Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • A Note on Independent Voters

    I’m sure it’s a requirement that political commentators try to discover trends in voting patterns. It’s also not surprising that they try to make those trends deal with either the Democratic or the Republican parties. But I think that they simply don’t comprehend the meaning of “independent.”

    I’m just one independent voter. I won’t register as a member of either of the major parties, and I truly vote independently. I examine everything I can find about each candidate in a race. (Have you ever tried to discover anything useful about candidates for the district utility board?) When I vote, it is a decision that the particular candidate is the best person in that race and in that race only. It doesn’t mean I’m likely to vote for the same person next year. If that candidate is a Democrat is doesn’t mean I’m suddenly leaning Democrat. If he or she is Republican, it doesn’t mean I’m leaning Republican.

    For me, the meaning of being an independent voter is that those labels don’t impact the way I vote, except with reference to how party connections might impact the way a particular candidate will govern. I cannot be counted on for a trend. It’s back to a clean slate in each election.

    I don’t know how well that applies to independent voters in general, but the unscientific poll of the independent voters I know, including a few who are registered with a party so that they can participate in primaries, but are no more loyal to the party label than I am, indicates that it’s a pretty common feeling. Party endorsement of a candidate means nothing. Each candidate must earn respect.

    For myself, I will add that I don’t favor or disfavor the incumbent. Since I go out of my way to study the candidates, I will know the names of all of them. I’m never voting on name recognition.

    So don’t seek a trend. I’m not starting to lean one way or another. If the candidates of the major parties–or any party–want my vote, they must earn it 100% for each candidacy.

  • Ed Brayton on Fox News Bashing

    … here, and for the most part I agree with him. I think there is a certain justification for media bashing, simply because journalists keep expecting us to regard them as unbiased when they are not. But the bashing isn’t unbiased either … and so on ad infinitum.

    One of the key skills required today, I think is distinguishing the data points from the opinion and the framing, and then trying to reframe the issue for yourself from the data points. Of course, learning how to fact check is also quite useful.

    But Ed is quite correct–there is no such thing as purely objective reporting.

  • Prayer in a Public Meeting

    If I were invited to offer the invocation at a government event at which people of any faith should be welcome, I would have to refuse. This is a stand that has been misunderstood by both supporters and opponents of separation of church and state. I have been told that I lack the courage of my convictions because I would not go and utter a purely Christian prayer under those circumstances. Of course, I must note that it is not the courage of my convictions that is lacking, but rather I don’t have the courage of someone else’s convictions. On the other hand I have been told that I am intolerant because I will not offer an interfaith prayer.

    I was reminded of this issue today when Wesley Elsberry linked to this story about a council member in Tampa who chides speakers for offering too sectarian of prayers, which she believes violates the separation of church and state.

    I have an initial issue that I’m not going to address in detail, and that is how it can be that a prayer in general doesn’t violate church and state separation, yet a prayer in the name of Jesus does. The first would seem to exclude all those who either do not believe in God at all or do not believe in a way that includes the validity of prayer.

    And that does relate to my problem a little bit. Personally I think prayer is largely personal. Now I don’t mean it can’t be public. Matthew 6:5-6 has been cited ad nauseum as a prohibition of all forms of public prayer, but I think that verse has been asked to bear an excessive weight. Jesus is addressing making a show of one’s piety. When might one pray publicly and not be making a show of one’s piety? In my view, that would be a case of corporate prayer, when a group of people join together in prayer.

    Corporate prayer involves a certain amount of agreement, a certain commonness of purpose in worship. When I am asked to pray publicly, I do not feel that I need to preach a sermon in prayer. I’m sometimes a bit amused when someone informs God of all the things that the congregation needs to know, normally while saying something like “you know Lord …”

    My conviction is that if I am offering my prayer publicly, but it is not a corporate prayer, it automatically becomes a show. I should not pray something corporately that I cannot fully invite everyone to participate in, as I would in a pastoral prayer, or an invocation in a Sunday School class, or in a group offering the blessing over a meal. I have even left out praying before a meal when meeting with non-believing friends. They know my convictions, and I don’t think God will miss the meal because I chose not to impose my beliefs on a group.

    I do think that invocations at governmental meetings are a public show. The council (or congress) as a whole is not going to seek God’s will. The meeting should be welcoming to all citizens, not just those who pray, and the prayer cannot be offered in real unity nor in any sort of expectation of obedience. I believe that a critical part of prayer is listening, something that should be included in our acts of prayer as congregations.

    Are there any ecumenical or interfaith circumstances under which I do believe I can pray? Yes, I believe so. I can do so in practically any ecumenical setting, though I will shape my prayer to the best of my ability so as to make it truly corporate. I can and have engaged in prayer in an interfaith setting where all believe in God and all believe in prayer.

    The latter is a bit difficult for me, as my view of both ecumenism and interfaith dialog is that it is a conversation between strongly held beliefs, not a least common denominator collection. I think that continuing constructive conversation is much more important than is some sort of structural unity.

    So I would say that the council member in the story is only half right. Were I invited to pray at that council, or any other, I would just say no. I’d pray for them at home or with others of like mind. I’d be happy if the individuals prayed according to their conscience and understanding of God.

    The public display? No.

  • FTC Disclosure Rules for Blogs

    Over on my company blog I indicated that these rules were generally common sense, as in if you make money off of something you should disclose the fact that you do.

    Of course, you can’t count on the government to use common sense even in implementing common sense. Thus somehow if print news organizations get free copies for review, they don’t have to disclose it, but bloggers must. Even an affiliate link is compensation and must be disclosed.

    I don’t have problem with the disclosure requirement. In fact, I try to be more forthcoming that is required. I do have a problem with the idea that we need government regulators to do this sort of thing. I think it’s a pretty clear example of how to waste taxpayer money while accomplishing less than good competition would manage.

    There’s a good article and discussion at Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits.

  • The Death of Good Judgment

    I’ve really been wanting to write something about this for some time, but I haven’t, and don’t, have time to do it justice. But I saw a couple of other posts that begin to address some of the issues.

    My deep concern is with ideas such as zero tolerance polices, the great push to make the foibles of youth into major crimes, and finally the equivalent push to move more and more juvenile crimes to adult courts.

    I think there are genuine reasons to be concerned about the juvenile justice system. There are good reasons to put certain young offenders into the adult system. The problem is that the public seems to be much more concerned about being hard on criminals than about solving problems of crime.

    Making sex offenders out of teens involved in sexting is a good example of the legal system run amuck. This is much more properly a parental issue than one for the state. Only in extreme cases of parental neglect should the state get involved, and then I would suggest the involvement should be with parents. In no way do I want this to make things easier for purveyors of child porn–adult pornographers preying on children. They’re scum and we need to go after them. But using the same laws on teenagers playing around, even if one can stretch the letter of the statute to fit, is nothing other than malicious.

    Having said all that, let me link to a couple of recent blog posts that called my attention back to this.

    The first is a post on a new blog for me, AnotherThink, which I found via C.Orthodoxy. I find myself thoroughly in agreement with the sentiments expressed in that article, and have added the blog to my RSS reader.

    The second comes from the blog Classically Liberal, and describes the case of a six year old cub scout who brings, you probably guessed it, a multifunction knife to school. But instead of sanity, the school has a zero tolerance policy. Now they want the child taken to juvenile court. Sounds like an excellent reason to homeschool.

    Both of these cases illustrate a lack of willingness to permit and/or to exercise simple good judgment. One can determine not to tolerate a weapon at school without simultaneously overreacting to either mistakes or purely innocent actions. But we prefer to hide beyond a policy that requires merely the application of a detailed set of rules without any regard for how those rules work out in practice.

    I said two things, but here’s another I remembered, Hoosier Grandmother Arrested for Purchasing Cold Medication. This was surely a case for the application of some good judgment, which was not forthcoming. Of course, I would blame the legislators who passed the law in that form in the first place.

    I realize that criticism and court cases against people that exercise judgment make people afraid to do anything that’s not micromanaged by the book. I continue to believe that such an attitude will be ultimately very destructive.

  • President Obama and the Peace Prize

    This is just a quick early reaction, and my reaction is that it is too early to judge President Obama’s impact on world peace. Yet he has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for which nominations were closed two weeks after he took office.

    I want to be clear that what I like most about President Obama is his approach to foreign policy. I think it is much needed. This includes the fact that he has a bipartisan team. One of the key elements of any foreign policy is sustainability and a purely one-party approach isn’t sustainable.

    But I think the single most important element of any policy, provided it is morally and ethically justifiable, is its long term effectiveness. In public policy we seem to want to proclaim a plan for accomplishing something, or sometimes even just the intent to accomplish it, and then act as though we have succeeded.

    It is as though I wrote a new family budget, itemizing savings in various categories, and then started spending the money before I had actually lived on the new budget, and successfully saved the claimed amounts. (Watch as this happens in the health care debate–we’re spending money we imagine we’ll save.)

    In foreign policy, President Obama has declared a new era of engagement with the world, but he has done, as yet, very little actual engaging, and what he has done, has yet to be evaluated. I’m optimistic about many of these things, but optimism isn’t success.

    I think this is very much premature, and is much more of a political message than an award for actual accomplishment. I would hope the president can fill the shoes for which supporters, well-wishers, and starry-eyed dreamers have fitted him, but that would be impossible. Unrealistic expectations beget disappointment. Every stumble–and there will doubtless be some–will now look larger than life. He can now do exceptionally well, and yet be regarded as a failure.

  • Giving Away a copy of Preserving Democracy

    … on the Energion.com eZine, which is currently in development. But I’m trying to bring a few people over there, so a copy of Preserving Democracy will be given to a randomly selected commenter who writes a relevant comment.

    In mid-October I will be changing the topic to science education, and offering a $10 B&N gift card. The Energion.com eZine will go into full production in January 2010, but even now I am paying for a few articles and offering a few prizes.

    I now return you to the normal, more personal, content of this blog.

  • Singing Praise to President Obama?

    CBS is reporting on a school that has children singing songs about President Obama’s accomplishments. I note that the story compares the reaction to this to the reaction to Obama giving a speech. I thought the speech reaction was way overblown. The president of the United States should be able to address the nation, and to address schoolchildren as well.

    But even in the context of Black history month as the school superintendent said this was, I think this is deplorable. Use historical figures, celebrate current African-American citizens, celebrate President Obama as our first African-American president, but leave out the songs of praise for his specific policies.

    In both religion and politics, it seems some teachers fail to comprehend the idea of neutrality.

    HT: Dispatches

  • Doing Something

    Talk is cheap, and I’m a good talker. This past Sunday I visited a new Sunday School class and met a young man who told me that he was opposed to abortion. He went on to say that he believed that if you talked about something you should be willing to act, and in his case, that meant going out and getting the home study done and being willing to adopt. He and his wife had done precisely that and had adopted an older child.

    I deeply respect someone who takes that sort of action. There are many ways in which one can act. Some of us are called upon to proclaim, but even then I think the proclamation gets weak if one isn’t personally involved in taking action in some way.

    Today Allan Bevere has a great post on the health care debate and how the church should be engaged. What can we do? Do we really believe the gospel has power? Consider this near Allan’s conclusion:

    … But in the midst of the debate over how the Principality and Power called the United States can initiate health care reform, I believe that the church should be ahead of the game and work to cover as many people as it possibly can, and thereby demonstrate a powerful witness to others concerning what is possible. The church is a sleeping giant with resources available to it, both spiritual and physical, that can shake the very foundations of every civilization, but they are under-utilized because we continue to think the nation-state is where the real action is. We continue to believe that Caesar is more effective in accomplishing tasks than the people of God brought into existence by nothing less than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. [emphasis mine]

    I think our greatest difficulty with sharing or proclaiming the gospel in this country is that we do not show the power of the gospel in the way we live as a church. If the gospel has power–resurrection power–then we should be able to point to something to show for it, as the early disciples pointed to an empty tomb.

  • A Survey

    My wife received a “survey” from the Republican party. Now let me make one thing clear up front. I have seen polls from Democrats that follow this same pattern. This isn’t an issue of one party or another.

    This survey purports to seek the opinions of the “Neufeld Household” (though of course it is not directed to me, the registered independent) regarding a number of political issues. The questions, however, are not written to elicit information, but to charge up supporters and to raise money. Nobody writing the survey thinks anything else, I’m sure.

    For example, the question on judges:

    Do you believe that Barack Obama’s nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U. S. Senate?

    Nobody (well, there may be an insane person or so) actually believes the nominees should be approved without any question. Many, however, disagree on how much scrutiny and the nature of the scrutiny. For what it’s worth, I personally think the senate is generally doing a poor job on judicial appointments. I don’t see any reason at all that ideology should not be considered when voting to confirm or not. But the arguments tend to change hands.

    The subtext here is that Republican readers of the poll are expected to be annoyed at the senate’s swift approval of judges they don’t like. A similar poll question could have been written regarding some of Bush’s appointees for a Democratic survey.

    But my purpose is not to discuss the various issues with regard to the senate’s responsibilities. Rather, I’d like to comment on why a “survey” such as this works at all.

    The answer there is simply that too few people seriously study out the issue and thus are vulnerable to being charged up by one-liners, even in the form of a fake survey. My wife glanced through this–it was, after all, addressed to her–and simply said, “This is insulting to my intelligence.” I happen to know she would agree with the intent of a number of the questions, to the extent that one can discover such intent. It’s the form and some of the specific wording of the questions that is annoying.

    Even I agree with some of the points, such as a question that asks if we have gone too far in bailing out banks, insurance companies, and the auto industry. Indeed I do. I think we went too far when we bailed out the first one. But that bailout was proposed by a Republican president. And no, Democrats should take no comfort from that fact, as they have carried this further than that Republican president proposed.

    But this isn’t a survey. It doesn’t detail any kind of proposed solutions. It doesn’t discuss. It doesn’t educate. On the other hand, it works. Why? Because there are many people who don’t keep up with what is going on themselves, and don’t seriously study the issues.

    I agree with my wife. The fake survey route for raising the cash is an insult to the intelligence of voters. The fact that many are not insulted simply encourages politicians to continue to play a shallow game.