions of his - or her - country. Our troops have tracked down war criminals, turned the tables on ambushers, faced countless roadside bombs - and built schools, created jobs, picked up garbage and set an example that even those Iraqis anxious for us to leave will not forget.

The American soldier has an immeasurably greater impact than American bombs. ...

The American soldier is a historical anomaly - not a grasping conqueror, but a man or woman of courage and good heart who wishes only to do what must be done, and then go home. Our troops are inspiring in ways that no campaign speech or campus rally will ever rival. They live the virtues - courage, patriotism, love of freedom, self-sacrifice, honor - of which their critics are embarrassed to speak.

They have a wicked sense of humor. They're exuberantly politically incorrect. They're part of the most thoroughly integrated, representative American institution - our military. And when the American people and our leaders stand behind them, they can do any job on earth.

In November 1998, Stephen Ambrose wrote American Heritage's cover story, "I Learn a Lot from the Veterans." He quoted an unnamed World War II veteran:

"Imagine this. In the spring of 1945, around the world, the sight of a twelve-man squad of teenage boys, armed and in uniform, brought terror to people's hearts. Whether it was a Red Army squad in Berlin, Leipzig, or Warsaw, or a German squad in Holland, or a Japanese squad in Manila or Seoul of China, that squad meant rape, pillage, looting, wanton destruction, senseless killing. But there was an exception: a squad of GIs, a sight that brought the biggest smile you ever saw to people's lips, and joy to their hearts.

"Around the world this was true, even in Germany, even - after September 1945 - in Japan. This was because GIs meant candy, cigarettes, C-rations, and freedom. America had sent the best of her young men around the world, not to conquer but to liberate, not to terrorize but to help. This was a great moment in our history."

The moment is not over.

by Donald Sensing, 2/24/2004 03:36:25 PM. Permalink |

Full-circle collective cluelessness
Reid Stott recounts al Qaeda's record of its threats and action and says:

... amazingly, a mere two and a half years after thousands died in New York, DC, and Pennsylvania, many today say that we’re not at war at all. Our collective cluelessness has come full circle.

He has some observations about the combined US-Pakistan operations to trap Osama bin Laden going on now, too, including a caution against inflating the prospects of its success

But if you’re going to paint such a Big Face on this upcoming offensive, you better make sure you get some returns. When it comes to catching bin Laden and al Zawahiri, we’ve had enough disappointing and unnecessary failures.

Six years worth. And thousands of graves.

He right, of course. But as I said, I think there are certain factors working in our favor now that haven't been there before.

While you're there, read Reid's post about the Nader candidacy. Really.

by Donald Sensing, 2/24/2004 02:56:15 PM. Permalink |

Andy Rooney acts like Andy Rooney
Which is no surprise. Andy wants to know from Mel Gibson,

My question to Mel Gibson is: "How many million dollars does it look as if you're going to make off the crucifixion of Christ?"

Doug Payton has a question for Andy.

Well, OK, I'm doing more than that. I'm betting that either it didn't even show up on his radar or he was apathetic about it. I guess it's OK to make movies based on religious figures that make no pretense of accuracy, but try to be true to the text and the detractors come out of the woodwork. I'd really like to find out what, if anything, Rooney said back then and compare it to now. A search of CBSNews.com, and Google was no help either.

I'd be very interested to find this, but I gots my suspicions.

But Doug, don't you understand? The double standard is the standard from certain commentators.

Update: The text of Rooney's diatribe is posted on CBBSNews' site. It's reprehensible:

I heard from God just the other night. God always seems to call at night.

"Andrew," God said to me. He always calls me "Andrew." I like that.

"Andrew, you have the eyes and ears of a lot of people. I wish you'd tell your viewers that both Pat Robertson and Mel Gibson strike me as wackos. I believe that's one of your current words. They're crazy as bedbugs, another earthly expression. I created bedbugs. I'll tell you, they're no crazier than people,” said God.

"Let me just say that I think I'd remember if I'd ever talked to Pat Robertson, and I'd remember if I said Bush would get re-elected in a blowout."

“As far as Mel Gibson goes, I haven't seen his movie, 'The Passion of the Christ,' because it hasn't opened up here yet. But I did catch Gibson being interviewed by Diane Sawyer. I did something right when I came up with her, didn't I,” added God. “Anyway, as I was saying, Mel is a real nut case. What in the world was I thinking when I created him? Listen, we all make mistakes."

That is what God said to me.

This rot isn't clever or funny. It's pathetic. Rooney's creative light went out a long time ago, and now he's become a snide, snarky and indeed, mean old man.

by Donald Sensing, 2/24/2004 07:51:55 AM. Permalink |

Another reason to be disgusted with the Republicans
Some of them, anyway, this guy for example:

Issa is, as I write, urging the the US Constitution be amended in order to have a presently-popular Republican politician - in this case Arnold Scwarzenegger - become eligible to seek the White House. The Constitution states that only native-born American citizens may become president.

Issa claims that the legislation for Congress to enable the amendment process to begin was being worked in Sen. Orrin Hatch's office before the California recall made Arnold the state's governor. Yeah.

They tried to pull this stunt when Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, too.

Update: Jalal in a comment points out that the Constitution actually requires the president to have been a natural born citizen, not "native born." Sorry for my sloppiness on that point. I should have been more clear. My eldest, for instance, was born in Germany, but because I was serving there under military orders, his birth certificate, issued by the Dept. of State, says explicitly that he was born a US Citizen.

by Donald Sensing, 2/23/2004 08:55:50 PM. Permalink |

Another answer to the "simple question" - (This post has been updated)
Out of the, what, dozens of answers Andrew Sullivan received to his "simple question," which I explained and answered here, Andrew chose to print this one.

I used to think that Mr. Sullivan was at least trying to be rational about his favorite subject, but no more. And that's okay - he has a right to be as partisan about homosexuality as anything else - but it's a pity he tars with a broad brush those who disagree, because he denounces that very thing in others for other issues. As a very liberal colleague of mine said, insightfully, "We are all fundamentalists, it just depends what the topic is."

Update: Today Andrew wrote,

I asked a couple of days ago how it was that conservative Protestants have little problem with civil and religious divorce, while Jesus explicitly condemns it. ...

One reader - an evangelical Christian - agreed:
... certain issues of illogic are driving me nuts. And the selectivity in obeying some parts of the Bible devotedly, while ignoring what seem to be major other ones, is deeply troubling.

Homosexuality is one of these issues (though not the most important of them to me).

As a member of a conservative church and a heterosexual man, I am well aware of the sins of heterosexuals (myself included). The church pretty much ignores these; few pastors have the guts to stand up and say "I struggle with the temptation to view pornography" or similar things. But we all do. When is the last time you heard a preacher expound on "but if any of you thinks lustfully about another woman, he has committed adultery in his heart"? (Me, in 34 years of going to church every week: never. Occasionally at a Christian conference or retreat for men, a gutsy speaker will address this.)

But on homosexuality, of course, the church is righteously indignant. I have come to believe that this is so because for the vast majority of heterosexual Christians, homosexuality is the one sin that they are certain they will never commit. Murderous thoughts, adulterous hearts, sure. But never homosexuality. And that is why they point fingers.
I think this guy is onto something. Beat up on the Samaritans; let the Pharisees off the hook. For some people, that's a literal reading of the Gospels.

This is an utterly vacuous argument. What the unnamed writer's position boils down to is this: since no humans are perfect, including humans assembled as the church, then anything is permissible.

The great majority of churches' doctrines hold that adultery, fornication and homosexual practice are all contrary to biblical teaching. The writer Sullivan cites approvingly simply says, basically, that because the church doesn't ruthlessly enforce the other prohibitions that it should not embrace homosexual practice and marriage - that is, the things that Sullivan promotes.

Mr. Writer, however, is simply wrong is presuming that because his rather empty-sounding congregation never mentions or instructs such things that no church ever does. In fact, there are vigorous programs and ministries in many churches and denominations that grapple with these issues. That they are obviously not wholly successful, by Sullivan's lights, does not mean they are wholly unsuccessful. And it certainly doesn't mean that unless churches become rabid fundamentalists they have no moral right to address this issue.

There is another point about adultery and divorce that escaped Sullivan and his allies; in fact, it escaped me until just now. It is this: Jesus taught and the church recognizes that adultery and divorce are the result of a divinely endorsed relationship gone bad, one into which sin has broken into strongly. But homosexual relationships are gone bad to begin with, according to biblical teaching and the church's historic understanding.

Over two millennia, the church has learned that the appropriate and most Christlike response to marital injury is restorative grace that repentance and reconciliation may be gained, both with God and with spouses. Almost always, though, the persons concerned keep their problem secret from pastors and church friends until so much damage has been done that reparative work is very difficult and often impossible. But in no case does the church aver that the sin never occurred, that it isn't really sin to begin with, or that its repetition is acceptable.

Yet that is exactly the standard that Sullivan apparently would hold the church. Either that, or (more probably) he wants to church to reject the biblical teachings about human sexuality altogether, especially about homosexuality.

For the church's historic teaching about homosexual relations has never been that they are divinely endorsed and therefore should be embraced. Unlike pre-adultery or pre-divorce marriages, which exist within the covenant of divine grace, homosexual unions have never been held to exist within the covenant of grace to begin with.

It is thus not hypocritical for the church to "tolerate divorce" while rejecting homosexuality. The church does not tolerate divorce; it does support divorced persons who desire to be made whole again through the grace of Christ. While divorce or adultery are sinful, by Christ's own words (see Mark 3) they are not unforgivable. Churches do maintain, though, that repetition of sexual sin (or any other) is not to be condoned. As Paul said, we must not make sin abound thinking that grace will thereby increase.

Homosexual practice is not unforgivable in the beliefs of any church I know of. But like adultery or for that matter thievery or any other sin one cares to name, the issue is that repentance is key to restoration. Repentance isn't simply feeling bad about something; it's Hebrew word actually means to change course, to take a new direction. Repentance means to reject the sin and live anew.

So the position of the church regarding homosexual practice is in fact consistent with its position regarding divorce and adultery: all alike are sinful and all alike require their practitioners to cease their practice. Jesus told the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-11), "Go and sin no more," not, "Adultery isn't really sinful."

But that's precisely what Sullivan either does not recognize or does recognize and is angered by. For his real objection is that the church will not list homosexual conduct on the "approved" side of the ledger. All the objections about divorce and adultery are red herrings.

by Donald Sensing, 2/23/2004 06:17:31 PM. Permalink |

Answer the phone and go to jail
More proof that common sense and the criminal mind don't often show up in the same person. Craigen Harris was arrested last week in Nashville for mugging David Miller at gunpoint, invading Miller's home and stealing $30, a Nintendo and a Miller's cell phone.

Miller called the police. Sgt. Matt Pylkas called Miller's cell phone number hoping the phone had been dropped nearby so he could lift fingerprints from it.

Harris answered the phone.

So Pylkas immediately pretended to be Miller and offered Harris $50 if he would return the Nintendo. Harris agreed and was nabbed when he came around. Said Miller of the incident,

''It wasn't funny last night — but it's funny now,'' said Miller, who was accosted at his girlfriend's east Nashville apartment, ''His dumb a.. answered the phone. Robbing people isn't that smart anyway. But — d... — to be that stupid?''

Yep.

by Donald Sensing, 2/23/2004 04:17:13 PM. Permalink |

What happened to war bonds?
Andrew Sullivan says we should finance (at least in part) the war on terror by imposing a temporary (hah!) war tax "on those earning more than $200,000 and direct it primarily to financing the war on terror." If it isn't to be directed exclusively to finance the WOT, then it isn't really a "war tax," is it?

During the Vietnam War, President Johnson imposed a war surtax of 10 percent in individuals and companies. Whatever you owed in taxes, you were taxed an additional 10 percent thereof. The surtax lasted from 1968-1970. But the surtax was imposed all all returns, not selected income groups.

But what about war bonds? They are really savings bonds, which the government has sold for many decades. Such bonds were used in the Civil War and World War I, but their sales ballooned immensely during World War II. In that war Americans bought more than $185 billion worth of bonds.

Technically, though, even during WW2, "war bonds" were really just US Savings bonds that were already being sold before America entered the war. At no point was the revenue from sales of these bonds ever devoted exclusively to prosecuting the war; the revenue went into the federal treasury. The fact that the war budget accounted for substantially more than half the federal budget then meant that calling the bonds "war" bonds was not only a savvy marketing tool, it was actually justified.

If "war bonds" are re-introduced their revenue must be dedicated solely to the defense budget. Otherwise, they'll probably flop because people won't line up to buy "prescription medicine" bonds. Sales of regular savings bonds should continue, of course, with no changes.

by Donald Sensing, 2/23/2004 02:14:43 PM. Permalink |

Jesus and masculinity
Last November I posted a photo essay on "The Metrosexual Jesus," the thesis of which is that much of the impotence of the modern North American churches in wider society is rooted in the presentation, theologically and visually, of a "sissified Jesus," of which this is one example of several I posted:

Comes now Robert Tagorda with a related post, kindly linking to mine but more related to Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ. He quotes an NYT piece on what Jesus really looked like:

The rise of a sedentary leisure class in the 19th century, for example, spurred worries that Christians were getting soft along with their faith. The "muscular Christianity" movement and the Y.M.C.A. network that it inspired emerged as one means to develop strapping Christian men of military bearing and to rescue the faith from what the preacher Billy Sunday called the prevailing "flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity."

As Stephen Prothero recounts in his insightful and entertaining new book, "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), one of a number of recent cultural histories about the peculiarly American version of Jesus, Christian leaders in the early 20th century were positively obsessed with counteracting the image of a Christ of "womanly sweetness," as one pastor described popular representations, or, as another put it, a "namby-pamby effeminate" Jesus.

Tagorda concludes of Gibson's movie, "This messiah must reflect its creator!"

by Donald Sensing, 2/23/2004 10:19:09 AM. Permalink |

Qs and As from the presidential candidates
Me: President Bush, some of your critics have said that your answer to every question about your administration's actions is "Nine-Eleven changed everything." How do you respond to that criticism?

President Bush: "Well, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 changed everything."

Me: Okay. Mr. Kerry, lately some of your critics have charged that any criticism of your record in the Senate and your virulent antiwar protests after you returned from cambat in Vietnam is met from you with nothing but the retort that you are a combat veteran and the Vietnam war does not need to be injected into this campaign. But isn't it fair to evaluate your record as a senator and your political actions after your return from the war for your fitness for the Oval Office?

Senator Kerry: Look, I served in Vietnam. I was one of the band of brothers. I know what it's like to be the tip of the spear. I can't believe that the Republicans want to make my Vietnam service an issue in this campaign. I say, bring it on.

Me: Yes, it's going to be a really long campaign.

by Donald Sensing, 2/22/2004 03:41:24 PM. Permalink |

How long until eBay?
California Gay Marriages in Legal Limbo

Many of the more than 3,000 same-sex couples who obtained marriage licenses from the city said getting married was among the most joyous events in their lives. But because of legal uncertainty and political controversy, the certificates don't appear to be worth much more than sentimental value at this point.

Not worth more than sentimental value? Yeah, right. Wait until they start appearing on eBay.

by Donald Sensing, 2/21/2004 05:31:38 PM. Permalink |

Repost: Index to "marriage, gay marriage, and much more" posts
As this topic has pretty much set a One Hand Clapping record for reader interest and commentary, here again is the index to my main posts on the subject. I recommend you read them in this order:

1. The "gay marriage" controversy: Traditionalists need to get a clue - we lost this fight 40 years ago

2. Separate the legal and the spiritual in the wedding business: Let the state do the former and the Church the latter; my solution to the "gay marriage" impasse

3. What makes a thing a thing? The Problem of Universals and defining what is marriage.

4. Answering Andrew Sullivan's "simple question" - explaining Jesus' silence on homosexuality.

5. Is the church really hypocritical about homosexuality? Responding to charges of ecclesial hypocrisy because the church tolerates divorce but not homosexuality.

by Donald Sensing, 2/21/2004 02:39:07 PM. Permalink |

Blogs' hits and read times
The Blogfather, Glenn Reynolds, runs Instapundit, which garners 105,134 unique hits per day on average. However, the "Average Visit Length" is 15 seconds.

That means that Instapundit is read a total of 1,577,010 seconds per day, or 438.05 hours.

My site, by comparison, pales in hits, getting 2,959 average per day. My average shows a much greater proportional variation than Glenn's because while my link to him barely ripples his SiteMeter, his link to me makes a big splash. Example, yesterday I had almost 5,000 hits, the day before 2,900 and Wednesday 3,500. So SiteMeter's rolling average of my daily hits will climb soon by a significant percentage, but Glenn's percentage variation is very small over short terms.

But my site's readers spend an average of 2:06 per visit. So my site is read for 372,456 seconds per day, or 103.46 hours.

This means that Instapundit gets 35.5 times as many hits as I do, but is actually read only 4.23 times as long.

I have absolutely no idea what this means, if indeed it means anything at all. But there you are.

by Donald Sensing, 2/21/2004 01:55:33 PM. Permalink |

Osama's in the box - just maybe
Joe Gandelman reports on reports that Osama bin Laden is now boxed in and under constant techical means of surveillance. US Special Forces are "absolutely confident" that there is no escape for OBL.

An combined US-Pakistan operation began this week that Amercian and Pakistani officers called a "hammer and anvil" operation designed to squeeze al Qaeda betwen them. The operation is oriented against the mountainous region straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Update: The US is moving a special task force into the region from Iraq to hunt bin Laden down.

A Defense Department official said there are two reasons for repositioning parts of Task Force 121: First, most high-value human targets in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein, have been caught or killed. Second, intelligence reports are increasing on the whereabouts of bin Laden, the terror leader behind the September 11 attacks. ...

Task Force 121 is a mix of Army Delta Force soldiers and Navy SEALs, transported on helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The SEALs and soldiers are based at Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, N.C.

The report also says that intelligence-collection effort on OBL's location are increasing in quantity and quality. Many of the techniques used to find Saddam Hussein are being adapted for the hunt for bin Laden.

Obtaining reports of his movements is a primary key to capturing him. Over time, as sources are identified and their reliability established, the lag time between the movement itself and the receipt of the report will decrease. Eventually it will become short enough to mount a raid.

One of the keys as well will be shrinking the box OBL can safely move within. Paksistani forces on one end and American forces on the other will work to effectively reduce the size of the region OBL can seek refuge. This will not necessarily happen quickly. Buit neither does it depend on physical occupation of the territory concerned. The UIS abilityt to serveil territory near constantly and enter points rapidly is a form of effective occupation.

Bin Laden has to consider in his evasions that our forces would prefer to capture him if possible, but it the opportunity presents to kill him now or only maybe capture him later, we will strike with lethal force.

As the old saying goes, "nothing succeeds like success." Al Qaeda has not shown itself to be successful for almost two years. More and more of its potential and existing allies will decide that they have hitched their wagon to a falling star, and will unhitch in greater numbers and frequency in the weeks and months ahead. Once we kill or capture Osama bin Laden, I think that al Qaeda's collapse will be very sudden and dramatic.

by Donald Sensing, 2/21/2004 12:52:03 PM. Permalink |

Index to "marriage, gay marriage, and much more" posts
Here is the index to my main posts on the subject. I recommend you read them in this order:

1. The "gay marriage" controversy: Traditionalists need to get a clue - we lost this fight 40 years ago

2. Separate the legal and the spiritual in the wedding business: Let the state do the former and the Church the latter; my solution to the "gay marriage" impasse

3. What makes a thing a thing? The Problem of Universals and defining what is marriage.

4. Answering Andrew Sullivan's "simple question" - explaining Jesus' silence on homosexuality.

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 08:38:46 PM. Permalink |

Schwarzenegger - AWOL or MIA?
I said two days ago that Calif. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was AWOL on the topic of homosexual marriages taking place in San Francisco. Now Bill O'Reilly says the governor is "MIA." Personally, I think AWOL is correct because to be missing in action, you have to first be in the action, and Arnold never has been.

Update: Arnold has now decided to join the fray by directing the "state attorney general to take immediate legal steps to stop San Francisco from granting marriage licenses to gay couples."

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 07:17:45 PM. Permalink |

There's a sucker born every minute
So observed P. T. Barnum as he watched people buy tickets at his circus to "see the egress." Buh-bye! Thanks for the dime! Well, he was right:

See here for the inside story on how lotteries deceive you and make you broke.

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 06:56:16 PM. Permalink |

Speaking of cognitive dissonance
What to make of this Kevin Drum post?

I've talked to an awful lot of Europeans over the years ... They mainly just seem to wish that we'd calm down a bit, stop thinking that someone is always out to get us, and show a greater willingness to translate our software into their local languages.

Okay, this is some Europeans' point, not Kevin's, but really, Europeans say we should stop thinking someone is out to get us? You mean, like this?

Kevin continues:

As for progressive taxation, I'm a fan of that, but mainly because the rich have all the money. If the top 20% of the population has half the income then those are the guys you have to tax. Even aside from moral concerns, trying to get a bunch of tax revenue out of the poor schmoes making $30,000 a year is like getting blood from a stone. It's just not going to work.

Why did Willie Sutton robs banks? "That where all the money is." Of course you have to tax earners to have an income tax at all; who can argue with that? But I don't get Kevin's point. Does he think we don't have progressive taxation now? If so, how does he account for the fact that,

... the share of total federal income taxes paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers has doubled since 1975. In 1999, they paid 36.2 percent versus 18.7 percent in 1975.

That sounds pretty progressive to me. So does this (same link):

To put these numbers into perspective, it should be noted that the top 1 percent of taxpayers reported just 19.5 percent of adjusted gross income. Thus, their share of the tax burden exceeded their income share by almost 17 percentage points. For the top 5 percent, the spread was even greater -- more than 21 percentage points. By contrast, for those in the bottom 50 percent, the difference between the percentage of total taxes and total income was minus 9.25 percent. That is, their income share greatly exceeded their tax share . (italics added)

So, Kevin, do we have an unfair tax system, and if so, against whom is it unfair? I'm not being snarky, I really would like to know. Post it and I'll link to it. I admit as well that these data come from a Jan. 2002 article, so I expect that the numbers have changed since then, but not the pattern itself.

Or, consider the fact that, "Married Couples File Less Than Half of All Tax Returns, But Pay 74 Percent Of All Income Taxes."

Or the fact that the US Congress' Joint Economics Committee reports,

The top half of taxpayers continue to pay over 96 percent of Federal income taxes, while the bottom half accounts for slightly less than 4 percent, according to new 2001 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data ...

The data continue to show the highly progressive nature of the Federal income tax. The top one percent of tax filers paid 33.89 percent of Federal personal income taxes in 2001, while the top ten percent accounted for 64.89 percent of these taxes. [italics added]

Catch that? "The highly progressive nature of the Federal tax system." As for "the poor schmoes making $30,000 a year," they barely squeak into the top half of wage earners, the cutoff being $28,528. But the top one-fourth of earners pay 82.9 percent of all all federal income taxes and the second one-fourth pays only 13 percent. Because $30K a year is at the bottom of the second fourth, Kevin's poor schmoes basically pay a tiny amount of income taxes.

I just don't get the point of the Kevin's post. Seriously. Then he concludes,

Then again, maybe I'm just kidding myself. Is it time for some therapy?

Well, I dunno. Your call, I guess.

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 06:45:20 PM. Permalink |

Jesus' silence on homosexuality
Why do Protestants ignore Jesus on divorce but agitate for Constitutional action against homosexuality?

Andrew Sullivan asks,

Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. But he was adamant about the impermissibility of divorce. How can the Protestant right ignore his direct teachings on one and yet demand Constitutional action against the other? On their own Biblically inerrant terms? Can someone clue me in here?

Sure, Andrew. First, the civil question, then the religious one.

Not all the Protestant right supports the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. I don't for example (but a lot of members of the Right wouldn't consider me a member). Neither does former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was the center of controversy last year for emplacing a Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building. Many conservatives, most of whom are probably Protestant, oppose the FMA on federalist grounds. So I think you paint with too broad a brush.

Second, the fact that Jesus never mentioned homosexuality is no argument for its permissibility. I learned in Vanderbilt Divinity School, whence my M.Div., that one of the basic tenets of biblical exegesis, especially of the prophetic record, is that prophets prophesy against the things they know need fixing. (Understanding the Mosaic law works that way, too. When the Law legislates what happens when someone's ox is gored, it means that gored oxen were a fairly prominent legal issue of the day.)

New Testament scholars and religious historians affirm that the proscription against homosexuality in first-century Judea was strong and certain. Were there homosexuals then? No doubt. But was homosexuality a "problem" that needed addressing prophetically? No. In fact, according to my New Testament professor, who personally supports gay rights, Jesus's silence on homosexuality really shows that he was quite in agreement with its hard proscription in Jewish law and sociology. It didn't need "fixing," therefore garnered no comment from him.

That being said, it certainly is clear that Jesus spoke unambiguously against divorce, as, for example, did the prophet Malachi, who quoted God thus: "I hate divorce." That seems pretty clear to me. That divorce is a scourge I affirm. But it seems it was in Jesus' day as well, and before then in the times of the prophets. So divorce has been a very tough problem to solve at the societal level for a long time, though we must keep trying.

I am not sure I agree with your observation that Christians are ignoring biblical teachings on divorce, although I doubt the teachings are being emphasized. The divorce rate for Christians is about the same as for the general population - but with more than 80 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Christians (ABC News poll, 2-16-04), maybe people who identify themselves as Christian pretty much are the general population.

There are, however, a large number of marriage-strengthening and enhancement ministries offered, both denominational and ecumenical. These are expressly designed to reduce divorce and enrich the marital bond. So while divorce in America and American churches remains a real problem, I cannot agree with your assertion that the churches are "ignoring" Christ's direct teachings about it. I do agree we are not making the headway we should be making.

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 04:03:41 PM. Permalink |

What makes a thing a thing?
The Problem of Universals and defining what is marriage

One of the underlying disputes in the debates about homosexual marriage is what, exactly, is marriage?

On the one hand, traditionalists insist that marriage is the legal and sexual union of a man and a woman for the purpose of bringing forth the next generation. That some husbands and wives do not conceive children for whatever reason is accidental to this definition and therefore does not obviate it. Along the way there are certain socially recognized, and usually legally enforceable, rights and obligations that go along with spousal status, such as property rights. Marriage is therefore definitionally impossible for between members of the same sex. Usually, but not always, this argument is buttressed from religious grounds.

On the other hand, proponents of same-sex marriage insist that it is the fulfillment of love and affection they have for one another to which childbearing is incidental. They claim that homosexual relations are just as valid an expression of love as heterosexual; therefore, homosexual relationships should receive the same legal recognition as traditional marriage. Sometimes, but not often, this argument is also buttressed from religious grounds.

Now, the particulars of these arguments I'll address below. First, I want to discuss this question: "what makes a thing a particular thing?" This problem is one of the oldest if philosophical inquiry. It is called, "The Problem of Universals."

Individuals have two kinds of knowledge of things: experiential and intellectual. Experiential knowledge arises from our senses - sight, sound, smell, etc. Intellectual knowledge of things is ideas or concepts formed from seeing experiencing many things and categorizing them into abstracted concepts.

Experiential knowledge gives us knowledge about a particular thing - the keyboard I am typing on, for example, but in intellectual knowledge we primarily use a concept. A true concept of, say, books, tells us nothing about the particular characteristics of the next book we pick up, but it tells us how we will know it is a book at all.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato took the view that there was a realm of unchanging Ideas to which the physical world conformed so as to give each physical thing its identity. A particular object is endowed with a lesser, impermanent reality of its Ideal as it comes into momentary being, and loses it as it passes away.

(Plato's work heavily influenced medieval thinkers, who called the realm of Ideas Universals.)

Aristotle, not long after Plato, disagreed with the notion of Ideas and thought that the forms (as he called them) exist only in the particular things and have no existence apart from or separate from them.

So the problem of universals was this: Since the nature of a universal concept was different in detail from any particular occasion of it, do universals actually give us any knowledge about the world?

In the 11th and 12th centuries, three positions got staked out:

Nominalism (Roscellinus): only the particular or individual is real. Universal terms are merely a word or a name, a flatus vocis , or "breathing of the voice," entirely subjective and mental, which serves as a sign for common objects.

Universalism (William of Champeux): Individuality is only an accidental variation or modification of universal essence.

Conceptualism (Abelard): a kind of moderated realism. Universal concepts are more than mere names and are actually abstractions of general characteristics objects possess in common. These natures do actually exist, but only in the objects which possess them. "Tree" as a universal category is an isolation of the mind of common features present in all trees. But "tree" does not exist as a universal being on its own. Universals are indispensable forms of knowledge we need to know the world.

What the two sides of the same-sex marriage are doing is arguing from two different understandings of what make a thing a thing, or what makes marriage marriage. The "pro" side seems to me to be arguing from the nominalist side, that marriage has no reality in the abstract apart from married couples themselves. Hence, objections from traditionalists that calling the same-sex couples in San Francisco married does not make them so is met with derision from the pro side. In their view, calling them married is exactly what does make them married.

OTOH, most traditionalist arguments I've seen seem to cleave to the Universalist line, that marriage has a definition - that is, a reality - independent of persons who are married. Marriage, truly to be marriage, must conform to this Universal. If not, it is not even a decent imitation and does not share in the Universal reality of marriage.

I tend toward a Conceptualist position. "Marriage" is not simply the name given to any relationship between adults, but only to certain kinds of them. As ordained by God or evolved through millennia (take your pick) there are certain characteristics and behaviors that marriage partners have always exhibited in common.

The Conceptualist advantage is that it does not require every example to conform to the abstraction in every detail, as the Universalist position does (its real weakness as an argument), and as the Nominalist position holds as irrelevant.

A Conceptualist argument of marriage could examine the history and results of marriage for literally back to the stone age and identify certain essentials that, as a group, marriage has:

Marriage has always, in all times, cultures and place, been the union of a man and a woman. There is no reason to doubt that homosexuals have also lived in all those cultures, but there is no evidence that their relationships have ever determined the nature of marriage.

The affirmation of love and affection of the spouses for one another has only rarely been a cause for marriage in human history. Until recently in the West (including America), the emotional feelings that spouses had for one another was not considered very important; what was important was their social or economic similarity, and their compatibility in a myriad of other ways. Marrying because of love is a latecomer to the scene and is not really the norm in most of the world's people now. There are billions of people living in cultures in which brides and grooms hardly have met before their wedding day.

The very fundamental purpose of marriage has been and remains the propagation of the next generation. Look at it this way: just as "a hen is an egg's way of making another egg," marriage is the means by which parents become grandparents. While it is biologically possible for children to be born outside the marital bond (obviously), it is empirically provable that what biologists call "survival advantages" of those children is so relatively low that non-marital childbearing is literally a dead end.

Hence, marriage is self-perpetuating, self-referent upon itself and self-defining. Marriage throughout human history has never needed to be defined be relying on something else. However, same-sex "marriage" has no existence or meaning apart from male-female marriage. Male-female marriage is self-perpetuating within itself; same-sex marriages cannot self-perpetuate within itself at all. In fact, if not for male-female marriage, same-sex marriage cannot occur at all. Self-perpetuation is the critical element of marriage without which a same-sex relationship, no matter how affectionate, fails to be marriage.

Elements of marriage such as property rights and the like do not centrally define what marriage is. Indeed, the historical and present record shows that such matters have varied widely across human cultures and experience. The wife as an equal partner is a modern development, but its lack in other times and places does not obviate the essential character of marriage, the procreation of the next generation. The various legal and social rights and recognitions that pertain to married couples are the result, not the cause, of marriage, intended to buttress its central purpose. Therefore, they are added or discarded inasmuch as they do so, though not without other influences as well. Thus, the legal rights and social claims of married partners are incidental, not essential, to defining what marriage is.

Marriage is therefore a social institution, not a merely personal one. All society has a vested interest in the propagation of the next generation and the health thereof. As a social institution, marriage is defined in aggregate, not in particular. This fact argues against a Nominalist position that if two same-sex persons obtain a marriage license, that they are in fact married. It also shows why the pro side's snark that many male-female married couples never have children is irrelevant: out of any random 100 heterosexual marriages, the overwhelming majority will conceive children of their own, within the marriage bond, but out of any 100 same-sex unions, exactly zero will do so. Hence, the lack of children in a small minority of male-female marriages is accidental to what marriage does and what it is for, but the inability of same-sex unions to have children within the bond is inescapably central to their relationship.

All of which is to say that the accidental characteristics of marriage - love, affection, property and other rights - spring from what marriage is rather than define what marriage is. Therefore, whatever relationship homosexuals may have with one another, and whatever legal rights civil authority may confer upon them, marriage is inherently - indeed, metaphysically - the province only of men and women united in matrimony.

(Note to my faithful readers: Yes, I do believe that marriage is an institution ordained by divine will and consider this teaching crystal clear in the Scriptures. But I also think that not only will most Americans not be persuaded by that kind of argument, neither will most church members! After all, the Bible condemns divorce even more unambiguously than homosexual relations, but the divorce rate even in evanagelical churches is the same as for non-church-goers. There is a place for religious argument, but the broad stroke of the campaign isn't it.)

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 02:09:00 PM. Permalink |

The ultimate weapon
Many years ago, I saw a composite photo was posted on an office door at Fort Sill, Okla. (home of the US Army Artillery Center) that claimed to be a photo of the ultimate weapon. It showed an M109 self-propelled howitzer in the field. On the end of the cannon barrel was a huge bayonet. It was a rather crude composite, as this was years and years before Photoshop. Heck, it was when home computers cost thousands of dollars and had maybe 4K total memory, and volatile memory at that.

Anyway, I see now that the German armaments industry really has developed the new, ultimate conventional weapon, and there is even an authentic photo to prove it.

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 12:52:12 PM. Permalink |

A few gay-marriage links

Billy Kelly points out that Chicago's Mayor Daley is trying to find a way for the city to issue marriage licenses to homosexuals.

Joe Gandelman predicts that President Bush will fight for the marriage amendment to the US Constitution.

Josh Claybourn takes Joe Carter to task over Carter's assertion that homosexual men are not as a group terribly interested in a monogamous relationship. Actually, it was not Carter's assertion, it was that of homosexual activist Kevin Keith's whom Joe quoted. Joe responds to Josh here, citing numerous academic studies that support Keith's contention.

Down in Down Under, a brother and sister are challenging an Australian federal law the forbids them marry. They are both adopted of the same parents, but have no blood relationship. (Okay, not a "gay" marriage thing, but interesting anyway.)

Here is a CBS News story from 2000 in the passage in California of Proposition 22, which legally defined marriage in the state as only between a man and a woman (tip to Richard Heddleson).

Nick Schulz explains why most American conservatives are really ambivalent on the gay-marriage issue, and I think he makes good points.

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 11:40:32 AM. Permalink |

Cure found for lung cancer?
Maybe.

Three patients injected with the vaccine, GVAX, had no recurrence of lung cancer for more than three years afterward, according to the study of 43 people with the most common form of the disease, non-small cell lung cancer. ...

The vaccine, developed by researchers at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, is years away from reaching the market, if ever. The researchers hope to apply for Food and Drug Administration approval in three years.

Small-cell lung cancer kills 150,000 people per year. Thirty-three patiernts with advanced cancer were tested and 10 with early stage cancer.

The cancer disappeared in three of the advanced-stage patients. Two of those patients previously had chemotherapy, which failed. In the rest of the advanced-stage patients, the disease remained stable and did not spread for almost five months to more than two years.

For patients in the early stage, the vaccine did not make much difference against the cancer.

One of my parishioners died of lung cancer a couple of years ago. Knowing what he went through, this new development just astonishes me.

by Donald Sensing, 2/20/2004 06:44:32 AM. Permalink |

Academic opium
Here are two read-worthy articles on TechCentralStation that I am posting here mainly to keep up with the links.

Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?

The Opium of the Professors. Hint: it is "hostility to Judeo-Christianity," and he explains why.

by Donald Sensing, 2/19/2004 05:23:14 PM. Permalink |

Homosexuals, marriage, and the M-word
When Andrew Sullivan writes about the M-word, he means, "marriage." But when homosexual activist Kevin Keith writes about it, he means, "monogamy." And he says that most homosexuals don't think too highly of the concept.

Joe Carter (same link as Keith's) says the Mass. Supreme Court failed to consider that "marriage" might literally mean something altogether different for homosexuals than for the rest of Americans. He quotes the court's ruling in Goodridge vs. Dept of Health:

We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others. This reformulation redresses the plaintiffs' constitutional injury and furthers the aim of marriage to promote stable, exclusive relationships. It advances the two legitimate State interests the department has identified: providing a stable setting for child rearing and conserving State resources. It leaves intact the Legislature's broad discretion to regulate marriage. See Commonwealth v. Stowell, 389 Mass. 171, 175 (1983). [emphasis added]

Adds Joe,

Gay rights supporters who think this issue is controversial now should prepare themselves for the PR nightmare that awaits them. Americans may be tolerant of traditional, committed “Ozzie and Ozzie” or “Harriet and Harriet” type relationships. But if the gay marriage agenda turns out to be nothing more than a way to convey social benefits for polyamourous relationships, then you can count on the FMA being our next amendment to the Constitution.

I'm not sure that I agree with Joe's conclusion. More pondering is in order.

by Donald Sensing, 2/19/2004 05:18:37 PM. Permalink |

Halving the poverty rate
Mark hasty has a simple plan called "Alternate Side Poverty," an "idea whose time has come."

by Donald Sensing, 2/19/2004 05:07:40 PM. Permalink |

The gay marriage manifesto?
This piece by Salt Lake Tribune columnist Holly Mullin isn't it, but its promotion of gay marriage mentions the themes that its advocates will use strenuously in coming months.

We have a blazing civil rights movement here, friends, the first of this budding century. It is strikingly similar to the fight for equality waged by blacks from Reconstruction, through an era of Jim Crow laws and straight on to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It mirrors the efforts by suffragists, who rallied for women's right to vote at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention but did not gain the franchise for another 72 years, with ratification of the 19th Amendment....

It will happen again. It will happen because recognizing gays and lesbians as full human beings, with a right to equal protection under the Constitution, is just and fair and decent. When a whole class of people is systematically denied the perks of marriage -- inheritance rights and Social Security and military survivors benefits to name a few -- simply because the majority finds its lifestyle abhorrent or something to fear, it's high time for a makeover.

Makeovers are what this society does. This is a country strong enough to absorb change and to promote justice. If not, blacks would still be picking cotton. Wives would still be their husbands' property.

Hat tip: Jeff Jarvis. Countering this kind of argument is going to be difficult for traditionalists.

by Donald Sensing, 2/19/2004 05:04:16 PM. Permalink |

James Webb and linear oldthink
James Webb is a former Secretary of the Navy and a US Marine combat officer in Vietnam, from which he wrote a bestselling book, Fields of Fire as well as some other books.

Webb had some harsh words to say in USA Today about John Kerry on the one hand and the Iraq war on the other. About Kerry:

To be sure, Kerry deserves condemnation for his activities as the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In the early 1970s, this small organization - never more than 7,000 veterans out of a potential pool of 9 million - became the darling of the anti-war movement and the liberal media. Its activities went far beyond simply criticizing the politics of the war to repeatedly and dishonestly misrepresenting the service of Vietnam veterans and the positive feelings most felt after serving.

And more along those lines. He also blasts Kerry pretty hard for his actions regarding Vietnam - the country, not the war - as a member of the Congress.

However, Webb gives no free pass to President Bush. Criticizing the president is a fair play; if you've been reading my blog a few months you know I've ripped Bush pretty hard myself for some issues.

But Webb would have been better served to keep in mind the old adage, "You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts." Webb's attacks on Bush's Guard service show carless reporting and a disdain for the facts. For example:

Recent statements defending Bush claim that the National Guard was not a haven for those who wished to avoid Vietnam; but it clearly was. According to the National Guard Association, only some 9,000 Army Guardsmen and 9,343 Air Guardsmen served in Vietnam. Considering that nearly 3 million from the active forces did so, one begins to understand why so many of America's elites headed for the Guard when their draft numbers were called.

The question is not whether whole legions of men were ducking Vietnam service by serving in the Guard. The question is whether Bush did. And the answer is no.

Fact 1: When Bush volunteered to join his Air Guard unit as a fighter pilot, a substantial number of its pilots were flying combat missions in Vietnam under the "Palace Alert" program. Bush himself volunteered for the program. Which is to say, Webb's scurrilous accusations to the contrary, that Bush (a) joined a unit that was sending pilots to fly combat is SE Asia and (b) Bush himself sought service in the combat theater. By the time Bush was combat-certified in the F-102 fighter, that aircraft had been withdrawn from Vietnam service and was devoted to North American air defense. The F-102 was an interceptor, not a ground-attack or air superiority fighter. Webb should have understood these facts.

Webb repeats other disproven accusations about Bush's service (note, not merely "denied" accusations, disproven accusations) that I won't go into here. Read his piece if you're interested, then see Bill Hobbs' comprehensive index of articles that tell the whole story.

It's Webb's blast against Bush over Iraq that I find baffling because it betrays a superficiality of strategic thinking about the Iraq war that is surprising from someone with his credentials:

Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory [by invading Iraq - DS]. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence.

There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves.

This broadside (there is more, too) is so blindingly wrongheaded that I hardly know where to begin. But let's start with the fact that Webb either didn't remember or didn't care about: the war with Iraq did not start last March. As 2003 dawned the United States was already at war with Iraq. And 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, 1994, 1993, 1992 and for 11.5 months of 1991. The US Air Force and US Navy had been flying constant combat patrols over northern and southern Iraq since the end of the Gulf War in spring 1991. A large American military presence had remained in both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia since the end of that war as well. Recall also that in 1998 Bill Clinton ordered a massive bombing campaign against Iraq and said boldly that no Congressional authorization was needed because the Gulf War resolutions of 1991, authorizing military action against Iraq, were still in effect. Other bombing missions were conducted during years before and after.

The Iraq question Bush inherited from Clinton (and Clinton from Bush the elder) was not whether to make war against Iraq; it was how to end the war already in progress. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made the question all the more urgent.

Hence, Webb's diatribe betrays a linear oldthink that is a prescription for American defeat at worst and prolonged indecision at best. If the United States fails to act decisively against the root cause of Arab-Islamic terrorism now, my grandchildren will still be fighting this struggle. The global war on terror is not a statist war as America has always known before; it is a clash of deep differences between two worlds, one the scientific-materialist, technological, dynamic West that emphasizes self determination within capitalist economies, the other the almost-universally oppressive-authoritarian, static, religiously oriented, technologically and scientifically marginalized Arab-Islamic East.

The terrorist war against America is not a political war. In June 2003, Alan B. Krueger, professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University, and Jitka Maleckov?, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Charles University in Prague, published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called, "Seeking the Roots of Terrorism." They concluded, "... we suggest that it [terrorism] is more accurately viewed as a response to [the terrorists' own] political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances. We suspect that is why international terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by people who grew up under repressive political regimes."

And, it needs to be said, people who grew up under oppressive religious regimes as well.

Andrew Olmsted observed,

... my own experiences with Muslims in college led me to realize the real problem a long time ago: until and unless we can find some way of changing Islamic society, the war is only going to go on and get worse. We're talking about over a billion people, the majority of whom are teaching their children the same tired rants about how Jews run the world and are trying to keep them down. This is the true enemy we face. But how do you solve a problem like this?

This is the key question, and seems to be what Webb never asked. Webb approaches the whole issue from a traditional, legalistic frame. But that is a frame that is unsuitable in large (not whole) for the GWOT because its origins were from mature states that alone had either the authority or the means to wage war. Its lingua franca - its entire terms of reasoning - rested on casus belli cases that were held to judicial standards because the whole theory of just war presumes nearly identical legal systems and political theory among contesting powers.

Essentially, the casus belli is the legal case for the war. In Western history and international jurisprudence, a nation may justly claim the right to wage war for only a very few reasons, such as response to aggressive war being waged against it (that is, in response to an actual attack), the defense of other states that have suffered such an attack or, more recently, for enforcement of humanitarian objectives (1992-1993 in Somalia or NATO's campaign in the former Yugoslavia, in example).

I spelled out in general terms the casus belli for the Iraq war in my February 2003 essay, Just cause exists for action against Iraq, published by the United Methodist News Service.

But our terrorist enemies are not states per se, though they are state supported, nor do Islamic legal systems and political theory concord very closely to Western models. That fact forced us to address not merely how to attack actual terrorist organizations that are waging (illegal) war against us, but how to kill the roots of Arab terrorism that have been growing certainly since the early 1900s, from seeds sown centuries earlier. (I published a long paper on that topic here.)

Thus, there had to be drawn a distinction between the legal causes of the Iraq war and the underlying rationale of the war. They are related, but not the same. Put another way, the war's short-term objective and its long-term objective are linear, but not equal. The long-term objective is a natural, though difficult consequence of the short-term objective and in fact is a key, fundamental reason we went to war against Saddam's Iraq.

And for my explanation of all that, I invite you to read my October 2003 essay, The Big Picture.

How unfortunately coincidental for James Webb that his sputtering diatribe appears the same day as a summary by Thomas Friedman of leading Arabs' voices hailing America's liberation of Iraq. Says Friedman,

What the critics miss, though, is that the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein has also triggered the first real "conversation" about political reform in the Arab world in a long, long time. It's still mostly in private, but more is now erupting in public. For this conversation to be translated into broad political change requires a decent political outcome in Iraq. But even without that, something is stirring.

The other day the always thoughtful Osama al-Ghazali Harb, a top figure at Egypt's semiofficial Al Ahram center for strategic studies, the most important think tank in Egypt, published an article in the country's leading political quarterly, Al Siyassa Al Dawliya, in which he chastised those Arab commentators who argue that the way in which the U.S. captured Saddam was meant to humiliate Arabs. ...

Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, the former dean of Qatar University's law school, just published an essay, in London's widely read Arabic-language daily Al Sharq Al Awsat, which asks whether the world is better off because of the U.S. ouster of Saddam. Those who say it is worse off, he argues, see only half the picture.

"Let us imagine the world if America had listened to the French and German logic saying: Give the murderers of the Serbs and the Arabs a chance for a diplomatic solution. Would Bosnia, Kuwait and Iraq be liberated? Let us describe the situation of the Arabs, and especially of Iraq, had America listened to the European counsel that said: democracy is not suited to the Arabs, their culture is contrary to it. . . . See now how many countries are turning toward democracy. Even Afghanistan has a constitution. In Iraq [they are drafting] a new constitution and handing over the regime, and Libya has changed."

Far from being a distraction or diversion from the war on terrorism, as Bush's critics charge, the liberation of Iraq is utterly central to it. There is a long way to go, and almost certainly and sadly, much blood yet to flow, but had Operation Iraqi Freedom not taken place, I am convinced that America would be losing the war against terrorism.

(Hat tip: James Joyner, who also thinks Webb's piece is "bizarre.")

by Donald Sensing, 2/19/2004 04:52:50 PM. Permalink |

Ain't. Gonna. Happen.
In his valedictory out of the race today, Howard Dean said,

Today my candidacy may come to an end--but our campaign for change is not over ... .

In the coming weeks, we will launching a new initiative to continue the campaign you helped begin. Please continue to come to www.deanforamerica.com for updates and news as our new initiative develops ... .

The fight that we began can and must continue.

Dean is dreaming. The Howard Dean "movement" is almost gone now; in the last few days he drew only a few dozen, not hundreds, of people to his appearances. There will be no campaign for a cause without a candidate to lead it. Kiss your supporters goodbye, Howard, and your grandiose dreams of "taking America back," because in politics there is nothing so disposable as a defeated (in your case, crushed) candidate. As Jeff Jarvis said, "Howard Dean will be a trivia question in no time." Quite so.

Update: Now we know Dean's plan to keep the campaign going. After attending to a brief legal matter, he now leads Bush 49-43!

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 06:54:43 PM. Permalink |

The clarity of campaign differences . . .
. . . is as clear as I think it can be for the coming November election. Steven Den Beste tells all about it.

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 06:42:07 PM. Permalink |

First, we kill all the Romans
Jewish leaders and Vatican officials locked horns this week over Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ."

A Jewish leader met with Vatican officials this week to ask them to publicly restate church teachings on Jesus' crucifixion, saying Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" contradicts the Vatican's repudiation of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus.

A top Vatican official who met with Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that no such statement was planned. U.S. Archbishop John P. Foley, who heads the Vatican's social-communications office, again praised the film and said he found nothing anti-Semitic in it.

Foxman's visit to the Vatican came as debate over Gibson's depiction of the violent final hours of Christ's life intensified ahead of the film's planned U.S. release Feb. 25. Jewish groups have said the film could fuel anti-Semitism; the Vatican has called it a recounting of the "historical fact of the passion of Jesus Christ according to the Gospel accounts."

Foley attempted to rebut the charge by pointing out, "Certainly there are some Jews who call for punishment for Jesus," but adding that the Romans were also depicted harshly.

I haven't seen the film, so I have no stand on whether it crosses a line, Catholic, Jewish or otherwise, into some level of anti-Jewishness. But Foley's deflection that the movie is harsh to the Romans is just irrelevant baloney. The Romans are no more and it doesn't matter how anti-Roman a movie is. There are no Romans around these days to persecute.

Remember 2000's Oscar winner for Best Picture, Gladiator? That was an anti-Roman movie if there ever was one. What, you didn't think of it that way until now?

See why "depicts the Romans harshly" doesn't matter for The Passion, even if it really does?

Update: Speaking of anti-Judaism, Best of the Web Today reports a tidbit about Reuters news service. Reuters, you may recall, became infamous in certain circles by directing its writers not to use the word, "terrorist" to refer to terrorists.

But Reuters called the Anti-Defamation League, "an independent Jewish pressure group." As BOTWT points out, "pressure group" is technically acceptable, but it

... is a somewhat pejorative term, and Reuters is anything but evenhanded in its application. In another dispatch, the "news" service describes the Council on American Islamic Relations as "an Islamic civil rights and advocacy group."

Bias? We ain't got no stinkin' bias!

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 05:49:37 PM. Permalink |

Man, am I bummed!
I don't even rate having a space named after me on Blogopoly!

This is a very creative and well done project, check it out! ht: Dean's World.

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 05:28:16 PM. Permalink |

If gays can marry each other, next thing you'll know someone will want to marry a dead person
I earlier linked to the news story of a Colorado county clerk who issued marriage licenses to homosexuals back in the 1970s, and next thing you know, a man requested a license to marry his horse.

Well, he should have gone to France:

A 35-year-old Frenchwoman became both bride and widow when she married her dead boyfriend, in an exchange of vows that required authorisation from the French President.

The ceremony was performed at Nice City Hall on the French Riviera.

The deceased groom, a former policeman identified as Eric, was not present at the ceremony. He was killed by a drunk driver in September 2002.

Christelle Demichel told LCI television she was fully aware that "it could seem shocking to marry someone who is dead", but said that her fiance's absence from her life had not dimmed her feelings for him.

According to French law, a marriage between a living person and a dead person can take place as long as preliminary civic formalities have been completed that show the couple had planned to marry. Before the ceremony can take place, it must be approved by the French President.

Now, there's a fun honeymoon!

<humor>I can just imagine their fifth anniversary:

SHE: You never pay any attention to me!

HE: [silence]

SHE: See! That's what I mean! You just ignore me!

HE: [silence]

SHE: Oh! I don't know why I put up with you!

HE: [silence]

But take heart, Christelle, he'll never run around on you! 'Course, he'll never run around, period! </humor>

Now here's an interesting question. France is mostly Catholic by far. Catholic theology has historically held that marriage vows are not finalized until they are sexually consummated. Indeed, lack of sexual consummation has always been grounds for annulment of the marriage because the act of marrying is incomplete absent consummation.

An annulment is not a divorce. It simply sets the vows aside as if they had never occurred. In the eyes of the church, an annulled marriage never took place. In France, when the church annulled a marriage the state also considered the marriage never to have occurred, at least in the early stages or when no children have issued from the marriage. (The church has annulled marriages many years after they occurred - say, for US Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, and has annulled marriages that issued children.)

In the United States, civil courts can annul marriages without recourse to religious authorities, but it's a hard sell if a fair time has passed since the wedding. A typical cause for civil annulment is incapacity of one or both of the couple, or at least the claim of incapacity, for example, one of them was inebriated during the vows.

Obviously, Christelle and her already-dead "husband" are never going to consummate the vows (no, don't even think of going there!). So is her next step to ask the church to annul the marriage? Of course, the "marriage" is only symbolic to begin with.

But I cannot believe that this ceremony is approved by the church, so it may well be that the church doesn't even enter into this picture, even for annulment. I am pretty sure the church doesn't annul marriages that take place outside its purview, and this one surely did.

This whole thing is just whacko. The French, ya gotta love 'em.

Well, no, actually, you don't. . . . (hat tip: Scott Harris)

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 04:44:54 PM. Permalink |

Caption contest

Sometimes you remember something just a little too late.

Write your own caption as a comment.

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 02:47:26 PM. Permalink |

Consistency
About the upcoming Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ, Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said (quoted in a flyer mailed to my church), "It is consistent with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John."

Except that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not wholly consistent with one another. One example: True or False - according to the Gospels, the Last Supper was the Passover meal.

Well?

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 10:02:19 AM. Permalink |

Presidents and their military service
Al Hurd has a concise summary and concludes that having served in the military had no significant relationship to how well a president performed as commander in chief.

Quite so. Take Sen. Kerry and President Bush, for example (imagine). The former was a riverboat sailor of junior rank, the latter a fighter pilot of junior rank. The training and skill sets for either job have nothing to do with what is required for the presidency. Neither, to be fair, does my training as an artillery officer.

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 08:18:43 AM. Permalink |

A little hearing problem
After his death, Osama bin Laden tried to enter heaven, but he was greeted at the gate by George Washington, who pummeled him across the face and yelled at him, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped conceive!"

Patrick Henry approached and punched Osama in the nose and shouted,"You wanted to end our liberties but you failed."

James Madison entered, kicked Osama in the groin and said,"This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!"

Thomas Jefferson came in and proceeded to beat Osama many times with a long cane and said, "It was evil men like you that provided me the inspiration to pen the Declaration of Independence!".

These beatings and thrashings continued as John Rudolph, James Monroe and 66 other early Americans came in and unleashed their anger on the Muslim terrorist leader.

As Osama lay bleeding and writhing in unbearable pain an Angel appeared. Bin Laden wept in pain and said to the Angel, "This is not what you promised me."

The Angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you in heaven. What did you think I said?"

by Donald Sensing, 2/18/2004 07:26:28 AM. Permalink |

Arafat is a Jew
No, I am not making this up. It is the latest Syrian claim (to be fair, a published claim by a Syrian person, not the Syrian government). But the writer is a "top member of the PLO."

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 10:02:30 PM. Permalink |

An alternative to the FMA
Dave Gudeman says that the Federal Marriage Amendment should be ditched, but has an idea for another amendment.

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 09:56:34 PM. Permalink |

Why do they call them "dark horse candidates"?
Well, read T.L. Hines' interviews with these presidential candidates (who really are on some ballots) that you never heard of and you might see why. "Whacko" is far too reserved a word for Donald Sauter, for example:

"Every presidential action will be dictated by majority will. ...

I imagine telephones would do a fine job. Also the internet. If we trust the internet to send money, we can surely trust it to send a vote. If the majority wants inefficient, old-fashioned methods of voting, we could stick with that. ...

As the Washington Post wrote in 1996, "Sauter would open a 1-900 line for voting on decisions. The toll call, he said, would make the voting system pay for itself and discourage frivolous callers."

Yee-hah!

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 09:47:10 PM. Permalink |

Slashing their own leg
In the race to get away from the lion (the US), Brian Dunn thinks that the Iranian mullahs just slashed their own leg.

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 09:28:56 PM. Permalink |

John Calvin and civil marriage
Reader William West emails,

I understand that, under John Calvin's Geneva government, marriage was a civil, governmental process, not a religious one (although, as far as Calvin was concerned, there may not have been much difference between church and government). It would be a fruitful inquiry to see if this view was followed in the areas of Europe that became predominantly Reformed after Calvin.

Not so. Calvin was clear in The Geneva Church that a marriage ceremony could be done either on Sundays or weekdays, "provided it be at the beginning of the Service" and should be introduced with hymns.

What Mr. West is thinking of is this instruction of Calvin: "With regard to differences in matrimonial cases, because it is not a spiritual matter but involved with civil affairs, we remit those to their Lordships ... ." Hence, while the Geneva Church uunder Calvin was very much in the wedding business, it stayed out of the adjudication business.

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 09:20:27 PM. Permalink |

If gays can marry one another, what about horses?
Well, it's already been tried. File this under "stranger than fiction."

Same-sex marriage licenses a new thing? Not according to former Boulder, Colorado County clerk and recorder Clela Rorex.
As a newly elected political rookie in 1975, Rorex was approached by a same-sex couple who asked if she would issue a marriage license. After securing a legal opinion from the Boulder County district attorney at the time, who said state law did not preclude issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Rorex issued the license [link].
She's very proud of what she did, "prouder than ever", to be a precursor to what is happening now. But will she continue to be proud when things continue now as they did then?
Soon after [a ruling by the state attorney general that marriage was a union between a man and a woman], Rorex stopped issuing licenses, especially after a man came in trying to get a license for himself and his horse, Dolly. Rorex told him the horse was too young to get married without parental consent.
Not that it was nutty, not that it was immoral, but simply because of the age of the horse.
"I issued licenses because I didn't want to be legislating morality," Rorex said, adding she knew little about homosexuality at the time and did not know many gay people.
I have a feeling she knew little about what she was really doing to society, if it turns out the only reason to preclude a man/horse marriage is a question of age. She got a peek down the slippery slope, and promptly shut her eyes.

My, my. Yep, that's what they hired you for - to make sure no horse got married too young.

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 07:30:44 PM. Permalink |

The "gay marriage" controversy
Traditionalists need to get a clue - we lost this fight 40 years ago

Yesterday I set of a firestorm of commentary relating to my post on separating the legal and the spiritual in the wedding business. Justin Katz, for example, accused me of "killing marriage," others either insinuated or said that I would open the door to legalizing all kinds of relationships, such as father-daughter unions, polygamy, etc.

Everyone needs to calm down and take a deep breath and consider the deeper issues behind the whole controversy. The walls of traditional marriage were breached 40 years ago; what we are witnessing now is the storming of the last bastion.

Marriage is primarily a social institution, not primarily a religious institution. That is, marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken the same basic form in all those cultures. Marriage existed long before Father Abraham, Jesus or any other religious figure. The institution of marriage is literally prehistoric.

The three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) actually recognize this explicitly in their holy writings. The book of Genesis ascribes the foundation of marriage in the very acts of God himself in the creation of the world. Two examples:

"It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him" (Gen. 2:18) and "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Gen. 2:24).

The three great religions base their definition of marriage on these verses and others which echo them in other particular Scriptures. In Christian theological terms, the definition of marriage is part of the natural law of the creation; therefore, the definition may not be changed by human will except in peril to the health of human community.

Psycho-biologists argue that marriage evolved in prehistoric ages because males are fundamentally driven by nature itself to ensure guaranteed paternity of offspring and women to ensure a steady supply of man-acquired resources for the nurture and protection of her children. I wrote about this in some length in June 2002, but here's the crux:

In evolutionary terms, marriage developed as the means by which women could guarantee to a specific man that the children she bore were his. In biological terms, men can sire hundreds of children in their lives, but this biological ability is limited by the fact that no one woman can keep pace. Siring kids by multiple women is the only way men can achieve high levels of reproduction, but women also have an extreme interest in the process, too.

There is no adaptive/survival advantage for women in bearing children by men who are simply trying to sire as many children as possible. During the latter stages of pregnancy, women are disabled to some significant degree - perhaps not for office work, but certainly for food gathering and for protecting or caring for their other children. For a single mother, as our own culture's experience shows, child-raising is a resource-intensive, years-long business. Doing it alone is a marked adaptive disadvantage for single mothers and their children.

So the economics of sex evolved into a win-win deal: women agree to give men exclusive sexual rights and guaranteed paternity in exchange for their sexual loyalty and enduring assistance with child bearing and child raising. For the man, this arrangement lessens the number of potential children he can sire (although it can still be up to a dozen, at least), but it ensures that his kids are, well, his kids, not another man's. (In folk lore and literature, the cuckolded husband is one of the most pathetic figures there is). The only way women could guarantee paternity was to remain chaste until she and a man had agreed to this arrangement. For the woman, the man's promise of sexual loyalty to her meant that he would expend his labor and resources supporting her children, not another woman's.

What weddings did was make legitimate the sexual conduct of a particular male and female under the guidance, nurture and if necessary, sanction, of the greater community. As Scott Harris argued in a series of comments, marriage

... is a biological relationship created solely for the purpose of the survival of the species. ... marriage predates religion and government, and is entirely independent of them. . . .

The significance of marriage is the explicit commitment of the representative of one family to the representative of another family to voluntarily join their families together for the express purpose of the perpetuation of the two families. When a child is born into the marriage, the two families cease to be distinct biological entities. They "become one."

The interest of religion in this relationship is to reinforce and support that commitment and to teach skills and values which sustain the commitment, and pass those values on to new generations. The government's interest is in coercively enforcing the contractual obligations of such a commitment.

Other long-term intimate relationships, e.g. business partnerships do not qualify for the benefits and protections of marriage because they do not ... provide children.

What has always been at stake in the institution of marriage is the coming into being of the next generation, and that is surely a matter of much greater than merely private concern. Yet the government can merely encourage, not guarantee, that men and women will bring forth their replacements. Marriage as conventionally defined is still the ordinary practice in Europe, yet the birth rate in most of Europe is now less than the replacement rate, which will have all sorts of dire consequences for its future in many ways.

Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill about 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex-pregnancy-marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward pre-marital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the last four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that men's sexual and emotional commitment to them isn't reliably gained by giving men sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43 percent since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the dominant way men and women begin their relationships, not courtship and marriage. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

It is this fact, and its widespread social acceptance, that is actually impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but in fact the dominant lifestyle in the under 30 demographic within the last few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities - that is, have sex without sex's results - the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt. When society decided - and we have decided, this fight is over - that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular males and females, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has been thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce and the removal of social sanction for divorce, and talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty specious. There's practically nothing there left to save. Men and women today wo have successful, enduring marriages 'til death does them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.

If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

Now, before your reach for pixelated brickbats, let me point out that I do believe that this state of affairs is indeed contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that gay marriage, if it ever comes about (and it will) will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye" (Matt 7:3-5).

There were two other lethal arrows into the heart of traditional marriage that I'll recognize here. One was socio-commercial feminism, which encouraged women on the one hand to postpone or pass up marriage and childbearing in order to have careers outside the home, and on the other hand to be as sexually active as they imagined men to be.

The other was the rise to pre-eminence in academia of post-liberal Christian theology and Bible scholarship, which has intentionally sought to free society from the Bible rather than help lead it to follow it. Massive numbers of papers and books have been written since the mid-twentieth century attempting to show that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are patriarchal, oppressive documents that tell less the story of humanity's struggle with its relationship with the divine, than they are the record of proto-Marxist class and gender struggles of power, exploitation and domination. So today, anyone who expects an orthodox biblical argument to be taken seriously is living in dreamland. Couple these philosophies with the Pill, and traditional marriage in its holistic social context didn't have a chance of survival.

Update: Next post: Next steps for traditionalists

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 12:55:11 PM. Permalink |

~~Please hold email for now~~ Back up now
For some reason my enmail address won't validate at logon and download. Tech stuff is correct, so I suspect that since it gets hung up on the same spam message every time, there is some sort of malicious code that is throwing the system. So for the nonce, I won't be able to see email you send me.

Update: Back online now.

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 08:09:34 AM. Permalink |

Separate the legal and the spiritual in the wedding business
Let the state do the former and the Church the latter;
my solution to the "gay marriage" impasse

Note: I have written a lot more on this topic since this first posting. Here is the index.

I have been in the wedding business now for almost eight years. I haven't counted the number of couples I have joined in holy matrimony, I'd guess 24-30.

As presently done, church weddings have two components, the legal and the spiritual. Any clergy officiant who performs weddings must do the legal part. The religious part is optional, even for pastors. I have known a few ordained ministers who would perform either a full-up religious ceremony or a bare-bones civil-style ceremony bereft of religiosity. Some civil officials who perform matrimonial services use religious language, others are brief to the point of rudeness. There was a Nashville judge famous for his terse style who beheld a couple come before his bench about 25 years ago. The entire proceedings went like this:

Judge: What do you want?

Groom: We want to get married and we're in a hurry [hands judge license and certificate].

Judge: [Signs license and certificate] Okay, you're married. Next!

As far as the state is concerned, a wedding is a legal meeting in which a contract is made and property rights are allocated according to law or other legal agreement. That is really the state's only interest.

What the filing of a signed wedding certificate and marriage license does (requirements vary ftrom state to state) is abbreviate what would otherwise be a long, drawn-out affair. Think home-sale closing and you get an idea of what a wedding would be like if it weren't for the fact that law and custom simply assign to spouses rights that would otherwise require lengthy, lawyerly documentation, and would probably require it for nearly every significant change in the couple's material status and the birth of children.

Yet for the Church, property rights and contracts are of fleeting concern, if any concern at all, except as they affect for good or ill the spiritual health and religious character of the married couple.

So why should I periodically act as an agent of the state in performing weddings? I can';t think of any reason.

I would rather see the state and the Church face the truth about what they are both doing in the matrimony business the way it is presently done: each meddling in the other's affairs and (witness Massachusetts and San Francisco) managing to make a mess of it.

If I had my way, I would never perform another wedding as weddings are presently done. There is a much more appropriate role for clergy, IMO, than joining couples in legal contracts called weddings. I am thinking of this topic because not long ago, James Joyner, surveying the issue of gay marriage controversies, suggested a radical solution:

... simply do away with marriage as a governmental institution, period. Let churches marry people as they see fit—with only religious value attached to the ceremony. We could then have civil unions that the states could regulate.

I posted a comment taking quite the opposite position. Instead of getting the state out of then wedding business, I would rather see the church get out of the wedding business.

This is heresy, of course, not in the sense of violating theological-doctrinal standards, but in the sense of crossing a deeply-embedded, socio-religious more. There still remains in American society a strong sense that you are "supposed" to get married in a church by a cleric, even among couples who never otherwise darken a church's door. A lot of times an engaged couple with no active religious life seek a church wedding just to make mom and dad happy, and/or because they want a traditional photo album of wedding pictures.

That, however, does not bother me. It used to, but I adopted my own personal wedding policy a few years ago: I do not marry couples not under my pastoral care. I am not a wedding mercenary. I am more than willing to talk to total strangers about officiating at their wedding, but they must become part of my flock until the wedding occurs. After that, they can do what they want. In the meantime, I give them Christian witness and pastoral care. I have found that most couples I marry under these conditions have stayed in my church after the wedding, some as members, some as participants.

If these terms are not acceptable to the couple, I offer them my prayer and best wishes. There is a very nice commercial wedding chapel five miles away and I know several county office-holders who can join them, or they can keep on shopping for another pastor and venue.

But I digress.

In Protestantism, marriage is not a sacrament as it is in the Catholic churches (for definition of "sacrament," see the endnote to this post). In the Greek Orthodox Church,

Since Marriage is not viewed as a legal contract, there are no vows in the Sacrament. According to Orthodox teachings, Marriage is not simply a social institution, it is an eternal vocation of the kingdom.

However, in the Roman Catholic Church and the Western wedding tradition generally, vows are exchanged and promises made. These vows are essentially legalistic in nature - in fact, contractual - and date mostly from the time of European feudalism. Feudalism was a pre-capitalist social system based on contractual obligations between classes regarding goods and services; this contractualism pervaded every aspect of society. One of the chief interests in weddings - done only between peer families, of course - was the matter of inheritance and property rights. Hence, weddings vows included, and still include, legal language such as "to have and to hold from this day forward" and declarations of freely entering into the vows.

However, weddings were not performed in churches until about 500 years ago. Martin Luther, for example, was not married in a church. While marriages were seen as falling under religious dominion, the wedding ceremony was a civil affair. (Note that the Catholic churches hold marriage, not weddings, to be sacramental.)

The contractual nature of weddings continues to this day, exemplified by prenuptial agreements and especially in divorce proceedings, in which the division of property is of foremost concern. The wedding litanies used by most denominations today have a lot of God talk but remain basically legalistic, not religious.

As the officiant of a wedding, I act as an agent of the state, signing two legal documents certifying the wedding took place and attesting to my legal authority to conduct it. I have no problem with that, but it tends to bifurcate my role. I have come to think a more appropriate role for me would be to conduct a purely religious blessing ceremony some time after the wedding is done.

So, my rough solution to the present controversy on both coasts has two parts:

1. Have states issue only "Civil Interpersonal Contract" registrations that may be used by any two adults of legal age. CICs (remember, I'm retired Army and I love acronyms) would accomplish the same thing as marriage licences do now regarding property rights from local to federal level, and other matters relegated now exclusively to spouses, such as the right to make certain medical decisions for the other in emergencies, etc. What they would not do is continue to involve the secular state in deciding what marriage is - apart from the legal aspect, this is a metaphysical question the state has no business even attempting to answer.

2. Certificates of marriage, having no additional legal effect, would be issued by churches, synagogues or mosques, not by the state. Holders of CICs who also wanted to be married - with all the social and religious implications thereof - would find their desire unencumbered by state burdens, and churches would be freed of the pressure to unite couples in matrimony for reasons often having little to do with religious nurture.

From my perspective as a pastor, separating the civil-legal aspects and the religious aspects would have some salutary effects.

It would allow more time for me to work with couples who have a religious interest in their interpersonal relationship without the deadline pressure of the wedding date. Of the gazillion things on the mind of the bride and her family to get the wedding done well and on time, religious reflection and counseling usually rank about last. The couple usually perceives, correctly, that there is time for that after the wedding.

It would permit me and the engaged couple to go forward with less sexual hypocrisy. Well more than half of men and women betting married today are already living together, living as husband and wife in every way except the legal certification. For a large number of the men - and most of the women - the spouse they will take is not the first they have cohabited with. The historical teaching of the Church, of course, is that sexual relations should follow, not precede, the wedding.

My personal policy in this is "don't ask, don't tell." I have not asked couples whether the live together, but when they both report the same mailing address it sort of gives the game away. By far the majority of couples I marry these days are already cohabiting. That means that the contractual nature of the wedding is more prominent than ever; they are certainly not looking for the Church's sanction of their relationship. They really seek legal, not religious, recognition of their troth and all the legal benefits it entails. For them, the signature on the license is far more important than the words of the litany. The ceremony changes essentially nothing about their lives, except often to make the in-laws on both sides more accepting of the state of affairs. Reconciliation is certainly a role for clergy, but frankly, I sometimes feel like I'm being used for essentially selfish concerns on their part.

If a couple wants a marriage, not merely a partnership, then I'd rather it be because they have genuine impulses toward spiritual union with one another and God, under God's grace and the care of the Church, not because it simplifies other parts of their lives.

Homosexual partners who want to share the same legal rights as traditional married couples would be able to do so under this arrangement. It would not entail the state defining them as married, nor require anyone else to recognize them as married. There are denominations that would issue them marriage certificates, though, the Metropolitan Community Church being one (they already do, but the state doesn't recognize them as contractual documents). But Catholics, Baptists and Methodists, et. al. would be able to maintain their orthodoxy of what marriage is and devote their attentions away from the legal-political arena to where it belongs: the care and nurture of souls.

ENDNOTE: One issue that I recognize but don't want to lengthen the post to address is whether parishioners cohabiting with only a CIC would still be held by churches to be "living in sin." Whether yes or no, this is of no concern of the state.

Another issue is that if some churches refuse ever to recognize non-traditional pairings as marriage partners, would this not drive homosexual partners out of the church once they get a CIC? Probably, but I can tell you that no matter how the state decides to define "marriage," churches will continue to define as they want and there is nothing the state can do about it.

A third issue is with the present system, for all its shortcomings, everyone does understand how marriage is defined, even though many people obviously want to change the definition. If states did turn to CICs, then the definitions of marriage might multiply according to the differences bdetween denominational understandings. Or maybe not; I am not sure that within Christian denoms there is very much difference in understanding what marriage is.

Finally, what is a sacrament? In general, a sacrament is a sacred rite instituted or blessed by Christ. Although Jesus never married, and marriage obviously existed before him, he did bless a wedding at Cana (Gospel of John). A sacrament is also an "instituted means of grace," by which if received in faith the believer may reliably receive the grace of God. (Catholic theology of sacrament, however, generally holds that the faith of the receiver does not inhibit the efficacy of the sacrament; hence, an unconscious person may be baptized as efficaciously as any person.) Look, I can't pare it down more than this. Whole books about the nature of sacrament continue to be written and I don't want to write one here.

Update: A point of clarification: I am not suggesting a total separation of the legal/contractual relationship from the spiritual relationship. In fact, I would not certify as married any couple who had not already completed a CIC. The mutuality of property and other rights is necessarily included in marriage. But all the legal mutuality is already accomplished by civil weddings now without regard to a couple's religious identity.

I repeat: all the property and legal rights that are made real by the signature of a marriage license can be obtained in other ways with other legal instruments, though with greater trouble and higher cost. What federal monetary benefits cannot be obtained today except through marriage license or blood kin can be granted through congressional action, and in my opinion, will be granted sooner or later (probably sooner).

People who scream about the "sanctity of marriage" - a religiously loaded term - need to explain how sanctified Americans think marriage is when there far are more than a million divorces per year, an enormous percentage of children are born out of wedlock and, as I already said, the vast majority of men and women who do marry already are living together as de facto husband and wife. The fact is that America destroyed the sanctity of marriage long before homosexuals became politically activist, and it was this destruction that led to gay activism.

Update: I can see I should have posted the next day's post first, and the above post second.

by Donald Sensing, 2/16/2004 05:04:11 PM. Permalink |

The pro-fascist Left
Paul Berman, an old-style leftist, recounts a conversation with another Leftist who insisted that the Iraq war was not an anti-fascist war as Berman said it was (via Dean Esmay).

Berman makes six main points in rebuttal, so elegantly and eloquently put that you really should just click here and read the piece without bothering with my summary. But in case you're pressed for time today, here they are:

The visceral hatred of the Left for G. W. Bush without regard to what Bush is actually doing as opposed to what the Left has decided he stands for.

"... a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don't."

"... any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable."

The Left has "... concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs."

The Left thinks that Israel represents "... a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else."

"... They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don't see it."

As for subsuming American foreign policy and military might under the authority of the UN or other "international structures" to confer "legitimacy:" "... Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately."

There's more. This essay is going into my permanent index of writings by other authors, joining essays of similar themes: "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee," by self-described "anti-materialist liberal Democrat" Ron Rosenbaum; The Ideological War Within the West, by John Fonte and "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing" by Lee Harris.

by Donald Sensing, 2/16/2004 01:53:18 PM. Permalink |

Iraqi cops
These are the men who fought and died - but stood their ground - in yesterday's attacks by insurgents. They are tough guys.

Brig. Gen. Sabri told Geraldo Rivera that the main constraint upon his men in the fighting was that they had only been issued 60 rounds of ammunition per man. Modern combat eats ammo quickly and his men ran out of ammo too soon.

These Iraqi heroes did not flee even when their ammo ran out and 23 of their comrades had been slain. These policemen never felt they were outclassed by the jihadi attackers. They were only outgunned. They declined the offer of troops from nearby American paratroopers. They did not need Americans to bleed for them. They were more than willing to bleed for themselves.

All they asked the Americans to do was send them more ammunition. We did, and these men held their ground.

Freedom is winning. Democracy is prevailing. The terrorists are losing. These men are not going to be defeated, they can only be killed. But they will not lose, for they know what is at stake. At the end of the long fight, they will be the last men standing.

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 09:44:29 PM. Permalink |

The Law is no obstacle anymore
Andrew Olmsted supports changing the law to make homosexuals eligible for the same marriage license that heteros can get. But he strongly opposes how it's being done, worrying (as I do) that America is now becoming A Government of Men, Not of Laws:

Once upon a time, the United States was described as a nation of laws, not of men. But that was a long time ago, and it went by the boards in the 20th century as courts began deciding what was legal based on personal beliefs rather than what was written, and Congress and the President stepped aside and let the courts do as they will. So it shouldn't be too surprising that the government of San Francisco has taken the next logical step. After all, letting same sex couples marry is the right thing to do. Why should such issues as the law get in the way of doing what's right?

Folks, America is one generation at most away from true tyranny.

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 05:52:13 PM. Permalink |

Channeling Homer Simpson
Kyle Haight says that is what it sounded like what Colin Powell and Congressman Sherrod Brown did at a congressional hearing a couple of days ago. As Glenn would say, "Heh!"

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 05:36:08 PM. Permalink |

"You have to love to hit"
When I was in high school, I tried to play football. I did not succeed, principally because I had not grown up playing the game on organized teams as almost every other player had. Compared to them I lacked the developed skills, instinctive knowledge and trained abilities that seemed so easy for them to display.

I remember clearly the week at football camp before school began. Coach Keaton got the team together and told us bluntly, "This is a violent game. To play football you have to endure pain and play through the hurt. To win this game you have to love to hit, and hit harder than the other guy. That's what this game is about."

I hope that the commanders and NCOs who take raw kids from high school and turn them into soldiers, sailors and airmen are as frank and blunt about the military trade as Coach Keaton was about football. By the time basic training is over, every member of the military should have fully internalized the raw and repellant truth about military service:

"War is killing and being killed. You don't have to love it, but you do have to do it."

Sadly, it appears that such is not the case, else Sgt. Mom, US Air Force, would not have had to pen as essay to "Certain Junior Troops" called, "What It Really Is Which You Have Joined."

... I would like to make certain matters transparently plain; to whit---

You have freely chosen to join the military, which offers many generous benefits, training in useful skills, experience, travel, support for your families, camaraderie with your peers, educational advantages, all of which should not blind you to one key aspect. The benefits in the military are great, because the demands are greater.

The core purpose of the military is to kill those designated by properly constituted authorities as our enemies, and to do so neatly, efficiently, without malice, utilizing whatever suitable technology at our disposal, and minimizing the harm done to noncombatants as well as ourselves. If you are not one of those at the pointy end of the spear, then you are supporting those who are: maintaining their equipment, facilitating the necessary logistics, bandaging their wounds, keeping up their pay records and their morale, transporting them and their weapons systems to where these goals may best be accomplished. If this is a problem for you, then you do not belong in the military. I would suggest something like the Peace Corps, instead.

Once enlisted, please realize that your participation in any upcoming war is obligatory. Discovering your inner contentious objector is something that should be done before Basic Training, not after. This is not the Scouts, with grander camping equipment.

3. Please also realize that putting on the uniform of your country makes you a suitable target for those designated as our enemies. ...

(Italics original) As usual with this kind of post, there are some deeply revealing comments made by readers. I might add that there has even been a report of a Marine or two who has somehow made it through boot camp and Marine Combat Training without grasping these elemental facts, but the Marines certainly have less of a problem than the other services. Men who join the Army's combat arms also get informed pretty darn quick what life is all about, but the Army's recruiting pitch remains mostly focused on pay, benefits and education. One retired Marine Gunny put it this way (on the Braden Files, but sorry, lost the permalink):

The choice is made clear. You may join the Army to go to adventure training, or join the Navy to go to Bangkok, or join the Air Force to go to computer school. You join the Marines to go to war.

I'm not sure that the contrast is quite as stark as the gunny makes it, but the point is certainly valid.

But don't worry - when these guys get moved into the Army's basic training units, they'll make sure that every FNG knows the score.

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 05:23:59 PM. Permalink |

Well, I knew Dale Jr. would win the Daytona 500
No, really, I did. Last night my wife and I attended a play that my son was acting in. One of the actresses was a young lady with the last name of Waltrip, daughter of Darrell, who lives in Franklin, Tenn., as we do. I asked Darrell who would win today, and he told me Dale Jr. would. He was right. Too bad I didn't put my life savings on the prediction, huh? (Darrell had been in Daytona all week, flew up to see the play, then flew back down for the race.)

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 04:07:21 PM. Permalink |

The self destruction of Howard Dean
No one I've read has done a better or more perceptive job of explaining why Dean fell so far so fast than Jeff Jarvis, who also dissects with clinical accuracy and dispassion the repellant rhetoric from Al Gore. Truly, his analyses are too well integrated and insightful to cherry pick some excerrpts, so start here and then read this.

BTW, it's not partisan, and candidates on both sides would become wiser by reading it.

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 03:48:02 PM. Permalink |

1980s computer games online
James Joyner is right - this is a cool place to play all your 80s' favorite computer-arcade games, online. PacMan, anyone? My fave is Space Invaders, btw.

Here's another page with a lot of 80s games, via Michael Totten.

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 03:35:20 PM. Permalink |

Welcome to "Bean Central"
What more logical place to advertise on a blog than on the blog of a self-confessed coffee nut, me? Bean Central Coffee Roasters is a Nashville company I am glad to welcome to my blogad space.

Natrually, they will ship fresh-roasted coffee nationwide. So cruise on by!

by Donald Sensing, 2/15/2004 03:33:23 PM. Permalink |

Okay, the Guard records, well, fine
But Joe Gandelman is still waiting for Bush's proctology reports.

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 10:11:15 PM. Permalink |

Massachusetts black ministers announce opposition to homosexual marriage
Via Brutally Honest, we learn that "three major associations of Greater Boston's black clergy" have announced that the issue of homosexual marriage in Massachusetts "is not a civil rights issue" (BoGlo link).

"As black preachers, we are progressive in our social consciousness, and in our political ideology as an oppressed people we will often be against the status quo, but our first call is to hear the voice of God in our Scriptures, and where an issue clearly contradicts our understanding of Scripture, we have to apply that understanding," said the Rev. Gregory G. Groover Sr., pastor of Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston.

The story poits out that the only prominent black clergy supporting homosexual marriage work in white denominations. "But within historically black churches, where most black Protestants worship, there appears to be a near consensus that marriage should be defined as the union of a man and a woman."

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 09:57:39 PM. Permalink |

This really works
There is a graphic link on the left and below to NetZero internet service. I use cable internet at home, but at my church there is only a telephone line. We are out a country road and there is no cable service. No DSL service, either. My connection speed from church has never been greater than 24KBPS - very slow for today's web. (The phone company only promises 9,600 baud through any ISP, including its own.)

NetZero High Speed service, $14.95 per month, says it can increase browsing speed by up to five times with no equipment adjustments. It does this by compressing text and graphics before sending them to your computer.

I signed up for it for my church's service. And I can report that it does indeed work. Formerly, using Earthlink (for more money), I had turned graphics-loading off because page loading was so slow. But with NetZero, I was able to turn graphics loading back on and pages load faster now than they did with them turned off.

So if you are still struggling with slow dialup, I can personally recommend NetZero to you.

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 04:32:41 PM. Permalink |

Angling for secretary of defense
That's what I think Wesley Clark is doing by literally embracing John Kerry today. I expect to see Clark campaigning for Kerry before long, for sure after Kerry is nominated.

The possibility that Clark is shooting for the veep slot must be considered, too, of course. Southerner, ya know, from Arkansas. (I hate to break it to the Yankees, but people of the South don't really consider any state west of the Mississippi to be truly Southern. Tis true that both Arkansas and Texas were Confederate states, but that's not quite the same as being Southern.

Please don't bother emailing me a flame about this; my mailbox is filling up with people wanting me to link to them. Just leave a no-profanity comment.

Update, Feb 14: You heard it here first. Today the New York Times says the same thing about Clark's intentions.

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 04:08:38 PM. Permalink |

Kerry vs. Kerry
BOTWT reports,

Kerry pledged to ... renew bilateral talks with North Korea and "replace unilateral action with collective security of a genuine nature."

Hey, John, renewing "bilateral" talks with North Korea is unilateral on your part, not "collective."

Somebody observed not long ago that the real interesting debates to come in the presidential campaign will not be between Bush and Kerry, but between Kerry-then and Kerry-now. To that we can add Kerry-now versus, uh, Kerry-now. It's a pretty amazing candidate who can contradict himself not merely over a year or two, but within the same breath.

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 04:01:16 PM. Permalink |

What to do to get a link
Rick in Virginia asks what new bloggers should do to be linked to by more established bloggers.

Well, as I wrote last September, bribery has worked for me pretty well in getting inbound links.

Seriously, though . . . Off the top of my head, one thing a lot of new bloggers do is try to get reciprocal links before they have posted much. I've had a large number of bloggers ask me to consider their sites and when I get there, I discover they've been operating less than a week.

I assure you, I well know the frustration of writing day after day after day and gleaning 30 hits per day. Been there. I sure didn't start out ranked 43rd for traffic; it's taken me two years of daily posting to get here.

There is only so much room on the blogroll. I just won't put a link there to a site that doesn't have some proven longevity. (I'll still gladly look at the site, though, and will link to it in a post if there is a post there I think is linkworthy.)

Generally, ISTM that bloggers tend to link to other blogs that reflect similar interests and points of view. I personally like blogs that are serious in nature and attempt to add value to news and events by interpreting them within broader contexts. I am turned off by intellectual laziness and resorting to slogans and platitudes or mistaking sarcasm and sneer for insight and thoughtfulness. Someone who simply repeats conventional wisdom without demonstrating some insights is less successful in gaining my links than self-critical, analytical writers.

I do not use profanity here and am not impressed with its use on your site, either.

But I don't have a checklist for getting my link, either. If I like what I read, I'll link. If I don't, I won't. That's terribly inexact, but there it is.

Emailing me: yes, I at least scan it all. Email from my parishioners or other work-related email always goes to the top of the pile. It may take me a long, long time to read your site if you email me about it. I cannot promise that I will answer your email, either. Sorry.

Finally, fer cryin' out loud, you must write well. If I get a few sentences into a post and can't figure out what you're trying to say, I just stop and close the window. Grammar and syntax matter. I personally have a pet peeve about posts containing incomplete sentences. Drives me up a wall.

But perseverance is key. Keep plugging away. When I stopped writing in order to get lots of links is when I started to get them. In other words, I decided to write to please myself first, and it was then my blog began resonating with others. I have no analysis about that, it''s just what happened. So my final advice is this: if you're not blogging for yourself first of all, you probably will be pretty frustrated in pretty much every aspect of it.

Update: Glenn Reynolds adds,

... sell the post, not the blog. I frequently get emails from people saying "I started a new blog," but when I follow the link the new blog has only one or two posts, one of which is "well, here's my new blog." I'm much more likely to link to a post that has something relevant to what I'm already writing about, or that has something new that I should be writing about.

Indeed, if you have posted something you would like me to read, you and I will both be better served if you email me the post itself instead of just the link. Just copy and paste the post into your email; HTML format works better for this purpose than plain text. Also, please paste the actual link like this: http://www.donaldsensing.com/2004_02_01_archive.html#107670208522395156, rather than embedded in a text fragment.

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 01:54:45 PM. Permalink |

900 Kay
I moved my SiteMeter java to the very bottom of the page (CTL-END takes you straight there) and I see that I am only about 550 hits from the 900,000 mark, which SiteMeter predicts I will reach about two and one-half hours.

The one million mark is within reach! Spread the word - I'd love to pass the 1,000,000 hit mark before March 8! (A date I pick because it is fewer days away than I have typically received 100K hits, though not unrealistically fewer, and because it is my wife's birthday, which is, or course, an irrelevancy in this matter. So?)

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 01:27:21 PM. Permalink |

Alice in Wonderland judges
Checking judicial overreach - judges rule in a "Wonderland" mode, but remember, Wonderland was a tyranny

I don't know how Massachusetts will finally handle the controversy about homosexual marriage there. The state's Supreme Judicial Court ruled last November - by one vote - that denying homosexual couples the right to marry was contrary to the state's constitution.

The November 18 ruling gave the Legislature six months to rewrite the state law to conform to the ruling.

The state Senate then asked the court whether the commonwealth could satisfy its constitutional concerns by granting civil unions to gays and lesbians, but forbidding them from obtaining civil marriage licenses. (link )

To this, the court said no: marriage is what they said and marriage is what they meant. The court's ruling to permit homosexual marriages will go into effect this May regardless of what the legislature does. Even if the legislature passes today an amendment to the constitution prohibiting homosexual marriage, the earliest the amendment could take effects is late 2006.

In my opinion, this ruling is as clear a case of judicial overreach and activism as can be found. The idea is simply ludicrous that the constitution's framers - or the people of Massachusetts of their day - included homosexual union in their idea of what marriage was.

And the court's justices know this; they just don't care. The Left's idea about our states' and nation's constitutions is that they are "living documents." As Justice Antonin Scalia has explained,

The notion that the Constitution is not static, that it changes with time, is actually embedded in language that the court used in an Eighth Amendment decision about cruel and unusual punishment. The Constitution, the judges decided, changes to "comport with evolving standards of decency that reflect a maturing society."

As Scalia quipped, "How come societies only mature -- they never rot?"

Enough evidence exists to argue that this one is rotting, and one of the reasons may be because too many people have decided that the underlying bedrock of our nation can mean whatever the prevailing philosophers -- translation: politicians and judges -- of the day want it to mean.

Scalia insists that the Constitution is an "enduring" document, not a "living" one. When standards of societies do evolve, say to include homosexual unions within the legal definition of "marriage," the place to express the new understanding is in legislative acts, including if necessary amending the constituion, not court rulings.

Treating the various constitutions as living documents rather than directive documents brings our legal system into its own Alice in Wonderland, where power, not justice, is the point:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more or less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master--that's all.'

And that is exactly the real issue facing the legislature and people of Massachusetts today, whether five practically unaccountable judges of the Supreme Judicial Court may treat the constitution - that is the very foundation of law itself - as their own personal playground. The question is, who is to be master?

Scalia again:

Scalia said he understood why judges, and much of the public, would support the "living Constitution" because with such an approach, the Constitution can say anything you want it to. But this nation was not built on the principle that judges, attempting to gauge the will of society, would interpret the Constitution differently as time goes by, he said.

The Constitution, Scalia declared, must remain static, but that does not mean that laws cannot change to reflect changes in society.

The answer for advocates of, for example, abortion rights or the death penalty is to garner enough support from the public and pass laws - not have Supreme Court justices and judges continually revising their views of the Constitution in order to satisfy society, Scalia said.

In the American Constitution, there are more and more effective checks and balances of the Congress and the President against one another than either branch combined has against the judiciary. The president may veto Congressional acts; some presidents have simply ignored Congressional direction - Teddy Roosevelt, for example, who was faced with a Congressional prohibition to send the US Pacific fleet far abroad, and did so anyway.

Congress may override vetoes, has to ratify treaties the president signs, has to confirm an enormous number of federal appointments, including that of all federal judges (and the commissioning and promotion of all military officers), and has the power to impeach the president and remove him from office.

Clearly, the Congress really has all the marbles in the check and balance system. It may impeach federal judges and may limit the appellate authority of the Supreme Court. But only 13 federal judges have been ever been impeached, and only seven of them removed from office. Congress has never limited the appellate authority of the Court. The Congress' other powers over the judiciary, intended by the Founders to be corrective tools as needed, are merely ignored today by the Congress. They include setting judges' salaries and determining the number of judges, including Supreme Court justices, who may serve at one time.

The Founders unambiguously understood that,

"The Judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power" (Federalist 78),

the power of the Congress was to be superior to the judiciary (Federalist 51),

the Congress, not the courts, was to be the safeguard of the rights and freedom of the people (Federalist 49).

What has happened over about the last four decades (Scalia's timeline) is that the belief in a "living" Constitution has politicized the appointment process of judges to a much greater level than ever before. Instead of the national and state legislatures confirming judges on the basis of whether they will conform rulings to the constitution concerned, they are insisting that the judge ensure his reading of the constitution comports with the legislators' own political agenda.

What's in it for the legislators or Senators? By applying political, rather than jurisprudential litmus tests to appointees, the elected legislators get to pass the buck for the political agendas off to unelected judges, using them as shields to hide behind when facing the voters. Knowing that major elements of such agendas would never pass the people's muster, politicizing the appointment process has enabled the legislatures to legislate through the judiciary rather than enactments.

In so doing, the people are shunted aside. The power to make the most major decisions affecting the order of society are taken from their hands by subterfuge. Increasingly, our votes at the ballot have less and less effect on what happens in government - and thus, what happens to us.

Both parties are guilty of this transgression of their duties. As I have written before, both the Republican and Democratic parties have adopted the same, fundamental philosophy of government and their power within it: Americans are a people for government to manage rather than for government to obey.

Neither party will redress this central threat to our liberty because profit near-equally from propagating it. We the people still have the ability to seize our power back, but that ability wanes yearly as the parties cement their place by bribing us with our own money - taxes in, "benefits" out.

We desperately need multiple voices of influence to speak publicly, loud and long about this issue. Then we desperately need both Republicans and Democrats alike to be ruthlessly voted out of office and Constitutionalists to be voted in. The reasons are simple:

[On the] "question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law" ... Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches."

[On the "ultimate arbiter" of the Constitution:] "The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union, assembled by their deputies in convention, at the call of Congress or of two-thirds of the States. Let them decide to which they mean to give an authority claimed by two of their organs. And it has been the peculiar wisdom and felicity of our Constitution, to have provided this peaceable appeal ...

"The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."

"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. ... their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves."

"... our Constitution a complete felo de se [act of suicide] [if] intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scare-crow . . . The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

"My construction of the Constitution is . . . that each department is truly independent of the others and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the Constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially where it is to act ultimately and without appeal."

Who said these things? Thomas Jefferson, that's who.

"The question is which is to be master - that's all."

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 11:38:03 AM. Permalink |

An unusual request
The enormous majority of my readers are Americans, of course, with next being Canadians, then some British folks, then some good people of the Anglosphere down Australia way. I have a few readers in mainland Europe, perhaps fewer still in Africa.

So today I got an email from a Danish artist, Asbjorn Lonvig, who has placed my site on his links page. As I have explained, I do not enter into reciprocal linking agreements. But generally, usually, most of the time, if someone sends me a link to a personal site to look over, I will when I get time and maybe will link to it and maybe won't.

Asbjorn's site has a lot of information about his art, but what really caught my eye was the subsite about his house, which he designed. It strikes me as just the right house for a modern artist, and I'm a sucker for this kind of home design. All we have where I live is neo-Georgian/Williamsburg monotony by the acre after acre.

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 10:13:48 AM. Permalink |

The rancid bile of the rank and file
Treasonous thoughts should be prosecuted

Do you think it is only the top of the Democratic party that is near-apoplectic in its irrational hatred for President Bush and all things associated with him? Think again. Here's a letter to the editor of this morning's Tennessean:

How many gallons of Republican Kool-Aid does a Bush supporter have to choke down in order to keep defending the worst president in American history?

Just as Alabamans happily say ''Thank God for Mississippi'' when annual ''quality of life'' rankings come out, I suspect Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Pierce are saying, ''Thank God for G. W. Bush'' somewhere in the afterlife.

Anyone who even thinks about voting for this man in November should be prosecuted for treason.

David Berman
Nashville

Get that? If the merest flicker of a thought crosses your mind that voting for Bush might be better than voting for any other candidate, you're a traitor and should go to prison!

I explained awhile back that I have some serious misgivings about many of the policies of this president and that I do not actually endorse his reelection. But the accusation that even considering voting for him is treason shows how depraved - and I do mean depraved - a significant number of hsi opponents have become.

One of my liberal fellow pastors told me, unsolicited, this week that he is repulsed by the vitriol coming from the Democrats, and said that rage is all they seem to offer. This gentleman, whom I know well and respect greatly, is certainly no member of the VRWC.

Yeah, Berman, you're right to attack me and others that way. I am a traitor because I want to exercise my right to vote for the candidate of my choice without first vetting my vote with you. How could I be more treasonous than that?

Meanwhile, a certain leading Democratic candidate, who by the way served in Vietnam, came back from the war and joined the leadership of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which, according to North Vietnam's military chief of staff during the war, materially assisted North Vietnam in staying in the fight,

In his 1985 memoir about the war, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap wrote that if it weren't for organizations like Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Hanoi would have surrendered to the U.S. - according to Fox News Channel war historian Oliver North.

But thinking about voting for Bush - that's treason.

by Donald Sensing, 2/13/2004 08:31:28 AM. Permalink |

Explain this to the insurance company
I've been gone all day and evening until a half-hour ago, so this will be my only post until Friday.

What on earth could have done this kind of damage to the plane? Not a trick question; I really don't know the answer. (Just had a thought - was the plane struck by the turning propellor of another plane?)

by Donald Sensing, 2/12/2004 10:08:27 PM. Permalink |

Super Bowl Decadence and the Challenge of Culture
That's the title of the first essay in a series by Dr. Mark Roberts. It's one of the entries in this week's Christian Carnival.

But I'm also remembering the experiences of a friend of mine who makes his living as a television writer. This friend, whom I'll call "Jeff," has repeatedly found himself in dialogue with other writers who included humorous filth in scripts for prime time television comedies. When Jeff says, "Wait, you can't say that in a family show" his colleagues don't argue their right to freedom of speech. Rather, they're confused. They have no idea why Jeff finds their humor offensive. When he tries to explain that parents don't want their children exposed to such nastiness, the other writers simply don't get it. ...

So here's my thesis in a nutshell. Most of the people who shape our culture, especially those who produce television shows, movies, Broadyway plays, rock music, and MTV videos, live in a moral universe that's far different from the moral universe of Christianity. Their perceptions of right and wrong differ vastly from the perceptions held by most Christians. This isn't a gripe. It's simply a fact.

I'll wager that their perceptions differ vastly from more Americans than Christian ones, too.

by Donald Sensing, 2/12/2004 04:15:44 PM. Permalink |

Separated at birth?

. .

Iraqi official Ahmed Kadim............................Radio talkshow host G. Gordon Liddy

by Donald Sensing, 2/12/2004 07:23:16 AM. Permalink |

Janet Jackson's costume maker furious at slur
You can't make this stuff up.

Furious staffers at the freaky Manhattan fetish shop that sold Jackson the bustier she wore at the Super Bowl say she altered it to make a tearaway bra cup — giving folks the impression that their clothing for the kinky crowd is badly made.

"There's no way it would have ripped that way," fumed Sam Hill, the female manager of DeMask.

By now, the tort lawyers a flocking to explain their services to Mr. Hill, no doubt.

by Donald Sensing, 2/12/2004 06:52:34 AM. Permalink |

Another bomb day in Iraq
Are al Qaeda's bloody tactics already failing?

Another al Qaeda bomber struck today in Baghdad, killing 47 Iraqis, the days after one struck in Iskandariyah where more than 50 died.

The target was a line of men waiting to apply for positions in the Iraqi security forces. A wounded man whose legs were almost blown off said from his hospital bed that "God willing" he would return to security duty when healthy again. The WashTimes reports,

Another of the wounded, Abbas Hussein, 39, an army veteran looking to re-enlist, said the would-be volunteers in line "were all happy and excited."

"I wanted to rejoin because I love my country, the great Iraq," he said. "I wanted to protect the people."

The attack occurred when,

an Oldsmobile packed with 300 to 500 pounds of explosives drove up to a crowd of Iraqis waiting outside an army recruitment center - only a few blocks from the heavily fortified Green Zone, headquarters of the U.S. administration.

The driver detonated the explosives, killing 47 people and wounding 55, the U.S.-led coalition said. The Iraqi Interior Ministry put the toll at 46 dead.

As I explained yesterday, al Qaeda's new tactic is to focus on intensifying attacks against the Iraqi police and army while also attempting to set off sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims that it will propagandize as America's fault.

Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, said he saw a connection between al-Zarqawi - and his memo - and the recent bombings.

"Iskandariyah is right on the line between Sunni and Shiite, so the attack there might be trying to foment some kind of civil war," said Swannack, whose division is based in the town.

But not all analysts are convinced that al Qaeda is behind the attacks. An stateside American official said the attacks were probably done by supporters of the former Baathist regime. "A prominent Sunni Muslim cleric, Hareth al-Darri," said the attacks were the work of nationalist Iraqis.

I said in yesterday's post that al Qaeda is growing desperate. It hopes that such terror attacks will simultaneously do two things: set the Iraqi people in general against the Americans and set the Shias and Sunnis against each other. Much more likely, these tactics will drive Iraqis of all persuasions closer together as they realize that the real foreign aggressors are the al Qaeda jihadis, not the Americans.

Terror attacks do not fill the victim population with despair. Hitler tried terror bombing against Britain in 1940, the allies carpet bombed German cities, and the Americans set entire Japanese cities ablaze. But in no case was the civilian population driven to abandon supporting the war effort.

Al Qaeda's propaganda that these attacks and attempts at Iraqi instability are propagated by the Americans will not find many roots among the Iraqis. Every action by American forces gives lie to the claim. I expect that these attacks will intensify but will fail, and more quickly than we now imagine. Designed to abort Iraqi democracy before its birth, what they may well do instead is draw the Iraqis into greater unity than before.

Update: Iraqi blogger Ali at Iraq the Model reflects on today's bombing and says the Iraqis are already dismissive of al Qaeda, though quite aware of the threats:

... when I went down to the streets and despite almost everyone knew about these attacks at least hours ago, the traffic was busy as usual, the traffic police, the IP and the new Iraq army soldiers were all in their places doing their jobs as if nothing has happened, and the reason that I don't believe this is attributed to apathy is that when the same terrorists made a threatening announcement through Al-Jazeera about 2 months ago, asking the Iraqis to go on strike for 3 days and warning those who disobey that they will face horrible consequences, the next day the streets in Baghdad were nearly empty. This is not the case anymore, and it made me surer than ever that we are winning and they will lose because they can’t kill us all nor can they force us to quit our jobs and take a safe corner in our homes. ...

I’ve always told my friends soon after the war, when most of the attacks were aimed at the American soldiers and the infra structure- they were hardly trying to rebuild with no much help from Iraqis at those times- that I was pretty sure it will be the Americans who will win this struggle. This was not based only on the fact that their case is just, nor their superior technology and resources, but also to another factor that in my opinion plays no less role than the above: they were determined, brave and patient unlike their enemies. They were moving slowly sometimes, taking causalities most of the time, but never hide in their camps or stop patrolling in dangerous areas and very rarely responded irrationally to terrorists’ attacks. I was not the only one who looked impressed and astonished to see those soldiers patrol on foot on the most dangerous areas in Baghdad, where attacks on Americans seemed to be a daily routine, and moreover there was not the slightest sign of fear, anxiety or hostility on their faces, still saluting people smiling to children, as if they are walking in their own land. Now at least one of the major 3 powers, that were a constant threat to their lives, no longer poses such a significant threat and the final outcome bears no doubt in my mind.

I’ve always hoped and believed that Iraqis will adapt such a determination to live their lives as they choose and to believe in their dreams, cling into their hopes to the degree that makes it impossible for such attacks to even hinder their progress to build their country and choose to hope and never surrender to despair.

My believe is that this had happened and it didn’t happen today or last week. My message to those crazy evil creatures is: get out of our land, invaders, and leave us build our country with our friends.

HT: Dan Kaufman

by Donald Sensing, 2/11/2004 07:13:41 PM. Permalink |

Today's "Have you no decency?" moment
Glenn Reynolds blogs about a severe smackdown of Rep. Robert I Wexler, D-Fla., and Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, given by Secretary of State Colin Powell today in a hearing at which Powell was testifying.

But when Brown contrasted Powell's military experience to Bush's record with the National Guard, saying the president "may have been AWOL" from duty, Powell exploded.

"First of all, Mr. Brown, I won't dignify your comments about the president because you don't know what you are talking about," Powell snapped.

"I'm sorry I don't know what you mean, Mr. Secretary," Brown replied.

"You made reference to the president," Powell shot back.

Brown then repeated his understanding that Bush may have been AWOL from guard duty.

"Mr. Brown, let's not go there," Powell retorted. "Let's not go there in this hearing. If you want to have a political fight on this matter, that is very controversial, and I think it is being dealt with by the White House, fine, but let's not go there."

I just saw the video of this episode on cable news, and it was very evident that Powell was one step away from rolling his sleeves up and inviting Brown to step outside. The Congressmen retreated quick.

Glenn agrees with Timothy Perry that this "have you no decency" moment should get more attention from major media. What is the "decency" reference? Another smackdown given to a member of the US Congress, this one to red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1954 by a civilian lawyer hired by the US Army, named Joseph Welch. Broadcast live on national television, historians credit Welch's handling of the exchange as the beginning of the end of Sen. McCarthy's career.

by Donald Sensing, 2/11/2004 06:03:13 PM. Permalink |

The decisive end to the AWOL accusation
Retired Air Force/Air Guard Col. William Campenni flew as a lieutenant in the same unit with then-Lieutenant Goerge W. Bush has published in the Washington Times today a long letter that decisively refutes the unfounded charges of AWIOL, desertion, "disciplinary" assignment and missed drills and flight physical being made against Bush by the Kerry campaign and the DNC.

While most of America was sleeping and Mr. Kerry was playing antiwar games with Hanoi Jane Fonda, we were answering 3 a.m. scrambles for who knows what inbound threat over the Canadian subarctic, the cold North Atlantic and the shark-filled Gulf of Mexico.

Col. Capenni shreds with finality the slanderous accusations being made against the president.

As I have posted before, I don't know of any journalist or blogger who has covered this issue more carefully and completely than Bill Hobbs. Here is his Bush AWOL index.

Update: Real Clear Politics, one of the truly indispensable blogs, posts the rebuttal quotes given by none other than the retired brigadier general who started the whole firestorm. Retired Brig. Gen. William Turnipseed was quoted in May 2000 in both the Boston Globe and the Associated Press as saying that as the commander in Alabama during the period Bush was supposedly absent, "To my knowledge, he [Bush] never showed up."

But Turnipseed also has said that Bush was never under his command and as far as he knows Bush was nhever supposed to report to the base concerned - and that furthermore, Turnipseed doesn't know whether he himself was on the base during the time in question.

by Donald Sensing, 2/11/2004 05:45:44 PM. Permalink |

Why did we learn this from this guy?
I earlier analyzed the letter captured last month in Iraq ascribed to al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which Zarqawi expresses a bleak prognosis for the future of their fight in Iraq. Zarqawi concedes that al Qaeda cannot defeat America militarily, and therefore must turn its attention to other kinds of confrontations.

Fighting Iraqi police is no cakewalk, said Zarqawi.

... the American efforts to set up Iraqi security services have succeeded in depriving the insurgents of allies, particularly in a country where kinship networks are extensive.

"The problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance," the document says. "When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region."

Jeffrey Collins has a good question:

Why is it that the first time we hear this analysis of how effective our strategy is, it's coming from the enemy? I've not heard this angle from any of the analysts in the media and if the American intelligence community had thought of this angle the administration didn't let anyone know about it.

And what else might we have overlooked that could have served to our advantage?

by Donald Sensing, 2/11/2004 06:48:45 AM. Permalink |

Duke Univ. Prof.: Conservatives too stupid to hire
The Duke University Conservative Union, a student group, took out an ad in Monday's Duke Chronicle, the campus paper, claiming that the university lacks intellectual diversity because politically conservative professors are practically not to be found.

In the advertisement, formatted as an open letter to President Nan Keohane, DCU alleged that a number of humanities departments "have become increasingly politicized over the past few decades" and, furthermore, that this politicization has had "a significant impact on the daily workings of their faculty members."

The advertisement listed the break-down of faculty members' political affiliations--Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated--for each of eight humanities departments, based on a cross-reference of Duke's departmental faculty lists with North Carolina voter registration records. According to DCU, 142 of the faculty members and deans included in the survey are registered Democrats, 28 are unaffiliated and 8 are registered Republicans.

But the chairman of the philosophy department, Robert Brandon, said that conservatives are too dumb to be professors at Duke.

"We try to hire the best, smartest people available," Brandon said of his philosophy hires. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.

"Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

But Michael Munger, chair of the political science department, said there may be a point to the DCU's argument.

"The solution is not to have 15 Republicans and 15 Democrats in one department. If everybody forced students to write papers based on a faculty member's particular perspective, that's still not diversity," he said. Rather, he said, the classroom, not the department, must be depoliticized.

"In at least one case, a department chair has said they thought the function of Duke was to rid conservative students of their hypocrisies," Munger said.

But he said he didn't think that attitude was widespread.

Yeah, right.

by Donald Sensing, 2/11/2004 06:46:57 AM. Permalink |

Kerry-Fonda photo emerges
The Washington Times reports,

A photograph of John Kerry together with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally in 1970 in Pennsylvania has surfaced on the Internet, angering veterans who say his association with her 34 years ago is a slap in the faces of Vietnam War veterans.

The photograph, taken at a Labor Day rally at Valley Forge, has been circulating across the Internet, particularly among veterans. It was posted Monday on the NewsMax.com Web site.

Mr. Kerry spoke at the 1970 rally, the culmination of a three-day protest hike from Moorestown, N.J., to Valley Forge, which featured a speech by Miss Fonda and a reading by Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland.

The harder Kerry presses President Bush on Bish's National Guard service, the more Kerry will be pressed about his war protestor days.

by Donald Sensing, 2/11/2004 06:13:07 AM. Permalink |

"Dozens" of Islamist terrorists already in America
Reports the Washington Times (link):

Islamic radicals are being trained at terrorist camps in Pakistan and Kashmir as part of a conspiracy to send hundreds of operatives to "sleeper cells" in the United States, according to U.S. and foreign officials.

The intelligence and law-enforcement officials say dozens of Islamic extremists have already been routed through Europe to Muslim communities in the United States, based on secret intelligence data and information from terrorists and others detained by U.S. authorities.

I would be very interested in their route of entry into the United States.

by Donald Sensing, 2/10/2004 06:37:39 PM. Permalink |

The Future of the Moslem Mind
The final installment of this series, "The Future of the Moslem Mind," by Tarek Heggy has just been posted, with links included to the previous five segments. I have linked to previous segments. This is well worth your time.

by Donald Sensing, 2/10/2004 06:26:28 PM. Permalink |

Al Qaeda's desperation
Today's Iraq bombing signals new tactics

Three information tidbits make an interesting confluence this week in light of today's brutal bombing in Iskandariyah, Iraq.

One: President Bush says in Sunday's Meet the Press interview,

... we’re doing a pretty good job of dismantling al-Qaida — better than a pretty good job, a very good job. I keep saying in my speeches, two-thirds of known al-Qaida leaders have been captured or killed, and that's the truth [emphasis added].

Two: A letter apparently written by Jordanian al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fell into American hands. The 17-page missive expresses pessimism that al Qaeda's efforts to fight Americans and destabilize Iraq are working.

The memo says extremists are failing to enlist support inside the country, and have been unable to scare the Americans into leaving. It even laments Iraq's lack of mountains in which to take refuge. ... [The writer] claims to be impressed by the Americans' resolve. After significant losses, he writes, "America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes."

Zarqawi (if it was he writing) also says that Iraqis won't support al Qaeda fighters.

Three: Members of the educated and professional classes in Iraq are being targeted for assassination:

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Mayah, a 53-year-old political scientist and human rights advocate known in his neighborhood here as "the professor," was driving to work when eight masked gunmen jumped in front of his car. They yanked him into the street, the police said, and shot him nine times in front of his bodyguard and another university lecturer.

In an instant, he became one of hundreds of intellectuals and midlevel administrators who Iraqi officials say have been assassinated since May in a widening campaign against Iraq's professional class.

War, as has been endlessly repeated by commentati (including me), is a contest of wills. But not merely that. It is primarily a contest of power. What Zarqawi's letter shows is that al Qaeda is failing on both counts.

Al Qaeda's leadership, beginning at the top with Osama bin Laden, was convinced that the United States did not have the will to fight. In an interview with bin Laden, conducted by Jamal Isma'il in Afghanistan and broadcast on Middle East television, it is clear that bin Laden's (and hence, all al Qaeda's) operations concept is based on a delusion that he has explained many times: when hurt, the United States always cuts and runs.

We think that the United States is very much weaker than Russia. Based on the reports we received from our brothers who participated in jihad in Somalia, we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty, and cowardice of US troops. Only 80 US troops were killed. Nonetheless, they fled in the heart of darkness, frustrated, after they had caused great commotion about the new world order.

And in an interview between Al-Jazeera television correspondent Tayseer Alouni in October 2001, bin Laden said,

We believe that the defeat of America is possible, with the help of God, and is even easier for us, God permitting, than the defeat of the Soviet Union was before.

Q: How can you explain that?

Bin Laden: We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. We found they had no power worthy of mention. There was a huge aura over America -- the United States -- that terrified people even before they entered combat. Our brothers who were here in Afghanistan tested them, and together with some of the mujahedin in Somalia, God granted them victory. America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.

America left faster than anyone expected. It forgot all that tremendous media fanfare about the new world order, that it is the master of that order, and that it does whatever it wants. It forgot all of these propositions, gathered up its army, and withdrew in defeat, thanks be to God.

On the matter of national will, Zarqawi's letter seems clearly to indicate that al Qaeda's leadership is recognizing they cannot outlast us.

Neither can they overpower us. The core purpose of military operations is to compel, not persuade, your enemy to conform to your will. Through attrition, maneuver of forces, political processes, psyops and civil affairs, al Qaeda is discovering it is being checked at almost every turn, starting with the fact that 70 percent of its leaders known to America are dead or captured. Their first team is pretty much off the field and the benchers trying to carry on aren't up to the job. They don't have the personal renown of the terrorists who have been killed or captured, and among the societies they most need assistance from, personal reputation is extremely important. But they are virtual unknowns for the most part.

After tacitly admitting that al Qaeda cannot defeat America militarily in Iraq, Zarqawi writes that al Qaeda must turn to terrorism against the Iraqis in order to destabilize the country so much that its return to sovereignty this summer cannot happen effectively.

"So the solution, and only God knows, is that we need to bring the Shia into the battle," the writer of the document said. "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands" of Shiites. ...

"You noble brothers, leaders of the jihad [meaning other al Qaeda leaders - DS], we do not consider ourselves people who compete against you, nor would we ever aim to achieve glory for ourselves like you did," the writer says. "So if you agree with it, and are convinced of the idea of killing the perverse sects, we stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command" [emphasis added].

Zarqawi (again, if he is indeed the author) goes on to write that al Qaeda fighters in Iraq must wage war against the Shiite Iraqi majority (i.e, the "perverse sects") and that this war must be well underway before the US returns sovereignty to the country. That way al Qaeda can propagandize that the Americans are responsible for the sectarian violence. "After that, the writer suggests, any attacks on Shiites will be viewed as Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that will find little support among the people" as a reason to unite against America.

That al Qaeda shows no compunction about killing other Muslims has been self-evident for several years. In fact, I wrote last November that al Qaeda’s primary war is against other Muslims. Their objective seems now to be to engender a civil war inside Iraq, to cause chaos, thus demonstrating American failure there.

Bombings such as today's blast in Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad and the assassination of Iraq's intelligentsia are the opening salvos of this tactic.

The bombing's target was a police station. Iraqi police are a frequent target of al Qaeda; they have killed hundreds since May.

''It was the day for applying for new recruits,'' said policeman Wissam Abdul-Karim, who was thrown to the ground by the blast. ''There were dozens of them waiting outside the police station.''

Iskandariyah is a predominantly Shiite city. Almost immediately, the rumor began spreading locally that the explosion was from an American missile. You can bet that several al Qaeda agents were already nearby when the bomb detonated, each with a coordinated story to begin spreading among shocked witnesses. The result? This:

But many angry townspeople blamed the Americans for the blast, and some claimed that a U.S. air attack was to blame.

''This missile was fired from a U.S. aircraft,'' said Hadi Mohy Ali, 60. ''The Americans want to tear our unity apart.''

This combination of terrorism and low-level psyops is a new twist. Previously, al Qaeda would commit a terrorist act and boast about it, bragging that the Americans were powerless to prevent it. Now they commit the deeds and don't take credit, but with preplanned cunning, immediately begin to plant the belief that America is actually the one committing the deeds.

Expect to see more of this kind of terrorism. I think it will not succeed in accomplishing al Qaeda's objective, but its failure will be sadly bloody.

Update: Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for Combined Joint Task Force 7, also thinks that al Qaeda is "desperate."

The general said the letter-writer's recommendation of instigating sectarian violence in Iraq "is almost a sign of desperation." Most of Iraq's people, he pointed out, reject terrorism and are looking forward to achieving governmental sovereignty on June 30.

Via James Joyner.

Update: The full text of the Zarqawi memo is here.

by Donald Sensing, 2/10/2004 05:27:03 PM. Permalink |

Deadliest bombing yet in Iraq
An estimated 500 pounds of explosive were used in today's bombing south of Baghdad, killing 53 persons and injuring scores more.

Only Iraqis were casualties. This bombing is evidence of al Qaeda's new tactics, about which more later.

by Donald Sensing, 2/10/2004 04:40:57 PM. Permalink |

Al Gore: completely unhinged?
Listen to this clip and make up your own mind. The clip was put on the internet by the Tennessee Democratic Party, excerpting a recent speech Gore gave in the state. Personally, I don't think it will stay on the site much longer, if the link goes dead, please email me to let me know.

by Donald Sensing, 2/10/2004 03:36:11 PM. Permalink |

The great Christian divide
A Presbyterian pastor says that the split between the two main wings of American denominations is growing wider. The Rev. N. Graham Standish wrote,

Increasingly, Christians are identifying themselves either as progressive or evangelical, rather than as a member of a particular denomination. Christians of each camp believe they are in the right, and accuse those of the other camp of having betrayed their biblical foundations. Is one side or the other really guilty of betrayal?

The problem isn't one of betrayal. In fact, each side is sincerely trying to be true to their biblical foundations. One side follows the biblical ideals of the Great Command (progressives), the other the biblical ideals of the Great Commission (evangelicals).

The Great Command is to love your neighbor as yourself; the Great Commission is the preach the Gospel to all the world. Christians who emphasize the Command gravitate toward matters relating to compassion and justice. Christians who emphasize the Commission gravitate toward missions and working for conversion of non-Christians.

So far so good; I agree with Standish's basic analysis, although his use of "progressive" to describe one side is a window into where he doubtless stands. After all, what is opposed to progressivism except reactionism?

I also think that this description is somewhat superficial. There is a bipolar opposition in Christian churches, but this isn't it. Standish also implies rather strongly that evangelicals aren't interested in matter of social justice. But they are. In fact, they are much more likely to endure in such matters than non-evangelicals.

A 1978 article in Journal of Psychology and Theology, "Conversion Experience, Belief System, and Personal and Ethical Attitudes" (6:266-275, Fall 1978.), compared survey results between persons who said they were Christians and those who did not make that claim. It also compared attitudinal scores among professed Christians by category (born again v. ethical belief system). The study defined "born again" Christians as "those who profess a personal saving relationship with Christ," and ethical as "those who profess to follow Christian teachings as primary." Note that these were ways the subjects described themselves, not how the study's authors described them.

The researchers wrote they expected the ethical Christians would score higher on the Social Interest Survey, motivated primarily by Christ's ethical teachings. It was not so. "The born again group scored higher in social interest in both age groups studied, even though they are primarily committed to the person of Christ and secondarily committed to the ethics [of Christ]. These results support the notion that born again commitment fosters greater internalization of Christian ethics" (emphasis added).

The authors claimed their study's results were consistent with previous research. Other significant points this study uncovered were that born again commitment is more likely to mature over a person's life than the ethical type and that "an intense, mature and personal religious commitment fosters a sense of purpose in life and a greater concern for the welfare of others" (emphasis added).

So I think that Standish has drawn too simple a picture. The real divide in our churches is not primarily between those who emphasize Christ's Command and those who emphasize his Commission. It is between those who believe themselves born again in Christ and those who don't so believe.

What's the difference? Born again Christians - and I consider myself one - are convinced that Christ was God in bodily form and that Jesus "was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead." For us, it is Christ's bodily resurrection that defines who Jesus was, and that furthermore, we understand Christ to be alive now. Hence, we say we have a "personal relationship" with Christ because we know him as a living being with whom we are in spiritual communion.

Because this fact defines our relationship with Christ and the way we understand Christian faith itself, it generally compels born-again Christians to emphasize Christ's resurrection and divine identity over other aspects of his ministry. After all, take away Christ's resurrection and his self descriptions of his divinity, and all you are left with is his ethics.

But Christ's ethics are unoriginal, except perhaps his command to love one's enemies. You don't need Christ at all to build a religion from Christ's ethics. In fact, there is such a religion already, Judaism. All Christ's ethical teachings are already found in the Hebrew and Jewish traditions and teachings.

I know and have known a very large number of Christians in both camps, the Command-oriented camp and the Commission-oriented one - more accurately, the ethics-oriented camp and the living-Christ camp (born again, if you prefer). There is indeed a great divide between us, and it revolves around the question Jesus asked his disciples: "Who do you say I am?" They don't answer the same. More on this later.

by Donald Sensing, 2/9/2004 10:47:36 PM. Permalink |

Advertising quirks
As you may have noticed, Blogads are taking the blogosphere by storm. I have succumbed (see space in upper-right column) and will point out that the space is now available again.

My ad space goes for a lot less than Instapundit's. There, Glenn Reynolds, bless his heart, has four blogads running simultaneously. I charge $20 per week, with longer durations discounted off the weekly rate. Glenn's rate sheet shows $300 per week, $500 per two weeks, $800 per month, $5000 per three months, and a whopping $20,000 per year.

Note that his yearly rate works out to be $84.612 more per week than his weekly rate. But his three-month rate is more than six times his monthly rate.

Okay, it's Glenn's site and he can charge what he wants, of course. I suppose that he doesn't want to be tied to long-term contracts. I guess.

by Donald Sensing, 2/9/2004 09:47:42 PM. Permalink |

Winchester is not available yet
In response to my post about the new Winchester Select Energy shotgun, I got this nice note from Green Top Sporting Goods:

Just thought I would drop you a note regarding the Winchester shotgun you mentioned on you website. I checked with a Winchester distributor and they aren't available at the moment but will be shortly. You should be able to get one for $1600-1700 [vice MSRP of $2,030 - DS]. Check with your local dealer and see if he can get you one.

If not e-mail me if your interested and we can sell you one and have a dealer of your choice local to you transfer the gun to you (most charge around $30-40 for this).

Just thought I would you know what the street price would be on this gun.

Jeff Fletcher
Green Top Sporting Goods
Glen Allen, VA
http://www.greentophuntfish.com/

What Jeff is referring to is the fact that federal law requires interstate sales of firearms be handled at the receiving end by a holder of a federal firearms license (FFL). As I recall, this law was passed in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy because Lee Harvey Oswald had bought his rifle through mail order. Buying a gun through mail order at the time was no different than buying a shirt.

The receiving dealer must prove possession of the FFL to the shipper, receive the shipment and handle the instant background check of the buyer before the buyer can take possession of the gun. As Jeff says, FFL holders usually charge a nominal fee for the service.

Anyway, check out Green Top Sporting Goods - it seems like a fine store.

by Donald Sensing, 2/9/2004 09:24:32 PM. Permalink |

I saw this, too
American Digest says about this photo, "Neither Snow, Nor Sleet, Nor Numbing Repeated Defeat...." I saw a scene much like this today just outside Vanderbilt University in Nashville today, except no snow, just rain.

by Donald Sensing, 2/9/2004 08:15:08 PM. Permalink |

The ethics of using lottery-generated scholarships
I was emailed the question, "Is it ethically okay to use college scholarship money from the state lottery?"

Background: Tennessee's first state lottery began Jan. 20. The revenue from sales is supposed to pay for, in order, tuition assistance for Tenn. students attending post-secondary schools inside Tennessee, then capital improvements to the state's public schools.

The emailer's question rests on the premise that the lottery is itself not an ethical enterprise. Obviously, someone who sees no moral or ethical problem with the lottery itself is hardly going to wonder whether it's okay to use the tuition money the lottery may provide.

But there are other analogies. Alone among the Nazi concentration camps, Dachau was the site of extensive medical experimentation on inmates (Auschwitz to a much lesser degree, where Joseph Mengele worked his cruelty). While thousands of inmates were simply murdered, many hundreds at least were the victims of cruel, even grotesque, medical experiments done by Nazi doctors.

Some experiments were so grotesque that their rationale can hardly be fathomed today. But others had a practical, if murderous, objective. For example, reports the Wiesenthal Center,

German air-force physicians tested the impact of low pressure and lack of oxygen on POWs, researching methods to rescue German pilots abandoning damaged aircrafts at high altitudes. Of 200 guinea pigs, 70-80 died as their lungs burst.

Among the other experiments performed was charting the survival over time of prisoners immersed in cold water, wearing clothing ranging from nothing to full cold-weather flight suits such as those worn by Luftwaffe pilots. With typical Nazi efficiency, whole tables were constructed showing how long prisoners lived in water of various cold temperatures, with what kind of clothing.

After World War II, Dachau's experiments were revealed. An emotion-laden debate ensued among the medical, religious and ethicist communities on whether it was permissible to use the Nazi documentation for modern, benign purposes.

The issue of whether to use the Nazi data is a smokescreen from the reality of human suffering. Instead of the word "data," I suggest that we replace it with an Auschwitz bar of soap. This horrible bar of soap is the remains of murdered Jews. ... Imagine the extreme feeling of discomfort, and the mortified look of horror upon discovering that one just showered with the remains of murdered Jews. The ghastly thought of the Nazis melting human beings (and perhaps even one's close relatives) together for a bar of soap precludes any consideration of its use. How could any civilized person divorce the horror from the carnage without numbing one's self to the screams of the tortured and ravaged faces of the Holocaust? Indeed, it is only with this enhanced sensitivity to the suffering that one can accurately deal with the Nazi "data." ...

Any analysis that fails to see realistically the Nazi data as a blood soaked document fails to comprehend fully the magnitude of the issue.

Of course, I am not making equal cases of state-run lotteries and Nazi camps; I can't imagine anyone insisting that Dachau was morally neutral, much less positive, as many claim state lotteries are. It is the form of the ethical issue I am interested in rather than the specific content.

If you, gentle reader, are one who thinks lotteries are either benign or neutral, morally speaking, then you need read no farther, for you are uninformed. I urge you to research the true impact of lotteries on your own. My own position on this issue is what ancient philosophers called invincible: I have examined in detail all arguments to the contrary and found them all inadequate, usually hopelessly so.

I point this out because invariably when I have posted about this issue in the past, one or a dozen readers fly to their keyboards to send me missives telling me I am wrong. I assure you, if you are similarly inclined: save your time and mine. I no longer debate this issue, any more than I debate whether the sun rises in the east.

So, back to the question at hand: "Is it ethically okay to use college scholarship money from the state lottery?"

No.

The injury done by lotteries on the body politic and the people who buy lottery tickets cannot be redeemed by the putative good claimed to be done by using a fourth to 30 percent of the revenue for tuition assistance. Lotteries are massive welfare programs for the well-to-do, transferring enormous sums of money from the poor to the middle and upper middle classes.

Even if you never buy a ticket, using the tuition assistance co-opts you into an unjust system. It makes you a partner in the Sheriff of Nottingham plan.

There is no right reason to do a wrong thing. Any analysis that fails to see realistically state lotteries as instruments that repress their most vulnerable citizens fails to comprehend fully the magnitude of the issue.

by Donald Sensing, 2/9/2004 07:57:29 PM. Permalink |

Stuff
Here are links I want to write about, but won't be able to until tonight at the soonest.

Former jihadi inmate at Guantanamo says, "I had a good time" there.

Has al Qaeda tacitly admitted we are winning in Iraq? (NYT article here.)

OTOH, al Qaeda's latest tactic is the targeted destruction of Iraq's intelligentsia, and that's a very bad thing: Assassinations Tear Into Iraq's Educated Class.

As a former Army public affairs officer, I can certainly sympathize with the experiences of this PAO in Iraq.

The split between the two main wings of American Christianity is growing deeper, says a cleric.

by Donald Sensing, 2/9/2004 11:39:11 AM. Permalink |

Meet the Press highlights are on Dateline right now (NBC)
So tune it if you missed it this morning, as I did.

Speaking of which, Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice has the questions Tim Russert should have asked President Bush:

1. Do you think it was an accident when Justin Timberlake reached over and ripped Janet Jackson's clothing, revealing her right breast?

2. Do you agree with Rush Limbaugh that Hillary Clinton was behind Justin Timberlake reaching over and and ripping Janet Jackson's clothing, revealing her right breast?

3. Do you think it's time that we protect our children from seeing something that would have a terrible impact on them, something that will scar their psyches for life, something horrible, something hideous -- William Shatner's toupee?

4. You have talked about launching a Mars program. Do you think there's intelligent life on Mars, or Dennis Kucinich?

5. Do you want to buy some Girl Scout cookies? (Kayla, 8, of San Diego asked me to ask you that)

6. If you could be a whale what kind of whale would you want to be? (Barbara Walters asked me to ask that)

7. Would you want to be a whale like Teddy Kennedy?

and a few others. Joe also has a concise analysis of Bush's present political prospects.

by Donald Sensing, 2/8/2004 06:02:57 PM. Permalink |

Bush's Meet the Press appearance
I did not see the show this morning ( I was, like, working) but the official transcript is here. Also Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of links to blogentati on the subject as well as some examples of the negative spin already being put on it by mainstream media.

by Donald Sensing, 2/8/2004 02:48:14 PM. Permalink |

Iraq: lessons learned by company officers
The WaPo has a fine article on the lessons learned by troop leaders in Iraq since the campaign began, and how the lessons are being passed to new units coming in. For example, countermeasures for roadside bombs:

The most effective counterbomb tactic has been the low-tech sniper, Army officers say. U.S. troops have learned to hide and spy on spots such as traffic circles where bombs are likely to be emplaced. "Anyone who comes out in the middle of the night to plant an IED [improvised explosive device] dies," a senior Central Command official explained in an interview.

The article also points the way to Company Command.com, an Army-endorsed site that apparently started as a blog, but now

CompanyCommand.com is an ongoing professional conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. It is a space specifically for company commanders—past, present, and future—to connect, to gather, and to share what they are learning.

I'm adding it to my blogroll.

by Donald Sensing, 2/8/2004 06:31:28 AM. Permalink |

I gotta get me one of these
Long-term readers may remember that I compete in shotgun target sports, specifically trap shooting. I have been using Beretta semiauto shotguns since I started the sport - first a Urika 12-ga. field model, then a Parallel Target model.

I have secretly longed for a good break-action sporting gun, such as the Beretta 686 E Sporting or the Browning BT-99, the former an over-under design with two barrels, the latter working the same but with one barrel.

The Beretta 686 appeals to me because I really like Beretta shotguns (not their pistols, though) and I have done a fair amount of shooting with the 686 E Sporting model. I've never shot a BT-99, but it is well known among trap shooters and highly regarded.

But now comes along a new Winchester model, the Select Energy Trap.

Click image for full-page picture

The Select is a new design, replacing the Supreme series. The Supreme was not well regarded by the shooting press or shooters, who stayed away in droves. It was faulted for over-heavy barrels, making the gun very front heavy. The Select, OTOH, has a center of gravity right at the breech, making the CG basically equidistant between the shooter's two hands, a good thing. It has a lockup design very similar to the Beretta's, much better than the old Supreme's design.

The Beretta and the Select cost the same - $2,008 vs. $2,030, but the Winchester has more features for the money, such as the adjustable comb (top of the stock) and a fiber-optic target front sight. It is a very attractive package. Yet the renowned BT-99 checks in at $500 less - $740 less for the BT-99 with a standard stock. And that buys a lot of ammo and practice targets. The Browning, though, has only one barrel and so can't be used for double-target competition.

Ah, well, I'm just dreaming, anyway. My daughter just got braces.

by Donald Sensing, 2/7/2004 07:20:43 PM. Permalink |

Here's something you don't see every day
In June 1991 a private organization sponsored the National Gulf War Victory Celebrations in Washington, D.C. It had a lot of government assistance of course, including static displays of military equipment for several days on the Washington Mall.

On June 6 the aircraft were landed on the Mall, very early in the morning. I was there as part of my duties; I was the director of joint public affairs for the celebrations. The stills below are from the video I took. I've been converting my home videotapes to DVD and grabbed these stills.

by Donald Sensing, 2/7/2004 09:34:34 AM. Permalink |

Flooding near my home
We had several days of rain, most of it hard rain. This happens about twice per year, resulting in flooding of local streams and the Harpeth river, which passes near my house. The water was higher yesterday than I have seen it in the nine years I have lived here.

I went out yesterday and took a number of digital shots, but alas, I had set the camera's resolution so high that the file sizes are immense, almost half a meg each. Here is a shot of a playground near our house.

Hhere is the Tennessean's online slide show of flooding in my county.

by Donald Sensing, 2/7/2004 09:00:28 AM. Permalink |

Linkagery

Murdoc Online says that economically, Bush has it better now than Reagan did at this point in his first term.

John emails, "I found Michael O'Hanlon's op-ed "Has U.S. war in Iraq slowed war on terror?" thoughtful and informative. It's a welcome change from so many op-eds on the subject that are more partisan politics that fact-based analysis."

Weird Al Yankovich has a song about eBay.

An interesting and brief analysis of John Kerry's voting record on security-related matters in the mid- to late 1990s is at Jim Doney's site.

Scott Forbes emails the link to a New York Times piece on stealth Christian web sites.

The Third Commandment is in full operation is Iraq (ht: Richard Heddleson). I can confirm from my years of Army service that this rings humorously true.

Geitner Simmons posts about European religion and its relationship to European foreign policy.

Gerard Van der Leun has a great photography exhibit called New York Life: Images After the Fall. Gerard also blogs at American Digest.

Bovious is less than impressed with the marketing hype of Mel Gibson's controversial movie on the Passion of Christ.

Roger Ebert will doubtless review it Just Like Any Other Movie and I will doubtless be pissed at that. Some Jews have already passed judgment on it as a dangerous wedge between faiths. I want it both ways. I want the philistine Ebert to approach the movie with reverence, and I want the people I go to church with to approach it with suspicion. Why is that? I don't know.

ISTM that Bovious has, uh, "issues." See what you think.

Lots of political news at The Temporal Globe.

The Nautical Origins of Some Common Expressions

by Donald Sensing, 2/7/2004 08:49:23 AM. Permalink |

It's a drawing

The 3D effect only works from one perspective, of course, but it's pretty eye catching!

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 09:27:38 PM. Permalink |

More on MAD and terror WMD attacks
Back on Dec. 23 I posted a long essay on the bankruptcy of Mutual Assured Destruction as a strategic policy of the United States if al Qaeda struck an American city with a WMD, especially a fission atomic bomb. That post garnered more comments than any other post I have made. At the end of the month a gentleman named James Wink, an eight-year Army veteran, emailed me his thoughts that I meant to post long before now. So here they are.

I have completed my BA in International Studies and am finishing a Masters in Strategy and Policy. Your discussion on the MAD doctrine was very interesting as well as the comments on your blog.

I have to take umbrage on using MAD in relation to the War on Terror. It doesn't work. It is logically inconsistent because MAD rests on a set of assumption of which two are not reflected in reality.

1) For MAD to work, all parties must be rational

2) For MAD to work, all parties must have a stake in the international system

The war on terror violates both assumptions. The terrorists are not rational by our interpretation: using a single nuke would do nothing to advance their cause. The terrorists have no stake in the international system: the consequences you described would only serve their interests. They would be delighted in just such a change.

While I am not sure that even al Qaeda would be "delighted" at the nuclear annihilation of a Muslim city, I do not think they would see it as defeat, but vindication of their basic precept that America is the Great Satan. And if we do it, we would be.

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 08:47:11 PM. Permalink |

Dean sees the writing on the wall
Howard Dean told a radio interviewer he would accept a VP slot. Translation: I'm dead and know it, so I'll take what I can get.

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 08:13:19 PM. Permalink |

I was about to write about this . . .
. . . But Victor Davis Hanson beat me to it, and did a far better job.

Throughout this war there has been consistently fuzzy nomenclature that reflects mistaken logic: WMDs are supposedly the problem, rather than the tyrannical regimes that stockpile them ? as if Tony Blair's nuclear arsenal threatens world peace; we are warring against the method of "terror" rather than states that promote or allow it ? as if the Cold War was a struggle against SAM-6's or KGB-like tactics; September 11 had nothing to do with the Iraqi war, as if after 3,000 Americans were butchered through unconventional and terrorist tactics the margin of tolerance against Middle East tyrannical regimes that seek the weapons of such a trade does not diminish radically.

WMDs in Iraq were a problem, but not the problem. Saddam & Sons & Regime was the problem.

Put another way, the problem in 1920s Chicago wasn't Frank Nitti's Tommy gun, nor even Nitti. The problem was Al Capone.

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 12:56:08 PM. Permalink |

What they say in Massachussetts
Jim Miller discusses Sen. John Kerry's rep in his home state.

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 12:31:30 PM. Permalink |

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to quit party leadership
So reports David Kaspar from Germany. But he'll remain in office as chancellor.

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 09:27:11 AM. Permalink |

Never give in - fight back furiously and fight dirty
Eleven-year-old Carlie Brucia's body has been found in Sarasota, Fla. Sarasota County Sheriff Bill Balkwill said,

... Joseph P. Smith, 37, has been charged with her murder. He is believed to be the tattooed man in a mechanic's shirt who was seen in a car wash surveillance video leading Carlie away by the arm Sunday evening, authorities said.

The videotape, shown on news shows several days ago, shows that Carlie walked away with her abductor when he took her arm. She did not put up any resistance, at least not on the tape.

A few years ago here in Franklin, Tenn., a man tried to abduct a girl, about Carlie's age, from a shopping center's parking lot, but he was apprehended before he got away with her.

What to teach little girls

Here is what my wife and I have taught our daughter, after consulting with law-enforcement officers I know:

Under no circumstances of any kind will we send a stranger to give you a message or take you with him. Any stranger who claims he has a message from us is lying. You are immediately to run away; do not answer him or hesitate. Just run.

It is not merely okay to be rude to persons who make you fearful or suspicious of their intentions, it is required. Your safety is paramount.

To get help in a crowded place like a store or mall, go to a woman first. A woman is more likely to help a scared girl than a man is. But if a man is all there is, go to him. A police officer is best, of course, but do not sacrifice help at hand looking for better help elsewhere.

In any event, crowds offer safety. Do everything you can to get attention on you. Yell, knock things over, call for police.

If a man or woman physically attempts to take you away, fight back instantly and loudly. Become a screaming, clawing banshee. Fight dirty! Immediately hit and kick everywhere you can, especially go for eyes and groin. If s/he is wearing glasses, rip them away. Yell for help at the top of your lungs all the while. Yell specifically, "This is not my dad (or mom)! I'm being kidnaped!"

Remember that your entire objective in fighting back is to be released. If the abductor drops you - hopefully from pain you have inflicted - immediately flee and get help.

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 09:15:59 AM. Permalink |

Photos of terror attack on Moscow subway
A Russian news web site has photos of this morning's bombing of a Moscow subway.

As Jeff Jarvis points out, ""Let no one doubt that terrorism is a world war."

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 08:52:36 AM. Permalink |

Bush AWOL
The final nail in that lie's coffin.

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 08:44:17 AM. Permalink |

Republican leaders slam White House
Republican US Representatives went ballistic on Karl Rove ...

... over President Bush's immigration plan and lack of fiscal discipline came to a head behind closed doors at last weekend's Republican retreat in Philadelphia.

House lawmakers, stunned by the intensity of their constituents' displeasure at some of Mr. Bush's key domestic policies, gave his political strategist Karl Rove an earful behind closed doors.

Good on yer, House Reps!

by Donald Sensing, 2/6/2004 08:36:51 AM. Permalink |

What's up with the Blogosphere Ecosystem?
Truth Laid Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem is a respected ranking of 7,427 blogs. It ranks blogs two ways, by traffic ("hits" as tabulated by SiteMeter) and by inbound links. Writes proprietor N.Z. Bear,

Blogosphere Ecosystem is an application which scans weblogs once daily and generates a list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list.

So far so good.

But here's the problem: the Number 1 ranked blog today is one I have never heard of before, Downtown Chick Chat. How did it displace Glenn Reynold's Instapundit from the No. 1 slot without garnering a lot of blogosphere attention beforehand? And how can the Ecosystem attribute to it more incoming links than there are blogs tracked by the Ecosystem?

I dunno. I'm just curious. Downtown Chick Chat's Technorati page lists only 32 inbound blogs, a big discrepancy.

Anyway, drop on by Downtown Chick Chat and see what it has to offer, such as 100 reasons why Capt. Kirk was better than Capt. Picard, I assume as seen from a woman's POV. Such as, "48. If something doesn't speak English -- it's toast," and, "91. Diplomacy for Kirk is a phaser and a smirk."

by Donald Sensing, 2/5/2004 09:22:22 PM. Permalink |

This is what blogs have done
President Bush personally saluted Army Chief Warrant Officer Paul Holton this morning, the man behind the Iraqi Toy Drive, now called "Operation Give." Bush eloquently praised Chief Holton and his humanitarian work at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Dean Esmay (quoted by Rosemary) correctly pointed out,

Please no one ever try to tell me that weblogs are irrelevant and unimportant. This entire thing happened ENTIRELY because of weblogs.

This is absolutely correct. The entire idea was a blogger's - I wish I remebered whose - and it became a meme picked up immediately by other bloggers, including yours truly. It was weeks (weeks) before there was the slightest nibble on the story by major media. That FedEx began donating intercontinental transportation of the donations to Iraq was blogger driven. So was Overstock.com's corporate support.

This was Holton's original post that started the whole thing.

She was obviously very poor, in her tattered old dress, totally worn out plastic flip-flops, her hair matted against her head indicating she hadn't had a bath in a long time and her skin blistered from the dirt and weather. ...

I rummaged through my FedEx box full of toys sent my by my teammates back home. I grabbed a comb, a brush, a pair of new flip-flops, a whistle, a stuffed monkey whose arms hang around your neck, and a new toothbrush and tooth paste and dashed out the door, telling my interpreter to come along. ...

Bending down I handed her the items one by one, as I explained what each item was, to insure she knew what I was giving her, especially as I gave her the toothbrush, asking her to be sure to brush everyday.

Her eyes lit up with such joy as I put the monkey arms over her head. She was so excited to receive everything, being somewhat shy though, not having dealt with an American before. She was so precious as her big brown eyes looked up at me, causing me to almost breakdown into tears as I walked away quickly so as to not bring too much attention to the little girl from the on looking crowd.

That was on Sept. 18, 2003. In only four days - the power of the blogosphere! - a toy drive was set up for the Chief and his comrades to give away to Iraqi kids. By the first week of October, Operation Give's web site was set up with Overstock.com's support. By Oct. 9, the response - entirely blogosphere driven - had become so great that the military postal system shut down sending packages to Chief Holton. And nine days after that it was back in business with a warehouse and FedEx shipping arranged.

It was not until Oct. 22 that the first national media, MSNBC, carried a story about Chief Holton and the toy drive. And on Dec. 3, FoxNews did a major segment from Iraq that I was able to grab stills from.

But nothing would have happened without an exceptionally fine American, Chief Warrant Officer Paul Holton.

by Donald Sensing, 2/5/2004 08:46:56 PM. Permalink |

Cell phone guns - I have video
A friend in a federal law-enforcement agency emailed me a video of a new threat, a handgun disguised as a cell phone. The video is on my server - 527K in size - to see it click here.

Wrote my friend,

If you get asked to test your cell phone at the airport, this is the reason. Because cell phone guns have been discovered. The attached video clip shows how cell phone guns operate. These phones are not in the US yet, but they are in use overseas. Beneath the digital phone face is a .22 caliber handgun capable of firing four rounds in rapid succession using the standard telephone keypad. European law enforcement officials are stunned by the discovery of these deadly decoys. They say phone guns are changing the rules of engagement in Europe ."We find it very alarming," says Wolfgang Dicke of the German Police Union ."It means police will have to draw their weapons whenever a person being checked reaches for their cell phone." Although cell phone guns have not reached the US yet, the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the U.S. Customs Service say they have been briefed on the new weapons.

All US ports of entry have been alerted. These covert weapons were first discovered in October of 2000 when Dutch police came upon a cache during a drug raid in Amsterdam. In another recent incident, a Croatian gun dealer was caught attempting to smuggle a shipment through Slovenia into Western Europe.

Police say both shipments are believed to have originated in Yugoslavia. Interpol sent a warning to law enforcement agencies around the world. "If you didn't know they were guns, you would think they were cell phones," said Ari Zandbergen, a spokesperson for the Amsterdam police. "Only when you have one in your hand do you realize that they are heavier than a regular cell phone."

Be patient if security asks to look at your cell phone or turn it on to show that it works. They have a good reason!

Strategy Page reported about these guns on Jan. 17.

No one is sure, but it is thought that the cell phone guns were invented, and are being built, somewhere in the Balkans. While they look like cell phones, if you hold one in your hand they are noticeably heavier. For criminals, especially professional killers, such weapons would be useful in situations where people are being frisked for weapons when entering a club, or a meeting with other gangsters. The weapons could also be smuggled into jails to aid in prison escapes. Commandoes and spies might find this device useful as well. The weapons could also be used to hijack aircraft.

During World War II the OSS developed a single-shot .22-caliber gun designed to be concealed in the fob pocket of a man's trousers (the little pocket tucked inside the right-front pocket). Operatives in Europe had reported that the police or Gestapo never searched that pocket; they didn't seem even to notice it. So the fob gun was developed.

It was very simple. Only about two inches long, it was only a tube with a bullet in one end, behind which was a spring-loaded firing pin connected to a small ring on the rear. You pulled the ring and let go. The cartridge fired. It had no range or accuracy, of course, but it wasn't designed for marksmanship.

Stanley Lovell, second-in-command of the OSS, reported in his book Of Spies and Strategems of an operative who was captured. When the German turned his back on him briefly after thinking the operative was disarmed, the operative in one motion took out his fob gun, held it to the back of the German's head and fired, killing the German.

The .22 cartridge is ideal for such weapons because it is so small. Zippo-lighter guns can't be far away.

by Donald Sensing, 2/5/2004 01:48:53 PM. Permalink |

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