Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Politics

  • Jena – Not Racist, but . . .

    I found an interesting quote in this MSNBC story on the [tag]Jena 6[/tag] that explains why I have been very concerned about this event from when I first read about it. (I have been following this mostly via Pursuing Holiness, with her latest post here, and only occasionally reading other stories.)

    Here’s the quote:

    The white teen who was beaten, Justin Barker, was knocked unconscious, his face badly swollen and bloodied, though he was able to attend a school function later that night.

    . . . yet the initial charge was attempted murder. I don’t see how the prosecutor can say this with a straight face:

    “This case has been portrayed by the news media as being about race,” he said. “And the fact that it takes place in a small southern town lends itself to that portrayal. But it is not and never has been about race. It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions.”

    No, it’s not about holding people accountable–it’s about losing one’s sense of proportion. Should they young men involved in such a beating be held accountable? Certainly. Is an attempted murder charge “accountability” for what they did? No, it’s well out of balance. Bluntly, the [tag]racism[/tag] is clearly present.

    I also don’t buy the whine that there was nothing that could be done about the kids who hung the nooses. That indicates a severe lack of creativity. The assumption appears to be that if you can’t charge those kids under a law, there is nothing that can be done. But the school and the town definitely could have done something, had they taken the event seriously. (And no, they should go over the top about that either. “Deal with” doesn’t necessarily mean “go nuts.”)

    I hope that the rally today will shake some people up and make them look inside themselves and reconsider their attitudes. Probably most will simply become more angry, but I can always hope!

  • Fred Thompson, Conservatism, and Federalism

    Joe Carter is losing some of his first love for [tag]Fred Thompson[/tag]. He says:

    Now I’m not so certain. His views of the federal marriage amendment, the Schiavo case, and his general position on federalism are troubling. For me, conservatism trumps federalism, while the position Thompson endorses seem to reverse that order.

    On the fundamental point, I agree with Carter. [tag]Federalism[/tag] is not essentially conservative or liberal. It’s simply a way that we divide power. But I must say that this tendency on the part of Thompson, of which I wasn’t aware, makes me much more likely to look at him myself. I’m afraid I don’t see why conservatives would be annoyed by his view on the [tag]federal marriage amendment[/tag] (I would oppose any federal amendment on this issue), and his view on the Schiavo case, insofar as I’ve read it, is right on.

    I’m an advocate of federalism, and even believe we should roll back a significant amount of the centralization that we have done thus far, and I’m somewhere center-left on social issues and lean libertarian otherwise. I guess that makes me a poster child for the “federalism is not essentially conservative” view.

    The main reason I wanted to call attention to this post, however, is because it expresses conservative goals much more clearly than many others. Some believe that one should vote for conservatives as a way to support federalism. In fact, social conservatives see their socially conservative goals as more important than the constitutional form of government and the 10th amendment in particular.

  • Like Us or Die

    Here’s another case: Leader offers $100,000 for cartoonist’s death.

    The head of an al-Qaida-led group in Iraq offered $100,000 for the killing of Swedish cartoonist [tag]Lars Vilks[/tag] over his drawing depicting the Prophet Mohammad.

    I’ll say again what I have said before. Blasphemy should not be illegal. I believe in [tag]free speech[/tag] when it’s engaged against my own faith. I don’t change my mind when it’s going against someone else. Muslim leaders who offer this kind of reward simply reflect badly on [tag]Islam[/tag]

  • Prison Book Censorship

    This program, as reported in the New York Times concerns me, not so much because I think the [tag]prison[/tag] officials are biased in their selections, but because the approach appears to be overkill–a massive and sweeping solution to a very small problem.

    I would hope the prison officials would reconsider and go instead to a list of books that are forbidden because they clearly incite violence. Limiting the list to 150 books on a religion category is ridiculous.

    HT: Crossinator

  • Arecibo Observatory

    MSNBC reports that funding may be cut off for the Arecibo Observatory.

    But among astronomers, Arecibo is an icon of hard science. Its instruments have netted a decades-long string of discoveries about the structure and evolution of the universe. Its high-powered radar has mapped in exquisite detail the surfaces and interiors of neighboring planets.

    . . . and later another interesting wrinkle:

    One is that Arecibo is home to what is widely regarded as the world’s foremost upper atmosphere and “space weather” research center. Funded at about $2 million by a separate NSF division, the center studies the impacts of solar flares on satellite and cellphone communication; evaluates climate change; and has developed methods for cleaning up the atmosphere after a nuclear attack.

    That one would have to close as well.

    I would think that this would rank high on the list of scientific projects that should be funded, what with its uses in weather studies as well as in studies of near objects in the solar system. Personally, I prefer that most scientific research be privately funded, and I welcome the increasing private participation in space research, but we are funding some projects, and this one seems like a good one with long term impact. Theoretical research may not be sexy for the politicians, but it is critical for the long term progress of science.

    It would be a good idea to start distinguishing between investment in the future and simple expenditure of money.

  • Christian Politics

    I appreciated this post from Monastic Mumblings. (HT: The Moderate Christian Blogroll [RSS])

    I would like two add just a couple of notes. First, I think we begin to depend on politics when we cease to depend on the gospel. If we truly believe that Jesus can change lives, then we also must believe that we have a better weapon to use fighting against evil than the law.

    Second, I think it’s dangerous when we place our focus on being right about information, rather than on living right and on being in right relationship. Do I mean righteousness by works? No. That is simply another form of being right about things. Our right relationship with God should not make us feel better than other people. We simply have received more grace.

    Finally, while the article I referenced is largely about the religious right, I think we must be careful never to make a political stance the equivalent of being Christian. There are activities we can definitely point to as un-Christlike, but we should not make a political philosophy–a strategy for living in this world–our criteria for one’s place in the next. That applies not just to [tag]right wing[/tag] politics (which I opposed), but to [tag]moderates[/tag] (with which I identify) and to [tag]liberals[/tag] (who make me more comfortable than the right wingers). None is a necessary aspect of faith, and none are excluded from the label “brother or sister” based on their view.

  • Corrupt Politicians and Shrill Partisans

    OK, I’m shocked and amazed. Well, not so much. This time it’s Democrats, as the FBI arrests officials in New Jersey. This story just reminded me that people who have power will be tempted, and some of them will turn out to be corrupt. The question is what we’ll do about it. In this case, the FBI seems to have answered that one.

    But this reminded me of this post which tells us how awesomely horrible George W. Bush is, followed by comments in which various people repeatedly discuss how truly horrible the current president is.

    It happens I’m not a George W. Bush fan. I think the war in Iraq was a strategic mistake. But get some perspective folks! You can oppose someone without regarding them as corrupt. You can disagree, even on major issues, without assuming they are stupid. People can disagree on intelligence assessments without being congenital liars. Do preconceptions impact intelligence reports? Sure they do. Is that right? No. The appropriate congressional oversight committees should do their jobs when it does. (They probably won’t. They usually have their own agendas!)

    Some very smart people disagree with me on the war in Iraq. How do I know that? Well, first, I don’t make the assumption that disagreeing with me is the equivalent of being stupid. If I assume that, everyone who disagrees is stupid by definition. But supposing that I eliminate that one question from consideration. Is the person smart in other ways? If so, I should consider the possibility that an intelligent person can disagree. I know a fair number of them.

    Is it hard? Sometimes it certainly is. The Iraq war seems wrong to me in so many different ways that I have a hard time understanding how someone can support it. But I’ve had intelligent conversations with people who do.

    It’s interesting watching liberals get all frothy about W, because here in the Florida panhandle it was much like that during the Clinton administration, only it was the conservatives who were over the top. They would have a hard time telling me precisely what was so awful about what Clinton had done compared to Republican administrations. It sounded to me like they just disagreed with him on policy. But to many of them, Bill Clinton was a strong candidate for the antichrist.

    They have similar feelings about Hillary Clinton. There’s a certain “anyone but Clinton” attitude down here in these parts, because while they hated Bill Clinton for reasons passing understanding they reserved greater vitriol for his wife.

    And that’s where I come full circle to corruption. Partisans on both sides want to use the fact that some politicians are corrupt as leverage to get their own party into power. Thus they will try to spin corruption so that it falls largely on one party or the other. To hear the partisans, there’s always an excuse when “their” politician fails, but there’s never any excuse for the other politician. Republicans who were involved in impeaching Bill Clinton certainly don’t think it’s an appropriate remedy in the case of George W. Bush.

    Unfortunately this tactic often works, because people don’t really study candidates and issues in any detail. Whoever can work the media just right to make the other guy look more corrupt without crossing an invisible line and losing support for being nasty and mean will become a winner. That’s what we need to avoid.

    The discovery that a candidate who supports your views otherwise is corrupt should not cause you to vote for an opponent whose views you despise. It should make you look for a different candidate who supports your views. Corrupt people will get into office. Get over it. That’s why we have terms of office and elections. We can throw them all out.

    The partisans who are pushing corruption as an issue that favors one party over the other are doing themselves and the nation a disservice. Unfortunately, the greatest–and final–disservice is done by voters who let themselves be influenced by a general smear without digging out the specifics.

    If the voters were intelligent, 30 and 60 second ads would have no impact on a campaign. People would ignore them as the trash that they are.

  • As Long as They’re Not Saying Anything

    . . . why should I listen?

    This story from MSNBC discusses how Fred Thompson upstaged the Republican debate. Since I’m an independent, these debates are generally of limited interest to me, though I do like to follow the candidates so as to have prior knowledge about the nominees.

    What surprised me here was that anyone would think that people might be more interested in the debate than in the new announcement. For the moment, Thompson has one advantage over everyone else: He’s new. We will all wait anxiously (well, not so much me) to see if he’ll say anything substantially different. If (I suspect “when”) he doesn’t, we can go back to being bored.

    As long as we put up with this sort of campaign with canned talking points that are rolled out in answer to every question we’ll just get more of it. We need some free-for-all presidential debates in which candidates can’t dodge the questions and in which they’ll be told outright that they didn’t answer a question when they don’t.

    OK, enough whining I think! Back to our regular programming.

  • Larry Craig, Family Values, and Hypocrisy

    I generally try to avoid scandal stories about celebrities, though I’m much more often tempted to read, listen, and comment when they involve political figures. Listening to the arrest interview tape of Senator Larry Craig was an interesting experience. I was immediately struck by how naive I am at age 50. None of the conversation made any sense to me. I’ll have to take other people’s word for it that this was clearly soliciting. In the end, I can’t imagine he actually plead guilty even though he was innocent. Surely a politician of his experience realized the story wouldn’t stay hidden forever.

    I want to make a few comments on the reaction. Democrats are pretty happy, of course, to see another Republican get caught with his pants down, so to speak. Republicans have a harder time defending this one, though there is clearly a willingness in congress to let things pass if they can get by with it. With the information age, such behavior becomes less and less possible, and politicians will realize that if they want to be surviving politicians.

    For many conservatives, it seems that the media reaction is the main part of the story. The media focuses in on the hypocrisy issue, and this bothers them. Surely the basic moral issue is more important. Well, from a Christian moral perspective we have several issues.

    First is that this is a married man who is engaged in infidelity. I think that fact must concern us whatever we believe about homosexuality and its compatibility with Christian faith. Yes, there are many pressures that are put on a gay man by the moral disapprobation of homosexuality, but at the same time there is the sacred vow of marriage. I would suggest that any time we choose to loudly proclaim a set of values that we are not and/or cannot live up to, we are simply asking for the pressures to build. Senator Craig set about gaining power in a subset of society that disapproved of who he was. I know he denies being gay, but at the least it seems he had some tendencies, tendencies that would not be approved by his colleagues. He put everyone around him at high risk by his behavior.

    Secondly, this isn’t directly about homosexuality. Being gay is not about seeking illicit sex in restrooms. This act is dangerous quite apart from any moral view of homosexuality. We should not view this act as any different from that of Senator David Vitter in going to a prostitute. Now there are other points about the two stories that are different, but the type of sex outside of his marriage that was sought by Senator Craig is not the main moral issue.

    Third, we all find it very easy to condemn others for sexual sins. We think sexual sins are so much dirtier than other sins. I am not here trying to define “sexual sin.” Use your own definition if you have one. But other sins such as gossip, theft, accepting bribes and so forth are just as immoral in the sight of God, and yet while we condemn the people who do them, we don’t have the “yuck” reaction that we do to sexual sin. I don’t believe God divides sins into “yucky” and “not-yucky.”

    Fourth, hypocrisy is significant. In my opinion, what Senator Craig did was wrong, irrespective of any issue of hypocrisy. (I must note that it’s hard to separate hypocrisy from this one, since we have a married man carrying out the action. One assumes he was at least hypocritical to his wife.) But I do believe that hypocrisy is another offense and adds to the list, so to speak. Thus the media are not off track in pointing to hypocrisy. If a person who has said nothing about being gay, or who is positive about gay rights comes out of the closet, there is no issue of hypocrisy. Some may still object that they believe homosexuality is wrong in itself, but no issue of hypocrisy arises. When someone has proclaimed that the “gay lifestyle” is wrong, that it is a threat to family values, and that various elements associated with it should be outlawed, and then we find out he has been engaging in those very acts all along, it’s a different matter.

    It is a matter of integrity. The voters should expect that their elected leaders are who they say they are. Then they can choose wisely. Those leaders should expect that the most serious breach of trust is for them not to be who they say they are. In politics, I think hypocrisy is one of the most serious sin–very funny, I know, considering how pervasive it is. But then I believe gossip is probably the most serious sin in the church–very funny also, considering how pervasive it is.

    So would I think Senator Craig’s behavior was OK if he just wasn’t a hypocrite? Well, this is where it’s hard to separate his act from the context. To avoid the charge of hypocrisy, he would have to announce something to the effect that he believed that seeking random sexual encounters in restrooms was OK. He’d still be stuck with the legal issue–it’s against the law, but at least he wouldn’t be a hypocrite. I would think he was unwise (would “incredibly stupid” be going too far?) as well. According to my moral beliefs, he would be morally wrong. There wouldn’t be any possibility that he would be Senator from Idaho under those circumstances.

    Let me use a simpler issue–premarital sex. Now my personal moral code, which I believe is in accord with Biblical and Christian teaching, says “no.” But I know people of generally good character, who don’t approve of random sexual partners, who nonetheless believe that a period of time living together is simply a good way to test the waters. (I’m not arguing that they are right, nor would I make the same suggestion, but these are in general very reliable people.) Now supposing I read a story about a candidate for office that says that he lived with his girlfriend for a couple of years before marrying her. How do I react? Well, if he had concealed the fact, and said such behavior was wrong, and he wanted it to be illegal (unlikely these days, eh?) then I would regard him as a hypocrite, and I would be unlikely to vote for him. The reason is that his words do not match his deeds. On the other hand, if his stated believe was that this was OK, I would still give him consideration, because his deed do match his words.

    Supposing he opposed such behavior but had confessed to his prior behavior? That would again be quite acceptable to me. As a Christian I do believe in redemption and restoration.

    Which brings up one last point–restoration of fallen leaders. I’m thinking of this mostly from a Christian perspective. I believe that a leader who has fallen into sin needs to take a substantial amount of time out of leadership, followed by serving and being faithful in small things, before being restored to leadership. (I’m not going to argue the definition of “sin” here. Use your own again!) I would neither close the door, nor would I make it a revolving door. Some of what I’ve been hearing about Ted Haggard leads me to think that some folks have a revolving door. Forgiveness is good, redemption is possible, but when we’re choosing a small number of leaders we need to make as certain as is humanly possible that we have chosen good examples.

    Having done so, we need to realize that leaders will fall. The tendency to sin is a strong Christian theme as well. That means we need to hold them accountable, and they need to seek accountability to make this kind of problem less likely to occur. The most important method of preventing sin, however, is being transparent. Any time you are pretending to be someone you are not, there will be a great possibility that the pretense will slip, and the real you will show through. If you are being the real you, that danger is removed.

    (Note: I made a number of related remarks on my wife’s devotional list here.

  • Education as a Priority and Teacher Quality

    Way back in the pre-blog days for me (April, 2005), I wrote an essay for my Energion.com web site titled Make Education a Priority. You can type that rather uncreative title into a search engine and you’ll find that many dozens of politicians are using it as a slogan, but I don’t see that priority on the campaign trail being translated into real improvements at the classroom level. In that article I put first on the list of my suggestions: High quality, motivated, and informed teachers.

    I want you to understand that I don’t believe in minor, incremental changes in education. I think that we need to recognize that education is an investment in infrastructure–people. Spending on good education is not money down the drain. It is going to produce in less costs in other areas, such as welfare and crime, and it’s going to pay in greater economic productivity. Unfortunately, the American people generally don’t want to pay for good education, so they don’t get it.

    Now I know some folks are going to talk to me about waste, or lack of accountability. Those are good topics. Unfortunately, the people who talk about them generally (not always) don’t want to pay for a top notch educational system. They want to get the biggest apparent bang for the smallest investment possible. I believe strongly that we should make teachers one of the highest paid professions, that we should make schools be among the best built and best maintained facilities, and then and only then we should hold the educators responsible for providing us what we pay for.

    Right now we’re treating our teachers much like our soldiers overseas. We argue about their funding, we send too few of them to accomplish their mission, we can’t make up our minds about the goals, yet we expect them to produce. In both cases, our military and our teachers, they do produce to a remarkably high standard despite the problems.

    I still believe that this high quality educational system, led by highly trained, motivated and compensated teachers would be the most important single thing we could do for the future of this country. Thus I was gratified to encounter the article The Blackboard Bungles, subtitled “Three authors take us inside today’s classroom. These flies on the wall reveal how we might fix our schools” on MSNBC/Newsweek.

    From the first author, a teacher writing about his rookie year:

    It’s not good for kids. (“I would not want my kid in my class,” Brown writes.) It’s not good for teachers or the school. Brown does try, but struggles to control his class and resigns after a year. In his book, we see that good teachers are the linchpin to solid reform. Too often, poor schools become dumping grounds for green teachers. And children are the ones who pay the price.

    From the second, a journalist:

    Teachers spend most of the year drilling kids in order to help them perform well on exams.

    I believe we need teacher accountability, but there’s a key to effective accountability–you need to test the results you want to have. If you want your kids to be good a multiple choice tests, training them for the tests is a good idea. But life rarely comes at you in the form of multiple choice tests.

    I commend this entire article. This is a topic we really need to get working on. We need to insist that “make education a priority” becomes not just a campaign slogan, but a reality in government.