Squaring the Culture

I have avoided the entire Edward Kennedy discussion, choosing instead to pray for the man’s soul. I detested his politics; I was incensed by his involvement in besmirching the reputation of Judge Robert Bork; I heard good things about his personal treatment of employees and constituents; his family has a big house a few miles from where I’ve been living for the past 2 years; he had a reputation as a philanderer and a drunkard; he was a well-liked power broker in the US Senate. That’s how much I know of the man, and I feel I’ve already said too much about a man whose funeral is proceeding even as I write this. He should rest in peace.

However, I’m incredulous after having read this misguided editorial by Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, who wants us to consider what a shame it would have been if the accident at Chappaquiddick had been the subject of a 21st-century-style media feeding frenzy.

This disgusting piece implies that if it had taken place today, the media would have gone berserk over the accident, turning it into a circus and, in the process, ending Kennedy’s political career. It then simply assumes that nobody disagrees that the remainder of Kennedy’s life was such an unmitigated boon to the public good that we all would have been worse off for his career having ended.

What astounds me is how clueless Zorn is about the protection of privilege in America, particularly Democrat privilege, and how this protection by the press makes a mockery of the central requirement of a free society that every citizen must be equal before the law. The unequal treatment before the law rides on an awful inversion of morality: the bizarre notion that if a man’s politics are Democratic enough, no moral malfeasance, no matter how horrific, is sufficient to offset his virtue. Virtue is defined as “supporting Democratic party initiatives.”

It’s the same blindness that was exhibited as it was becoming embarrassingly obvious that President Clinton was a pathological liar, a perjurer, a grafter, and possibly even a serial rapist. Democrats simply closed their ears and eyes. How could somebody who supported welfare, ecology, and women’s rights be considered morally bad? He is such a good man, simply by virtue of his politics!

This substitution of political correctness for moral character is evil, and undermines our republic.

There is no legitimate doubt that Kennedy avoided serious investigation into the accident by virtue of the fact that he was, in effect, royalty. Whether there ought to have been a conviction, or even an arrest, is completely beside the point; there ought to have been an investigation, and there would have been… except that in Massachusetts, Kennedys are not the subject of investigations, because they’re Kennedys.

There are valid reasons to object to the manner in which media turn a tragedy into a circus. However, the process serves to ensure that no party is exempt from public scrutiny, and eventually from the law. Kennedy did plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, arguably because there was no way to avoid the public knowing that he had done so. He was sentenced to 2 months in prison, but the sentence was immediately suspended by the judge. Appropriate press attention could have served to ensure that a proper investigation took place.

So public scrutiny, and particularly press scrutiny, is a necessary goad to produce appropriate legal action, and protects our liberties — when applied in a fair and impartial manner.

The fact is, however, that press attention has long since ceased to be applied fairly and impartially.

In fact, it has become disturbingly common, in modern America, for Democrats generally to believe they are above the law, with good reason. Republicans who get charged with a crime step down; Democrats never do, and the press protects them. Try to imagine what a Lexis-Nexis search of the mainstream media articles would reveal of the $90,000 in Representative Jefferson’s freezer (D, La), the bribery tapes capturing Representative Jack Murtha (D, Pa) making deals, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D, Ca) shuffling of more than $1 billion in defense contracts to her husband’s company, Senator Harry Reid’s (D, Nv) profiting from land scams, or dozens of the scandals instigated by President Bill Clinton (try to find a discussion of the possible graft in declaring the Grand Escalante Staircase a national park, for instance). Compare them to the unhinged attempts to tie Abu Graib to high public officials who had nothing to do with it (43 days on the front page of the New York Times), the number of mentions of the Abramoff scandals, the coverage of possible indictments of Tom Delay, who, so far as we can tell, is guilty of no crime, and the unspeakable savagery aimed at Sarah Palin, who has not even committed the public appearance of a crime. The truth is, we rely almost entirely on conservative blogs and talk radio for information regarding violations of the law by Democrats, whereas the least foible of any Republican becomes a front-page story and headlines the 6 o’clock news. The Chappaquiddick accident would never become a feeding frenzy unless the Senator were a Republican.

This is not to say that there has never been an instance of Republicans currying favor so as to avoid prosecution; it happens. However, the imbalance between the way Democrats and Republicans treat felons within their ranks is stark, and makes it clear which party is currently a danger to the rule of law.

One wonders whether Mr. Zorn, or any other Democrat, would so blithely ignore possible disagreement over the value of a politician’s public service if that politician were not of their party. And then one realizes, there is no need to wonder; Ronald Reagan’s death did not benefit from this same assumption of positive feeling, and the deaths of such figures as Tony Snow and Jerry Falwell were used as excuses for rage-filled diatribes against the right. No, in the modern press, liberals are saints, and conservatives, devils. Consequently, the irresponsible killing of a young woman is treated as an unfortunate accident simply because the man who committed it has the right politics in the eyes of reporters. In such an environment, where correct politics are the only publicly-accepted measure of virtue, it is only a matter of time before a legislature passes laws to outlaw conservatism. Liberty is not safe where morality is measured by political correctness.

Zorn’s editorial is nonsense. If he has so little regard for equal protection and so little awareness of how he’s savaging it, he would serve the public better if he kept his mouth shut. However, it is because the law he treats as meaningless still has some power that he retains the right to publish his opinion. He may learn, soon enough, that if he continues to saw the limb of equal protection, it will not be conservatives alone who fall from the tree of liberty; it will be everybody, including himself.

I have only progressed a few inches into my review of the Theological Foundations of a Just Rebellion. However, as part of that review, I encountered a truly excellent defense of the basic notion of individual rights in a public brochure written by Elisha Williams, member of the Connecticut General Assembly and former rector at Yale University. The brochure was entitled “The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants,” with the subtitle “A reasonable Plea for The Liberty of Conscience, and The Right of private Judgment, in Matters of Religion, Without Controul from human Authority. Being a LETTER, From a Gentleman in the Massachusetts-Bay to his Friend in Connectivut, Wherein Some Thoughts on the Origin, End, and Extent of the Civil Power, with brief Considerations on several late Laws in Connectivut, are humbly offered.” Boston, 1744. ( You can read it for yourselves in its entirety at the link under the title.)

Williams’ essay is a long one, and will take some time to condense; I will report on it soon. In the meantime, however, a friend passed along to me a challenge from one of his friends for some Protestant to articulate the appropriate limits of government, with reference to the current administration’s attempts to nationalize health insurance. “If the public option is not a valid function of government,” this person asked, “What IS a valid function, and why?”

So, I’m setting forth my thinking at the moment regarding the proper limits of government from a Protestant’s point of view. The essential ideas are Lockean (based loosely on the ideas of John Locke), but Lockean as expressed by the Rev. Williams. This is a first cut at something I hope to refine and correct as I move forward. Enjoy.

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Man in his natural state has himself, has God’s oversight, and has whatever he has taken from nature to sustain himself. Thus each person, by natural occurance and therefore by God’s initial design, has both the responsibility to answer to God out of his conscience, and the right to care for himself using his personal property.

The confirmation of this occurs in the structure of the Old Covenant. The Ten Commandments basically defend these same two principles, “honor God” and “honor private property.” The first five commandments say “Separate the holy from the profane,” in order that man may know God’s will. Have no other gods but the true God, make no gods out of created things, let no man claim authority from God that is not his to claim, treat God’s holy days as holy, and honor the teaching of your parents. The second five commandments say “Do not take what belongs to another person.” Steal nobody’s property, cohabit with nobody’s spouse, take nobody’s life, ruin nobody’s reputation, and covet nobody’s goods. Thus the central rules of God over man are “Honor and obey me, and respect each person’s property.” All belongs to God; He has apportioned to each person according to His will, and nobody has a right to reapportion it by force.

Regarding property, which at its root is the right of every person to provide for himself and his family, people fall into conflict from time to time and need an arbiter to settle disputes regarding the conflict of their needs. Government serves this role, and pursuing this, articulates the basic agreements individuals make in order to settle their disputes. Men also need to gather together to protect themselves from other men who would hinder their efforts to provide for themselves. In pursuit of this protection, men form governments, which keep the peace and provide for defense.

Regarding conscience, which is the other imperative, it is the unfortunate tendency of human beings to desire to force other people to do as they see fit, out of desire for personal profit, desire for power, or arrogant assertion of the right to decide others’ consciences. In the same vein, governments tend to force men to violate their consciences, to do as the governors see fit. Consequently, humans in community need the ability to limit the power of government, and to keep it from forcing them to violate their consciences. Inasmuch as any agent or any government attempts to force individuals to obey the conscience of that agent or government, rather than permitting the individual to obey his own conscience, that agent or government steps into the role of God and usurps God’s authority.

Thus the only valid function of a government is to protect the life and property of free citizens, so that they are at liberty to do as their conscience requires them before God. Any attempt by government to serve any other function constitutes a violation of the other core principle, an attempt to remove from people their responsibility to answer personally to God. Assigning any function to government aside from the protection of life and property constitutes blasphemy. Governments protect life, liberty, and property. This is it’s only valid purpose.

The confirmation of this occurs, again, within the structure of the Old Covenant. In the one instance in human history where we know that God established a civil polity, which was the nation of Israel after the invasion of Canaan, the polity He established was a clan — a loose affiliation of family structures, each with their own clearly demarcated property, but with each person answerable to God Himself. Both their property and their liberty were inviolable; even those who came into slavery by way of debt, were released eventually in the Jubilee, and returned to their ancestral property. He also sent periodic prophetic agents, who acted, not as governors nor as rulers, but as reminders to the consciences of individuals that they each, individually and collectively, should keep the laws of God; they also acted as leaders to free the people from invading tyrants, but their leadership ended when the tyrants were overthrown. When the people of Israel decided that they wanted a monarch instead of this loose confederacy, God announced “They have rejected ME from being king over them,” (I Sam 8:7) confirming that to raise up human government to perform any function other than mere protection of liberty and property constitutes blasphemy.

The desire of humankind to replace God’s rulership with human wisdom displayed itself in Genesis 10:8-12, and in the building of Babel in Genesis 11. This is the origin point for men declaring themselves great, establishing kingships, and attempting to perfect themselves; this is also the origin of the notion that one man might rule over another by right. Both the early deific monarchs, and the much more recent Utopian political philosophies, are expressions of the spirit of Nimrod, and recreate Babel. These efforts assert human perfectibility, represent human tyranny, and earn the opposition of God.

The subtlety of satan in deceiving mankind and drawing him into blasphemy displays itself in a very common equivocation on the notion to “protect life.” One might imagine that anything a government does to make life better for its citizens constitutes a proper function under the rubric of protecting life. With this in mind, the unwary might justify the government controlling the tiniest details of human choices in any area, dictating to citizens which washing machines to buy, which fuels to use, or which health insurance to purchase. This is demonic in origin, and constitutes nothing but a Nimrodian attempt by humans to produce Utopia apart from God, by inserting government in the place of God in ruling men’s consciences. Government exerting control over choices does not protect the common good, it attempts to produce it. Government’s job is to protect, not to produce. Government produces nothing.

By the same token, the temptation to use government to meet the needs of the poor must also be avoided. Christian imperatives to do good to others are sound responses of the conscience toward God, but since each person’s conscience is owed to God alone, never to another human being or to the state, the exercise of that conscience must remain a personal choice and not a collective one. For the government to usurp the role of private charity is for the government subtly to usurp the role of God in ruling peoples’ consciences. Conscience must remain free, and the exercise of conscience, the responsibility of the individual citizen.

It remains but to dispose of a common misconception regarding a single passage in the Apostle Paul’s writings, Romans 13:1-7, in which Paul argues that Christians should keep a good conscience toward civil authority, because the power that exists was established by God. This is commonly thought to support the claim that any government in virtually any application of power has God’s imprimatur, and that it constitutes rebellion against God to resist the authority of the state in any way.

The passage does not support this absolute position, however. The matters that Paul addresses concern merely keeping the peace, and argue for the right of governments to enforce such laws as are common to all humankind — don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, and so forth. When he says “There is no authority except from God,” he is not declaring that every power the state has usurped is theirs by the approval of God, but rather, that the legitimate power of the state is limited to those things that God ordains. If the state attempts to exert power — “bear the sword” — for purposes other than those God ordains, then it acts illegitimately, without His power. However, within those central matters of common human rules that reflect the true laws of God, whatever state enforces them is enforcing the laws of God.

To assert that any government, no matter how wicked, is established by God simply by virtue of the fact that it exists, is to say something absurd, and something far beyond the context. If a parent taught his child, “Listen to your teachers, even the ones who are not Christian, because all truth is God’s truth,” is that parent asserting that anything any teacher says is therefore a truth from God? Of course not; what he’s saying, instead, is that whatever is true, is true regardless of out of whose mouth it comes. Paul, likewise, is not saying that every government represents God in all its exercises of authority, but rather that when even a secular government enforces laws that God ordained, it is defending God’s authority thereby.

The only government that rules in its entirety within the will of God, is that government that performs the simple role of protecting the ability of free citizens to provide for themselves, by arbitrating between neighbors and protecting life, liberty, and property from destroyers both within and without the community. All that any government performs within these bounds, it performs with God’s blessing. All that any government performs beyond these bounds, it performs as an act of blasphemy, taking for men that which belongs properly to God.

Next in the Theological Foundations of a Just Rebellion: Ninevah’s Repentance and Deliverance, a sermon preach’d before His Excellency, The Governor, The Honourable Council And Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New-England, on a Day of Fasting and Prayer in the Council Chamber, Dec. 3, 1740. By Joseph Sewall, D.D., Pastor of a Church of Christ in Boston.

And God saw their Works, the they turned from their evil Way, and God repented of the Evil that he had said that he would do unto them, and he did it not. Jonah 3:10.

Doctrine

1) If we would seek the Lord in a right manner, we must believe him; the threatnings (sic) and promises of his word.
2) It is the duty of a people to cry to GOD in prayer with fasting, when he threatens to bring destroying judgments upon them; and their rulers should be ready to lead in the right discharge of this duty.
3) Our seeking to GOD by prayer with fasting must be attended with true repentance, and sincere endeavours after reformation.
4) When a people do thus attend their duty, God will repent of the evil, and not bring destruction upon them.

Use

1) Learn that true religion lays the surest foundation of a people’s prosperity.
2) Abounding iniquity will be the destruction of a people, except they repent.
3) Let us then be sensible of the destroying evil of sin, and the necessity of true repentance.
4) Let us all be exhorted to turn, every one from his evil way; and to engage hearily in the necessary work of reformation.

The message specifically exhorts those who are political leaders in the colony that it is their responsibility to lead the people in repentance before God.

And as the judge of all the earth hath advanced you to rule over his people; so he declareth to you in his word, That they who rule over Men must be just, ruling in the Fear of God; and requireth you to lead in the work of reformation by your example, and by the right use of that power with which he hath betrusted you.

The message also notes a particularly bad time for the public treasury at a time of warfare, and accounts this to “the frown of Providence.” The pastor calls on the leaders to ensure that justice and equity be laid in the foundation of whatever measures they take to solve the crisis.

Finally, this message weighs against the claim made by modern critics disputing the Christian origin of American political theory that our nation’s founders were Deists. Deism is the belief that God set the universe in motion and then stepped away, leaving men to perform all the acts without His intervention. The pastor in this case takes the orthodox Protestant perspective that God is active in the affairs of men, and exalts or demolishes nations according to His pleasure, and specifically because of their righteousness or lack thereof. This position is the polar opposite of Deism, and was common among the pastors of the Revolutionary period.

The memeorandum.com display on the right indicates blog and news site traffic last night after about 8 PM, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he was going to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogators of Wahabist detainees. In case you’re not familiar with memeorandum, that display represents an unusually large amount of traffic for a single topic. I regard this as a troubling instance of the practice of politicians in power to change the subject when the public narrative is not going their way. Clearly, Obama wanted the attention off of health care.

Although changing the subject is nothing new in human communication, we got used to a particularly cynical brand of it during the Clinton years, in which the President developed the habit of firing lethal missiles at Middle Eastern targets when he needed a distraction. It’s not that there existed no good reasons to fire missiles; it’s that his use of them accomplished nothing international aside from embarrassment, and served only to take the public’s attention off of truly thorny domestic matters. We had missile-firing incidents a month before the 1994 election, a month before the 1996 election, the day Monica Lewinsky testified before the grand jury, and the day the House voted on impeachment — all just by coincidence. We also had at least one arms inspector in Iraq resign in disgust when it became clear that his job was not to find hidden weapons, but to provide PR cover for the President.

Now we’re seeing another President use the announcement of investigations to distract the public from a health care narrative that has gone badly out of control for the White House. I suppose the Obama White House is now going to return to trying to sneak the bill through under cover of night, which is their style. They’re not committing murders like the Clintons did (or are we supposed to think “brown people don’t count”?) but they are making career operatives fear for their safety who performed difficult tasks for their country.

We also heard last week that the Bush team probably asked for Homeland Security alerts in advance of interim elections. Again, this falls short of murder, and does not make government employees sweat bullets and suffer strokes, but it does make the public uneasy, not to mention the increase in cynicism when the act becomes public.

What we are seeing here is an excellent reason to note the lesson from the TFJR sermon yesterday, that genuine moral virtue and true, heartfelt service to the public good are necessary characteristics of good governors. I’m a Republican, and frequently defend the moral acceptability of Republicans over Democrats on this blog, but the standard truly has nothing to do with policy choices, it has to do with personal character. I want to vote for men and women who choose the right policies; but I want much more to vote for men and women who possess genuine moral character, and who serve the public good out of a sincere heart. The nation cannot prosper without those. They are few, and far between. Morally excellent leaders must become the norm rather than the exception. They will not become the norm unless citizens of good moral character demand it.

This highlights another feature of moral government that we had better bear in mind: morally excellent governors arise from morally excellent people. A people without moral excellence will not elect moral governors. I learned this the hard way when I lived in Mobile, Alabama back in the 1980s. The people there are largely conservative, and oppose high taxes and government encroachment on their lives. Yet, season after voting season, they re-elected the likes of Howell Heflin to the US Senate, one of the porkiest porkers ever to pork up a Senate bill. I liked my neighbors and I liked their politics, but they had the representatives they deserved. It’s a characteristic of human politics, regardless of what sort of system: people get the government they deserve. So, if we want righteous government, we had better become righteous people.

This, by the way, is why I detest the Democratic character assassination machine so deeply; it drives good people out of politics. Deliberately creating an illusion that a good person is a bad person violates the 9th commandment (”You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor”.) Democrats are good at this; it’s about the only thing at which they are good. The Democratic slime attacks against Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Clarence Thomas, Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin epitomize why Americans have so few morally excellent governors. I’m not saying that these people were moral paragons in all matters, but I am saying that the successful, partisan assaults to ruin their reputations ensure that good people will avoid politics, and that the US will elect corruptible governors.

Keep an eye out for health care initiatives in the dark of night; our sneaky, dishonest President just changed the subject.

The object of this series is to examine the political thinking of religious leaders in the colonies during the period leading up to the American Revolution.

First entry in the “Theological Foundations of a Just Rebellion” series: notes on the sermon by Benjamin Colman, preached at the Lecture in Boston before His Excellency, Jonathan Belcher, Esq., Captain General and Commnder in Chief, etc., August 13, 1730.

This is a lecture illustrating the importance the British colonies laid on government in general, and in the Christian character of their leaders. The text was from Hannah’s inspired prayer upon dedicating her 4-year-old son Samuel (later, the Prophet Samuel) to the service of the temple. I Samuel 2:8: “For the Pillars of the Earth are the Lord’s, and He hath set the World upon them.”

Doctrine:

1) The governments and rulers of the earth are it’s pillars.

First, to Colman, a “pillar” is a type of foundation; he interprets passages speaking of “pillars” and passages speaking of “foundations” as though they are speaking of the same thing. He explains that it is clear that the earth does not sit on pillars — they understood Copernican cosmology — and made reference to “thrones of princes” and “bows of mighty men” from the same passage, drawing the inference that Hannah was talking about governments. He also referred to the passage in which Paul calls James and Peter “pillars of the Church” and others speaking of humans as foundations, making the case.

This is where the meat of the sermon lies, for me: he then recites all the virtues required of rulers if they are going to fulfill their role as pillars of the earth. Since government is the pillar on which human society rests, government must uphold virtue, order, and peace. Governors must be the best from among men, with clearly “superior gifts, powers and beauties of mind.” Their goal must be the public good; they must be wise beyond mere human achievement, based on Christ. They must excel in knowledge, wisdom, integrity, uprightness, faithfulness, devotion to the common weal, unselfishness, fortitude, patience, and humility. In short, they must rule with God’s wisdom and virtue.

2) The pillars of the earth are the Lord’s.

God is both the source of the governmental order and of the virtues of the governors. He sets them up and takes them down as He pleases.

3) He has set the world upon them.

Government is a divine idea, and man cannot flourish without it. “So the peace, tranquility and flourishing of places are made to depend on the wisdom and fidelity of their rulers, in the good administration of government.”

Here again we find some meat: the desire of any single human for power comes from human sin. The government does not rest on any individual, but rests generally on virtuous men, who in turn rest on God’s power.

Use:

Colman claims that the order of good government is an indication of divine wisdom. By contrast, he regards the influence of the Catholic Church on the governments of Europe as a demonic enterprise, usurping the rightful devotion of subjects from their proper leaders. He asserts the correctness of Reformed churches in directing their congregants’ allegiances back toward their own political rulers. I believe this exhibits a version of Kuypers’ notion of Sphere Sovereignty — the idea that for a church to invade the province of government, a governor to invade the province of the Church, or either to invade the privacy of a man’s home, was a violation of the natural order.

He also asserts that pursuing a role in leadership is a matter of obedience to God; it is wrong either to “pine after honour and power, or wickedly push for it like Absolom,” but likewise wrong to shrink back from it when the divine call is plain. Colman argues for contentedness in the face of God’s sovereign choices, and for devotion to duty according to one’s station.

Finally, he notes that the heavenly reward for righteous is to be made a pillar in heaven.

Fathers of our country, let me freely say to you, that the devotion and virtue of our humble, but illustrious ancestors (the first planters of New-England), laid the foundation of our greatness among the provinces: And it is this that must continue and establish it under the divine favour & blessing. Emulate their piety and godliness, and generous regards to the publick, and be acknowledged the pillars, the strength and ornament of your country!

But let me move you by a greater argument, even a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, which the Holy Ghost has set before you in a most illustrious promise;

Rev. iii. 12. Him that overcometh will I make a Pillar in the Temple of my GOD, and he shall go no more out: And I will write upon Him the Name of my GOD, and the Name of the City of my GOD, which is New-Jerusalem; which cometh down out of Heaven from my GOD: And I will write upon Him my New-Name.

Christ will erect a monumental pillar, that shall stand for ever, in honour of all them who in their station here, be they high or low, faithfully endeavour to uphold his church and kingdom.

Government is necessary for order; religion is necessary for governors. Order arises from the godly exercise of power by divinely ordered leaders. Reward is obtained by faithfully applying oneself to one’s proper station.

America, at its roots, is a theological nation, begun by the religiously devoted and founded in perceived obedience to the law of God. The American Revolution was preached into existence from the pulpit, beginning with the Great Awakening in New England. It must be the case, then, either that the preachers who produced the American Revolution believed that rebellion against an unjust ruler was justified biblically and theologically, or that their rebellion was carried out in opposition to their religious convictions.

I find the latter explanation implausible. I do not completely understand the former, though. Although I imagine I can explain their thinking in terms more accurate than could about 98% of my fellow Americans, I am not satisfied that I understand them as well as I ought. I don’t say this out of obsessive desire for perfection, nor some confused intellectual snobbery; I want to know how liberty gets created, and what’s missing when it gets lost.

Consequently, I’m beginning a quest to understand the theological underpinnings of the American Revolution, as reflected in pre-revolutionary writings and general theological thinking. As I noted in my last post, I just borrowed a collection of politically-oriented sermons from the period, and I will proceed to read them for the next several weeks. I also intend to write about what I’m reading as I go, so my readers can share my learning and perhaps come better to understand the reasoning behind the first American Revolution.

The purpose will be ultimately to attempt to restore liberty to the American nation, first by correcting our theological thinking to grasp the essential nature of liberty, and then by directing our energy toward those goals which will most correctly achieve that sort of liberty here.

I do not expect that I will agree with everything that was preached in American during the revolutionary period. However, I do expect that I will learn a great deal about what they thought, and that my own thinking will be improved by theirs, as the level of learning in that culture was orders of magnitude more robust than what we’re taught in 21st century America.

Thus, the quest begins. I will post from time to time my notes from reading particular sermons, under the rubric “TFJR”, for Theological Foundations of a Just Rebellion. I have created an article category “TFJR” in the sidebar under Topical Index; you will be able to obtain an exhaustive display of all articles created under that designation, in reverse chronological order, by clicking on that link. I hope you all enjoy the series, and are enlightened by it.

I was wrong.

I’ve been watching the American political scene deteriorate for almost 30 years as hard leftists increased their stranglehold on the mind of the American culture, and America grew less and less able to resist the corruption of the thoughts that upheld political liberty. It’s been going on a lot longer than that, this is just how long I’ve been aware of it. I have been been expecting political persecution from the left, as those least tolerant of differences of opinion (who ironically fashion themselves the sole defenders of tolerance) grasp the reins of government in greedy hands and turn the power of the state against those who continue to defend the moral and civic virtues they themselves abandoned long ago. I expected to end up in jail, frankly, for resisting the will of tyrants. I’ve been trying to prepare myself for that eventuality. Progressives have, so far, proceeded consistently along the path I expected them to follow, and are now dismantling our liberties and consolidating their power to control.

Last night I had coffee and conversation with some of my wife’s old friends that I had not met before, and found a couple of gems that are going to alter and sharpen my thinking. The first was a collection of political sermons from the American Revolutionary period.(1) I’m already astounded by the clarity of their thoughts, and I’m filling in the gaps in my understanding of the faith that undergirded the American Revolution. Modern students have not been told, but in fact the American Revolution was preached into existence from the pulpit, and sustained from the pulpit as well. Ideas have consequences, and if we are going to reestablish the liberty they purchased for us at great price, we need to understand the ideas that led them to make the purchase, and enabled them to pay the price.

The second was a comment from my host that I regarded as a word from God, that began a correction in the thinking I described in the first paragraph. The comment appears in the title of this essay. I was thinking like a martyr, as though it were my Christian duty to patiently endure tyrants. It is not. We live in a country established as a self-governing unit, with the true and proper power deriving from the people, and only from the people. I don’t need to accept martyrdom; I need to do my job and throw off tyrants.

The Constitution of the United States begins with the words “We, the people.” That is not a literary flourish, nor is it a mere convention; it is a declaration of political philosophy. The authors of the Constitution asserted thereby that all the powers of the government derive solely from the will of the people.

The same philosophy permeates the Declaration of Independence. According to Jefferson and the men who signed the Declaration, governments derive their just powers solely from the consent of the governed, and whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government. “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” (My emphasis.)

Modern Christians seem constrained in their will to resist tyrannical government, fearing that they are violating the Apostle Paul’s (characteristically Jewish) insistence that the powers that rule, rule by the agreement of God, and to resist them is to resist God (Romans 13:1-7). “Render unto Caesar,” warns the hesitant Christian. But they forget that we, the people, are Caesar. We do not serve a government that represents God; the government serves us, and it is we, the people, who are the power that rules under the leadership of God.

God moved to establish here on the American continent a nation in which the people carry out His will, and the government carries out the peoples’ will. Any government that resists the will of the people, resists the will of God, and rules without legitimate power. And because it was God who established it, we, the people, lack the right to refrain from exercising God’s will, and lack the right to abdicate our authority. We do so at our peril.

God does not call us to be martyrs before a tyrannical American government. God calls us to be champions in resisting tyranny. God calls us to rise up and throw off tyrants. If they rule without our consent, they rule illegitimately.

Do Barack Obama and his cozy band of thugs think that objecting to their plans to impose governmental control over health care (and everything else) constitutes mob rule? I have a message for them: this mob is their employer, and insofar as they attempt to impose their control over it, they rule without permission. Does Nancy Pelosi think that the great, unwashed masses need her gentle guidance to save us from our uninformed selfishness? I have a message for her and her cronies in the House of Representatives: this unwashed mass is their employer, and insofar as they attempt to impose their control over it, they rule without permission. We, the people, are Caesar, and we, the people, owe it to God to resist tyrants in government.

If I have to suffer martyrdom in any fashion in order to resist tyrants, I’ll accept that when it comes. In the meantime, though, I accept the responsibility that falls to me by virtue of my citizenship in a free nation. It is my job to be a champion of liberty and justice, and to resist the corrupt and the tyrannical. Barack and the Democrats are both: corrupt, and tyrannical. They think they’re facing mob rule now? They ain’t seen nothing yet.

Notes:

(1) Sandoz, Ellis, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 2nd edition, 1991, Volumes I & II.

One of my readers directed my attention to this article from American Thinker, which makes the case that Congressional Democrats have already created the mechanisms through which the government will make, then enforce, care decisions according to cost-benefit algebra. Death panels are not in Obama’s plan because they already exist.

Of course, “death panel” is not precise; it’s just gruesome jargon. This portion of the health care debate rages over how, when, and by whom decisions should be made to cease treatment of the elderly or terminally ill because the cost of further care is greater than somebody wants to pay. In a sane system, care ends when the patient chooses not to pay. Under national health care, care ends when a bureaucrat chooses not to pay. Defenders of Obama’s or the Democrats’ plans love to point out that today, care ends when the insurer chooses not to pay, but they are badly mistaken for several reasons. First, shortages are not nearly so severe, and prices not so prohibitively high, when the government is not manipulating the market, so fewer such decisions are necessary in a free market; second, even if the insurer says “No,” private care is available at the patient’s expense that would not be available under a government plan; and third, appeals (and, if necessary, lawsuits) are possible with an insurer that would not be possible under a government plan. Even with insurers in the mix (who are so prominent in our current system because of government meddling), the final decision is made by the patient and his or her family where it should be made, and not by an unconnected bureaucrat.

However, the Democrats have apparently side-stepped the debate (who’s surprised?) by inserting language into unrelated legislation, the Stimulus bill. Pay attention; you’re going to learn how vague laws and unread legislation can be used to implement tyranny. This is tricky.

Critics call attention to two regulatory boards created by the Health Care portions of the Stimulus bill: the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (HIT), and the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). The HIT coordinator is the administrator responsible for building a national patient record system, a measure that will certainly improve health coordination if the system is built correctly. The portion of the Stimulus bill that creates the HIT coordinator position spells out the process of creating, coordinating, and propagating this new, central database of health information to public and private health care providers around the nation. In my mind, this is a rare measure that might actually fall within a legitimate definition of the role of the national government, and if our nation’s fiscal health were not in crisis, I might even favor it — but wait ’till you hear what’s buried in it.

The HIT legislation states that it “…reduces health care costs resulting from inefficiency, medical errors, inappropriate care, duplicative care, and incomplete information….” Then the legislation sets up the means by which a nationwide information system will be created, with review, strategic planning, testing, and financing. Finally, it says it will phase itself in over several years by paying a financial bonus to doctors and hospitals who become “meaningful users” of the system. “The Secretary [of HHS] shall seek to improve the use of electronic health records and health care quality over time by requiring more stringent measures of meaningful use selected under this paragraph,” it adds, regarding the payment standards for doctors and hospitals separately.

Now, if I were paranoid, I might note that this is vague enough that literally anything might be slipped in, in the definition of a “meaningful user.” I might further note that the bill contains a mechanism by which the Secretary of HHS might add new restrictions at will, without oversight from any source, and without the public’s knowledge. Since it is entirely at the whim of the Secretary of HHS, he or she could say that a “meaningful user” is one who uses the system’s recommendation of the most cost-effective treatment — after inserting a cost-benefit calculus into the system. In this manner, a clever definition of “meaningful user” could incent doctors and hospitals to implement a value-assessment standard for care decisions, like the one Democrats have been favoring.

Why would I be so paranoid as to imagine such a thing?

Two reasons. The first is that former Senator and nominee for HHS secretary Tom Daschle wrote a book in 2008 entitled Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, in which he described measures almost identical to those in the Stimulus bill, and explained how he would use them. His intentions and the legislation by which he would achieve them were covered back in February by New York’s former Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey in this article on Bloomberg. Since the bill she wrote about at the time was an interim version, I verified that the wording on which she reported actually remained in the final bill. It’s all there. With Daschle or somebody familiar with his intentions at HHS (like, say, the radically pro-abortion Kathleen Sebelius), we can expect doctors and hospitals to be required to use the new patient and treatment database as a means of restricting care by cost, or forfeit healthy incentive payments by the government.

The second reason is the other commission, Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). Remember when I said that given fiscal health, I might even favor the national patient information system? The Comparative Effectiveness Research body is another story; the government has no business performing this analysis at all.

“Comparative effectiveness” is jargon in the Progressive policy world for rationing on the basis of cost-benefit analysis, using language uncomfortably reminiscent of the Eugenics craze of the early 20th century. Naturally, the language speaks of “social justice,” but such justice is defined as certain citizens sacrificing their rights (not voluntarily) for the benefit of other citizens who produce more. You are blessed, citizen! You have been selected to sacrifice for the good of all! And it speaks of the “maturity” to enact such “difficult” measures, like this smug essay by a medical school prof at UCSF.

Take the comments by CER board member Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm’s brother), taken from recent medical journals by Betsy McCaughey:

…Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (JAMA, Feb. 27, 2008).

Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31).

By Emanuel’s logic, discrimination against blacks, women, gays, Jews or any other group would be justifiable, so long as that group is given the opportunity to pay it back against their oppressors at some other time. This is insane, but it’s the sort of rationalization that has been going on for years among Progressives, who wonder whether humankind is a cancer on the planet.

The CER panel is modeled after the board in the UK’s national health system called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE. NICE is, simply put, the UK’s health care rationing board. It decides what sort of care is appropriate on the basis of a cost-benefit calculus that says that Britain can only afford to spend up to $22,000 to extend a life for 6 months.

From the Wall Street Journal:

What NICE has become in practice is a rationing board. As health costs have exploded in Britain as in most developed countries, NICE has become the heavy that reduces spending by limiting the treatments that 61 million citizens are allowed to receive through the NHS. For example:

In March, NICE ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer. This followed on a 2008 ruling against drugs — including Sutent, which costs about $50,000 — that would help terminally ill kidney-cancer patients. After last year’s ruling, Peter Littlejohns, NICE’s clinical and public health director, noted that “there is a limited pot of money,” that the drugs were of “marginal benefit at quite often an extreme cost,” and the money might be better spent elsewhere.

In 2007, the board restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, a cause of blindness. The drug Macugen was blocked outright. The other, Lucentis, was limited to a particular category of individuals with the disease, restricting it to about one in five sufferers. Even then, the drug was only approved for use in one eye, meaning those lucky enough to get it would still go blind in the other. As Andrew Dillon, the chief executive of NICE, explained at the time: “When treatments are very expensive, we have to use them where they give the most benefit to patients.”

And it is this board that the Stimulus bill recreates in the form of the CER. But it is delusional to think that Obama’s health care proposal contains death panels. We’re bearing false witness, says the most patently dishonest President in our history (yes, worse than Clinton.) With all due respect, Mr. President, you can shove that self-righteous posturing right up your ass.

McCaughey, in the Bloomberg article, states that the Stimulus bill language requires that Medicare care decisions include the findings of the CER. This is not entirely clear in the language, but then, that’s the point. The Secretary of HHS has latitude to define a “meaningful user” as anything he wishes, and to impose more stringent standards as time goes along. Without oversight. Or letting anybody know, aside from the hospitals who must comply if they are to be reimbursed for installing the patient records system.

No, there are no laws saying “We are going to withhold care from granny.” Who was naive enough to imagine that there would be, if such a thing were to come about? But Daschle explained how he would slip it in, empowering an unelected bureaucracy to make the hard decisions about health care rationing that elected politicians are politically unable to make. They are unaccountable for our good, don’t you see?

The demographic impact of the Baby Boom on medical care and Social Security has been apparent for some time now. It has been amplified by the loss of 50 million potential wage-earners to abortions. But now, it appears that Progressives have chosen to deny the Boomers any say in their own demise; simply because it is convenient, not to mention consistent with their misanthropic world view, the Obama administration is preparing to solve the demographic crisis by simply allowing the Boomers to die with only minimal care. He’ll never say so, of course. We’re bearing false witness if we mention it. Holocausts never arrive through the front door.

I have spent far too little time documenting the new “Czar” structure of the Obama administration. Better late than never, I suppose.

Czarring is really just appointing an administrator to oversee and coordinate a particular executive function. Many Presidents have one, some two or three, and most recently, George W. Bush appointed more than anyone before him, with something like 19 different “czars,” many of them ad hoc appointments for temporary matters (he had a Katrina Czar, and a Bird Flu Czar.) But the Obama administration has outdone them all, with the President having already appointed some 35 individuals to head new administrative teams reporting to the White House.

As near as I can determine, the practice is Constitutionally iffy. Article II, section 2, clause 2 seems to assume that Congress retains power to confirm Presidential appointments of minor officers in the Executive branch, and can only refrain if it does so explicitly. The same clause seems to imply that executive departments can only be established by acts of Congress, although I doubt that that provision has ever been enforced.

At any rate, the real entertainment associated with all these Executive underlings has been reading the ideas these folks have expressed prior to being appointed to the government. It appears that President Obama has taken to appointing whoever has “progressive” ideas of note and wants a chance to try them out. Some of these ideas have been… interesting.

The latest in the string of “Czar” appointments was the appointment of the Chief Diversity Officer at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Diversity Officer, you ask? Well, apparently the position has never existed before, but now President Obama has created it, and installed in it an attorney named Mark Lloyd, formerly Senior Fellow at the ultra-liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress. Mr. Lloyd has some… ahem… novel ideas about how the government can solve for everybody the horrendous problem the citizenry has been railing about forever, the absence of “progressive” voices in media. Yes, you heard that right.

You see, the fact that leftists utterly control every newsroom of every major television network in America other than Fox, that leftists control perhaps 90% of major market newpaper newsrooms, that leftists dominate scriptwriting and production in television and film, that leftists completely dominate popular music, and that there is practically no such thing as an artist who is not a leftist of some stripe, progressives like Lloyd have expressed outrage that in most radio markets, nearly all the partisan talk shows are conservative. It’s just. Not. Fair.

In a June 2007 paper entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” Lloyd (with 9 others) observed that 91% of talk radio programming is conservative, and only 9% is “progressive.” This does not include government subsidized, mostly leftward-leaning public radio stations, which don’t count because… well, golly, they just don’t. Pay no attention to those government-paid men behind the curtain. The reason for the disparity is as follows:

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management.

If you have your LeftSpeak Jargon Translator turned off, the above translates to “conservatives are talking because we have not officially shut them up yet.” You’ll notice, of course, that consumer demand is missing from the list of the causes of the disparity; it cannot be that there is a lot more conservative talk radio because the public is willing to pay for and listen to a lot more of it. Oh, no. The report does consider the argument that demand causes the disparity, but it dismisses it. It can’t be that, you see, because conservatives are not even half of the total market, but more than 90% of the shows are conservative (not counting NPR and the like.) What’s worse, in the few markets where a leftist talk show is performing well, there is only one such talk show, but there are as many as four conservative talk shows. It’s. Not. Fair. And of course, there’s no reason to consider how nicely the left’s taste for hearing its own talking points gets satisfied by movies, music, TV, the arts, mainstream newspapers, and network “news” programs (”60 Minutes? Middle-of-the-road, of course,) which would explain why leftists feel no urge to listen to radio for information or support. We have to consider radio in a vacuum. It’s the only fair way.

So how can the government solve this awful disparity that the clearly expressed taste of the public has created? How can the government force radio stations to air programming that is truly fair and balanced? Why, by threatening to remove stations’ broadcast licenses every three years if they don’t “serve the public interest” as defined by… well, by Progressives (shouldn’t the public interest be defined by, I dunno, the public?) And by limiting the size of the company that is permitted to control the radio station — because everybody knows that Big Corporations cannot run local radio stations that meet local demand.

New Diversity Czar Lloyd also wrote some ideas in a book entitled Prologue to a Farce in 2006. I’ve not read the book (apparently, very few have), but blurbs suggest that it claims that the fact that communications are carried out by Evil Corporations® means that people cannot find out what they need to find out for a free society. Consequently, Good Progressives® have to correct the Evil produced by these Evil Corporations®, so people get to hear what they genuinely want to hear, instead of what they pay to hear by supporting advertisers. See how easy it is?

In order to tame these Evil Corporations®, apparently Lloyd suggests that the FCC levy a fine on corporate broadcasters equal to — wait for it — equal to their entire operating expenditures. The proceeds would go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (ok, now public broadcasting counts. Because… um… well, it just does.) And of course, no Big Corporate Broadcaster is going to exit the radio business because they’re being forced to double their expenditures to support their competitors. Big Corporations have unlimited funds, and do not really need to earn a profit. It’s in the public interest. They’ll surely see their responsibility.

Land of the free. Home of the brave.

Listen to Glen Beck discussing the ideas from the book with Seton Motley from the Media Research Center, and brace yourself for American Liberty, Progressive Style. For darkhorse’s sake, though, let’s remember that Czar Lloyd has not actually proposed these ideas as FCC regulations yet, so it constitutes Obama Derangement to suggest that he might consider doing what he’s advocated at some future time. There is no cause to be concerned. All is well. All is well.

Everybody has written about this one: Michelle Malkin, Bobby Eberle, Newsbusters, CNS News. Hat tip goes to Eberle and GOPUSA for the Beck clip.

President Obama’s health care proposal continues to threaten to add $1 trillion to the national budget over the next 10 years (certainly an underestimate, by the way) without a word regarding how we’ll raise the money to pay for it. An objective observer might consider this a prima facie reason to reject the plan out of hand, but proponents, who refuse to believe the Emporer really has not clothes on, frequently mention how the preventive care portions of the plan will actually lower costs — which sounds remarkably like what certain shopping-addicted women say about the extra pair of shoes that they didn’t need but bought on sale for $85 more than they could afford.

It does not matter; Charles Krauthamer yesterday cruelly poured cold water on the prevention fantasy. It turns out that even successful preventative care schemes cost more than treating the diseases they prevent.

Impossible? Not at all. You see, preventing a serious disease does reduce the cost of treating that one individual; but in order to catch that one case early. you have to screen hundreds, possibly thousands of cases who will test negative, and all that screening costs money.

Krauthamer confirms:

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.

That’s a hypothetical case. What’s the real-life actuality in the United States today? A study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, “if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success,” the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country’s total medical bill by 162 percent. Elmendorf additionally cites a definitive assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviewed hundreds of studies on preventive care and found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs.

This is not to say that screening should not take place, of course. It’s simply a reality check; preventive care does not reduce costs. It never has. It never will.

Now, what might really save us a bundle is if we rolled time back to the 1950s, banned preservatives and food colorants the way the French did back then, and then continued forward eating nothing but fresh, local foods. We’d all be healthier, (not to mention that small, family farms might still exist if we’d done that). A trip or two to the gym might not hurt, either. But preventive care is not going to pay for the new national health boondoggle, and no amount of wishful rationalization is going to make it even come close.