The evil in our country is accelerating, and there is no good way to say that.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court did what has been predicted for a long time: We could say that it "struck down" Roe v. Wade, but in the wrong direction. Roe allowed the states to regulate mid-term and late-term abortion for the mother's health. Texas tried to do just that. The justices then formed themselves into a medical board and struck down the Texas regulations because they made it too hard for babies to be killed! The regulations themselves, even if some lawmakers did (heaven forfend) have a pro-life motive in passing them, were legally and medically quite reasonable from the perspective of the "health of the mother," but the justices didn't care about that. The absolute ability to kill the unborn must be maintained and made widely available, even at the risk of additional lives.
Meanwhile, I just got an e-mail from a reader about the California law SB 1146. This isn't a reader I've ever corresponded with, so I know nothing about her, but I can draw some conclusions from the fact that she asked why it isn't reasonable for the state of California to rule that "if you want to discriminate" you can't receive state funding! So now refusing to refer to a man as a woman and house him in the women's dormitory at college is "wanting to discriminate." The country has jumped the shark.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, the religious right has died, not with a bang but an abject whimper. Michael Farris nails it here concerning the laying on of hands (metaphorically speaking) upon D.T. by leaders of the religious right, and mark this: Farris wrote that before James Dobson showed himself to be ultimately naive by publicizing a secondhand rumor that D.T. "recently" received Jesus Christ as Savior! D.T. can't even be bothered to work up a little speech about this alleged event and claim to be a repentant, prodigal son returned to the arms of the Father. Nah, he doesn't even need to bother with that. The evangelical leaders will accept a bare, detail-free rumor instead.
This is sad beyond belief. I never believed Dobson was that foolish, that gullible. Farris is right: This is the end of the Religious Right as any sort of credible force in politics in this nation, and it's chock full of ironies. As, for example, the fact that these leaders have psyched themselves and hence made themselves the tools of a manifest charlatan who obviously despises them partly because they couldn't bear the thought of being politically irrelevant! Yet doing so has been the ultimate sign of political irrelevance. One person who actually attended the meeting with D.T. as an observer has told me that the attendees were told that he was originally planning to speak to them for only fifteen minutes and that it was so great and they should be so pleased that he spoke with them for a whole hour! This is like an abused wife being so grateful that her abuser will give her a little of his time. Questions were screened, presumably so that he could answer only the ones that he had previously agreed to answer. There was no open Q & A. A transcript is here. Pathetic.
These various aspects of the darkness that is engulfing our nation accentuate one another, because Charlatan T., in the midst of his stream-of-consciousness ramblings and his willfully ignorant blatherings, has decided to keep saying "Supreme Court" over and over again, even to the point of (falsely) stating that all religious liberty matters are up to the Supreme Court to decide. In actuality, the administration can be aggressive against religious liberty or can protect it in many ways, including interpretation of existing statutes and military policies. But he can't be bothered to know these things, because he's just trying to get people to vote for him, so he blathers that it's all about the Supreme Court and pretends that he can be relied upon to appoint justices who will make good rulings.
Meanwhile, he's completely silent about the recent, historically bad, SCOTUS ruling, and I say it's because, frankly, he doesn't give a damn.
There is a common thread that runs through all of the insanity I have mentioned here, and it is this: The natural light is being systematically doused in the public mind.
Men can become women, women can become men, and you're a bigot if you don't go along with this insanity. Sodomy is perfectly fine, love is love, and you're a bigot if you don't endorse a sexual perversion as a form of "love" and marriage. Schools that even try to use religious exemptions as an opportunity to act according to mere common sense in their policies regarding men and women must be destroyed. There is an absolute right to kill an unborn child, and this right is so absolute that even regulations that make sense from the perspective of protecting the mother in the killing procedure must be struck down. And finally, a candidate who has neither honor nor knowledge nor wisdom nor any other quality from the perspective of common sense that qualifies him for the Presidency of the United States, the leadership of the free world, must be voted for because "we aren't electing a pastor." Because nothing but extremely narrow, religious concerns could possibly motivate one to refuse to vote for such a person. Thus the natural light is obscured and extinguished in the realm of candidate selection. Basic, not-particularly-specially-religious virtues like integrity and caring for something other than oneself are treated as optional and irrelevant in a leader, as if a demand for such virtues in a candidate were a silly religious nitpick.
The pattern is an old one, but now it's moving faster: Dismiss any opposition to some particular demand as "religious" and then dismiss even that as irrational, even when it is manifestly rational.
I'm going to speak candidly to my fellow Christians: There is a personal devil, and he hates the natural light. So he's seeking to destroy it. He's attacking it right now from many different angles.
What can we do? That's a hard question to answer, because there is so little, right now, that we can do. I have portrayed right here the attempt to hold onto political power by endorsing D.T. as a mug's game and as being in and of itself an instance of the attack upon the natural light--in this case, the natural light that allows one to see that a political candidate is unqualified. (By the way, I've gotten really intolerant of Trumpites, so if they come and try to take over this thread, I may close comments or take other, more drastic measures. I really don't have any particular concern anymore about appearing to be open to endless debate with any stranger who happens to show up.)
But does that mean that we should in some general sense renounce politics? No, it just means that we need to keep hold of our principles. There are state elections, referendums, elections of congressmen and senators, and we should pay attention to these and be willing to vote in them when a candidate or referendum is worthy of the vote. But being able to vote for somebody "viable" shouldn't be such a desperate need that we become like a single woman who will accept anybody who proposes to her rather than become a spinster. You don't owe anybody a vote. Don't become addicted to politics and to the feeling (even the illusion) of wielding political power. Let's face it: With an even more lawless court than before, with the left-wing elites wielding increasing political power, and with the GOP a disgraceful shambles, our ability to work through the political system is going to be increasingly limited.
So here's what I have left to say to do: Keep on speaking out about the natural law, and above all, keep on teaching it to your children. And teach it as the natural law. Speak of it (and be sure that you think of it) unabashedly as mere sanity and common sense. Don't give in to the meme that says that your objections to sodomite "marriage" or to calling a man a woman are irrational or even narrowly religious. Even if you or your organization has to use some religious exemption or non-discrimination law as a legal loophole, remember that you are actually testifying to the natural light which is available to all men, which is the deliverance of reason. It is not some narrow, black-box religious fiat. Tell your confused Christian friends outright that they are flat wrong, loud and clear, when they say foolish things such as, "I don't object to homosexual marriage, because we shouldn't be trying to impose our Christian views in secular law."
This is somewhat easier to see for abortion, because it's killing a baby. So remember it there too: Your opposition to abortion is based on the natural light, not on a religious objection that no one else can be expected to understand.
A real danger is that we Christians will mentally cooperate in our own dhimmitude. As dhimmis we will come to believe that our views are really weird, that no one can be expected to associate with us, and that we should just appeal to our religion and beg pitifully to be left alone. This is not just a prediction. It's happening already. Try talking to a "centrist" Christian friend about homosexuality sometime, and you will see this dhimmi attitude in force. And now it's starting for transgenderism. A sincere Christian just sent me this stupid article, full of falsehoods and confusions, the other week to ask me what I thought of it, as though it presented some kind of problem requiring us to rethink the approach of pure common sense to men who decide that they are "really" women and vice versa. And Mark Yarhouse has been undermining reason on this issue for quite a while in the Christian community, receiving credence as an "authority" on the matter.
Abortion is an interesting case, because it involves violence, and even many otherwise squishy Christians don't like to endorse killing innocent human beings. In fact, I've been encouraged by the (relative) robustness of the pro-life perspective through all the decades since Roe, and I have hope that this robustness will continue at least in our own refusal to adopt a dhimmi mental posture. We have many groups that just go on declaring the human worth of the unborn child and the human worth of human beings through thick and thin. God bless them. But it may be tempting, in sheer discouragement, not to continue to teach the natural law facts about the evil of abortion loud and strong, especially after rulings like yesterday that further limit our ability to do anything about it in the legal realm. (By the way, in case anyone wonders, Texas should defy this new, lawless SCOTUS ruling, but that is unlikely to happen.)
We are entering a time of great darkness in our country. One of the greatest gifts you can give to anyone--your child, your friends, your congregation (if you are a pastor), someone you mentor--is the natural law. This doesn't mean that you should downplay an understanding of the Bible in Christian contexts. But God intended for the natural light always to be there to work together with what he said in the Bible. And the Bible doesn't say everything important that there is to say. When the natural light is extinguished, chaos follows. The left has an explicit war on with reality and hence with the natural law and the natural light. We therefore need to be witnesses to it, in season and out, even in the midst of our grief and discouragement, knowing that no darkness can last forever.
One of my Facebook friends, who works for a pro-life organization, quoted yesterday from one of the LOTR movies. While, as a Tolkien purist, I generally hesitate to quote the movies rather than the books, this quote is apropos:
It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.
Comments (30)
Thank you for this excellent exhortation, Lydia. God bless you and your work. Heading off to post this at Facebook now.
Posted by Beth Impson | June 28, 2016 6:01 PM
Oh boy. As a Trump supporter, I better get in before comments get shut down...
The death of a politically relevant religious right happened long before Trump and occurred because we were satisfied with virtue signaling (i.e. self-righteousness) and couldn't be bothered to win politically should that proved to be too difficult or uncomfortable. We play a rigged game but refuse to recognize this. Since the early 2000s, traditional marriage amendments won nearly everywhere they were voted on, yet we have mandated same-sex mirage in all fifty states and the only judge who was punished after all of this was Russell Moore. Kim Davis is such a persona non-grata that even the pope went out of his way to clarify he didn't support her (way to be Christ-like toward the oppressed, pontiff!). I'm glad L.M. can say that Texas should defy the recent court ruling, but this isn't a very common position among mainstream conservatives.
In other words, the political incompetence of social conservatives has nothing to do with Trump. To tie him into this story is to just rehash old grudges and signal you are morally better than his supporters. But this ignores the complex realities of politics--Trump is the strongest candidate we've had in years on immigration, terrorism, and trade. This has always been his appeal to social conservatives (as well as others). We know we aren't voting for a theologian.
Posted by GW | June 28, 2016 6:13 PM
Perhaps the pro life movement should consider taking the gloves off about abortionists. Abortion is murder *and* abortionists are murderers. They commit gravely wicked and violent acts against human beings and deserve to be punished accordingly. Which, as far as I'm concerned is serious time behind bars. Just like other murderers. I wish there were states willing to arrest the abortionists and charge them with murder even. Sure, we know what the outcome would be, but it would send a message...the right message. If we cannot make changes in law anymore, then we have to work on the culture alone, and being nice has not been enough. We need to shame and stigmatize the pursuit of making living murdering babies as much as we can in the hopes this will reduce the numbers of people willing to purse that path. Even if abortion remains legal, that does not mean much if just about no one is willing to be an abortionist.
I should note that even if I have pro life views, I have no involvement in any pro life organization so my comment should not be taken to be representative.
Posted by DR84 | June 28, 2016 6:47 PM
Bag the silly personal implications. The meeting with evangelicals just happened in the last couple of days, so comment on it is timely. The comments by Dobson are even more recent (and the revelation today that the "person who led him to Christ" is, God help us, Paula White, is hot off the press _today_), so that was extremely salient in my mind.
I am sickened by the recent meeting and by Dobson's comments, and I stand with Farris's saddened evaluation. This isn't _signaling_ anything. This is saying what is extremely important to me and what, frankly, I have only been refraining from saying _more_ about because this site has unmoderated comments and I am sick of dealing with never-ending blah-blah from commentators.
I saw James Dobson as a figure of wisdom and integrity, well-known in the circles where I grew up. I admired him and believed that he held Focus on the Family on track while he was at the helm. I began my own youthful enthusiasm for politics when Dobson was at the height of his influence. I believed he would never be such a fool. I believed it up until the last couple of days. So, yes, I was going to blog about it now, because that's who _I_ am. If any "signaling" is going on, it's more likely to need to be signaling _to_ me than _from_ me. If you don't get that, too bad.
Posted by Lydia | June 28, 2016 6:58 PM
That's what Texas was trying to do. One of the laws said that late-term abortionists have to have admitting privileges at a hospital. And guess what? That's hard for abortionists to get, because some of the mean ol' hospitals are stigmatizing them and won't give them admitting privileges. And that was part of why the justices struck down the laws. They saw them as part of a conspiracy to make abortion hard to get.
Judicial supremacy needs to be defied, and this would be a great place to start. (But then, there are so many. Obviously, Obergefell would have been a good place too.)
Posted by Lydia | June 28, 2016 7:02 PM
Good for those hospitals. It would be wonderful if Texas would defy the court, but I just cannot imagine that happening. I am not even sure what that would look like, would it be shutting down abortion clinics who dont meet the standards that Texas holds them to despite the court? Does it matter that, in the end, the court will probably make the state of Texas give those clinics millions of dollars? In the moral calculus, how much should that be weighed, knowing that by defying will mean your opponents profit?
I also, tend to wonder how the other side will respond, so if we did make being an abortionist so shameful that just about no one pursued that "career" path, what would they do? I would not put it pass them to get very serious about making it medical malpractice for a doctor to not be willing to kill babies themselves, or at least certain doctors like ob-gyns. The way things are going, Im half surprised this has not already happened. It seems clear that at least the court views abortion as a pre-eminent right above all others (except LGBT "rights" which are equal in stature with abortion).
Posted by DR84 | June 28, 2016 7:29 PM
Yes.
Someone who knows more about this can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that in such a constitutional crisis, what the court could _make_ the state of Texas do would depend on what the guys with the guns do. (To put it bluntly.) I _doubt_ (but could be wrong) that there is a way for the court to make Texas give money to the clinics _other than_ by threatening to send federal marshals to put someone-or-other in jail, which is the same way that they would try to get them to release the abortionists from jail in the first place. We're talking about court orders here. So it all comes down to who enforces the court orders and how.
A mayor of NYC (I think he may have been a Republican but hope I'm remembering wrong) tried to force all medical students in city med schools, with only a very narrow conscience exception, to train to perform abortions. So we're definitely heading there.
That model is being set for what is known as "effective referral." Canada is doing it right now for assisted suicide. Victoria, Australia, has done it for abortion. And Washington State is doing it for pharmacists and the morning-after pill (I believe that's the drug in question). There's a case in the courts on the WA pharmacists right now. They don't force the doctors directly to perform the abortions (though nurses sometimes _are_ forced to participate or lose their jobs), but they force them to give a referral to someone who will do the deed. So, yes, in that sense, we are already there.
Posted by Lydia | June 28, 2016 7:47 PM
Lydia,
I hate to just be your cheerleader all the time, but this really is a great post and resonating with me personally. I live with a lot of liberals (family and friends and co-workers) and while I have let me beliefs be known to people who get to know me, I will at first talk about my politics in a joking manner by saying something like, "yes, I'm one of those right-wing religious nut-jobs." I do it to 'break the ice' but I think I'm going to stop -- it sends the wrong message and your post explains why. My children and my friends and my co-workers can use their own natural light of reason to come to the same positions I hold -- indeed, I should work (sometimes vigorously, sometimes subtly) for their conversion. No more joking about my politics over something so important as helping people understand the natural law.
A great resource for these kind of arguments and for thinking about the natural law more generally is the always wise J. Budziszewski. He recently stopped daily blogging, but his website has all sorts of great resources:
http://www.undergroundthomist.org/
Finally, in response to GW:
1) You are talking about Roy Moore, the judge in Alabama; not Russell Moore the eighth president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
2) The religious right might not have won many political battles but it is silly to say they didn't try. Again, look at the anti-abortion laws passed in Texas before the recent Supreme Court ruling (a lot of abortions clinics closed down over the past couple of years thank God) or the state-level restrictions on abortion that are being passed by pro-life politicians:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/kentuckys-new-republican-governor-signs-24-hour-consent-bill
Yes, there is darkness and we have a lot of work to do. But the answer is never to abandon what is good and true for ignorance and falsehood.
Posted by Jeffrey S. | June 28, 2016 9:25 PM
That would be something, if it works that way, I imagine Texas could threaten to arrest those Federal Marshalls too. For better or worse, this seems like a path to some sort of civil war. Which is admittedly tough to swallow, but so is effectively being ruled by the court...and a court in particular that increasingly holds abortion and lgbt "rights" above all.
Posted by DR84 | June 28, 2016 9:28 PM
Lydia (or others), what are the best resources for teaching the natural law?
Posted by Jayman | June 28, 2016 9:44 PM
My general sense is that this is right. After all, there is usually VERY broad immunity from civil penalties for state authorities to act. And I don't know any of the detailed ins and outs, but it would greatly surprise me if there was an effective remedy if Texas just said "no" to whatever fines federal courts attempted to impose by writ. Finally, if the Governor backs up every state agent, the marshals would have to declare war on Texas in order to carry out some federal penalty.
Posted by Tony | June 28, 2016 11:12 PM
Come to think of it, the Supreme Court may have managed to get part of the decision about the Texas law right. Texas wanted to regulate abortion facilities much like other medical facilities, but by ruling that Texas can't do that, the court ruled consistently with the fact that abortion is not a medical procedure (even if they did not intend to). As much as what Texas was trying to do with their law is good in light of the legal predicament, it is incoherent to try to regulate a non-medical procedure as it if were a medical procedure.
Posted by DR84 | June 28, 2016 11:16 PM
It is a non-medical procedure in relation to the child, but it is undeniably a (harmful) medical procedure in relation to the woman. Once the murder of the child is denied in law (as, wickedly, it is), the fact remains that the woman's body is being acted upon in a way that would be considered a medical procedure under all other circumstances. So I don't regard this as incoherent. What would be true would be to say that it isn't a medical _treatment_ or a medical _healing act_ of some harmful condition. That's true. But that's also true of cosmetic surgery, for example, which can be quite radical. If unnecessary, elective, even harmful surgery or some other physically invasive procedure is allowed at all (a separate question) it's entirely legally coherent to regulate it, require that the place in which it be done meet health standards, require that the person who does it be qualified, etc.
Posted by Lydia | June 28, 2016 11:40 PM
AFAIK, the court didn't deny that it's a medical procedure. But since it's also supposed to be a "constitutional right," they ruled that regulations must be struck down if they make it too much of a burden to obtain. One can't help wondering what would happen if there were fewer and fewer doctors willing to perform abortions. Would the court simply strike down requirements that abortions be performed by a doctor, so that less and less qualified people could perform them and so that women wouldn't have to drive "too far" to obtain one?
Posted by Lydia | June 28, 2016 11:43 PM
Yes, I was not meaning at all to suggest that the court denied that abortion is a medical procedure, I was only suggesting that their ruling that regulating abortion like a medical procedure is unconstitutional is consistent with abortion not being a medical procedure. That is an interesting question, funny thing is that I have just been wondering what would happen if Texas (or another state) just completely deregulated the abortion industry so that people without medical licenses could perform them. Even people in back alleys with coat hangers could...what could be more convenient than that?
PS I understand there are plenty of reasons why that would be a very bad thing and I am not intending to advocate for it.
Posted by DR84 | June 29, 2016 12:20 AM
Making evil a vocation. I recall when news media started calling prostitutes "sex workers" and someone mused, "What's next? Calling Mafia hit-men 'end-of-life technicians'?"
Posted by Scott W. | June 29, 2016 7:12 AM
[Totally OT comment on the subject of, of all things, Noah's Flood, deleted. LM]
Posted by Ken Wolgemuth | June 29, 2016 8:53 AM
Jayman, on the homosexual issues, I would encourage you to Google and browse what has been written by Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George.
J. Budzisewski's _The Revenge of Conscience_ and other books by him are also useful.
In general, the Catholic natural law tradition, represented by various arguments in, for example, John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae (though I disagree with him strongly about the death penalty) is very good on abortion and on issues like in vitro fertilization. There are many pro-life speakers and authors who have presented the basic argument for the humanity of the unborn child. (E.g. Scott Klusendorf of Life Training Institute.)
These things are all for adults or bright teens, of course. With younger children, I think the most important thing is for the adults who are their mentors to have a strong, confident sense of the natural law on various controversial issues and therefore to be able to discuss them without apology. For example, if the issue of whether a man can turn into a woman (!) comes up with a younger child, or whether two men can be married (!), the adult should be able to say, "Of course not!" and go on to say various commonsensical things about the fact that men and women are obviously different, that marriage *just is* a bond between a man and a woman to form a family, and so forth. Not that I recommend bringing these issues up unnecessarily with your younger children. Indeed, IMO one of the best things to do is *not* to bring them up until, I dunno, age twelve or later, and just to teach the reality as the obvious norm when they are younger--the beauty of romance and marriage, men and women, babies, etc. This, of course, is a major argument against public schooling!
Posted by Lydia | June 29, 2016 9:26 AM
Thank you, Jeff S. Your comment on not just designating your views as religious is really encouraging!
Posted by Lydia | June 29, 2016 10:44 AM
I am anti-gay-marriage, think that homosexuality is a sexual dysfunction, and am anti-abortion. One of the great dangers I see for myself is that my beliefs aren't simply religious. Yes, they comport with my religious views, but they're based on reason, not revelation. And that means that, in America, I may someday be punished for something because my views aren't based in religion enough.
This is the rock and the hard place: Your views are religious and therefore not something that America will allow you to impose on the rest of the population, or they are not religious and therefore you have no protection from the full weight of the law.
Posted by Jake Freivald | June 29, 2016 2:10 PM
Jake, you'd have even more potential legal trouble if you were a reasonable atheist and held those same views. I've always held that, if you _do_ accept a particular religious tradition, and if that religious tradition _does_ endorse/require a particular set of views, it is not at all acting in bad faith to try to claim religious exemptions where those exist. One just has multiple lines of support for the same views. So if you were harmed in some way because of those views, and if there were a way to claim protection for your acting on them because they are *in fact* your religious views (among other supports for them), then I would definitely say "Go for it."
*Of course* it is highly unfortunate that reasonable, non-religious people can't get the same protection for mere sanity, but in a semi-totalitarian regime, we take what protections for sanity we can get.
What I fear, however, is that things are moving so fast that, by the time you or I or many others actually are in a situation where we might try to claim such protections, they won't be available anymore even on religious grounds. Many, many recent incidents and laws go to confirm this--the baker, the photographer, the pharmacist, SB1146, etc.
Posted by Lydia | June 29, 2016 2:32 PM
Jeffrey:
1) Thanks for the correction.
2) We've been passing laws for decades now (often with great success-see the votes on state marriage amendments which occurred circa 2004), but eventually the democratic process gets overturned by increasingly insane legal reasoning and we've been conditioned to accept Supreme Court rulings as final and the worst the leftist media says about us as a good-faith critique. The point is the game is rigged and social conservatives need to try something different than what we've been doing. This may mean advocating the impeachment or prosecution of federal judges; demanding resistance from our local/state governments; or coordinating civil disobedience from churches, Christian schools, conservative wedding photographers, etc. But passing legislation, waiting for an inevitable ACLU lawsuit, arguing till we're blue in the face in front of non-Christian judges, and then hoping to carve out some narrow exemption under the guise of religious liberty (as in Hobby Lobby or Little Sisters) doesn't really do much for me.
Posted by GW | June 29, 2016 3:25 PM
I believe Sherif Girgis just recently pointed out that there are people arguing that religious grounds should count against people because somehow making religious claims against another's choices harms that person. Which seems to me the direction things are going in the baker, photographer, pharmacist, SB1146, etc. cases as it is. It is perfectly fine for a baker to be too busy to bake the cake, but not fine if he is too religious.
"But passing legislation, waiting for an inevitable ACLU lawsuit, arguing till we're blue in the face in front of non-Christian judges, and then hoping to carve out some narrow exemption under the guise of religious liberty (as in Hobby Lobby or Little Sisters) doesn't really do much for me."
...and knowing that the ACLU and others will just take advantage of that opportunity to say that this legislation, whatever it is, was passed out of hatred and spite and thus must be declared unconstitutional and everything the legislation would have done must be fully reversed doesnt help. I believe that is basically the case already with the legislation that Mississippi passed this year. Using legislation is basically just playing into their hands. They know they own the courts and in the end any legislation passed that opposes their cause (DOMA for example) will end up helping their cause.
Posted by DR84 | June 29, 2016 5:52 PM
Actually, DOMA was really good for its time. Heck, it was passed something like twenty years before it was struck down. We should never sneer at holding actions. They can be truly great things. (Though I almost hate to say that about DOMA, since was signed by the despicable William Jefferson Clinton. But hey, it was what it was.)
The citizens of Mississippi had no reason to think that their legislation would be treated in that way, and *thus far* it's only one federal judge who has struck it down. It may be a bridge too far even for the currently constituted SCOTUS. That remains to be seen.
Legislation will probably still have its place in the years to come, but we're waiting to figure out what legislation.
At the same time, I'm all in favor of civil disobedience, as appropriate (e.g., Kim Davis) and state refusal to bow to SCOTUS diktats, as discussed in this and other threads. So it's not like I'm committed hook, line, and sinker only to staid, conventional approaches. For one thing, civil disobedience and its cousin, disobedience to wicked orders from employers, may sometimes just be *required* of us as men of conscience and/or as Christians. It isn't entirely a strategic move.
Posted by Lydia | June 29, 2016 9:09 PM
I have often warn many about political leaders using religion as a tool to seek votes. What is an abomination in.biblical context (in my opinion & understanding) doesn't mean to harbor hate against people our discriminate against them. I strengthen my spirituality in acceptance of a person in hopes of drawing someone closer than they were to God. I do not always agree with the workings of our vast society but stand strong in my faith. We can not turn or backs or bury the ills of what is going on around us. We can only find fault in our own souls and the rest we must leave it to God. We can show the path that we walk, but we personally cannot make anyone walk it. Do not harden or hearts to anyone, for there maybe one person seeking that includes labeling. God has or back.
Posted by Julia B. | June 30, 2016 10:08 AM
Julia,
Do you apply the same standard when politicians use environmentalism to seek votes? What makes a person's religious beliefs so different from his beliefs on environmental issues that he shouldn't vote for a candidate whose views most closely match his?
Who said anything in favor of "harboring hate" or blanket "discrimination" against non-believers? This is a false description of Christians commonly given to us by enemies who wish to see our faith weakened and influence diminished. Why buy into this deceit?
Standing strong in our faith is certainly vital in the face of tumultuous political winds, but does this mean we can't improve society through the political sphere also? Religious viewpoints were used to lead the fights against slavery and poverty in the 19th century--which culminated in political victories for anti-slavery and anti-poverty movements--but now they shouldn't be used to speak out against abortion or homosexuality? Would you be convinced if someone told you Christians shouldn't speak out against slavery today because it might offend slave-owners and turn them off to the gospel?
Lastly, the term "harden your heart" is used often in the Bible but is always in reference to a person's heart in relation to God. If we seek to do what God commands, it will include things which the world does not approve of. Our first concern should not be toward sinners but toward God.
Posted by GW | June 30, 2016 2:45 PM
What would be a good country to emigrate too? Maybe some country in Africa. Maybe even China... the light may be darkening in the West, but small sparks in the East?
GW,
"Trump is the strongest candidate we've had in years on immigration, terrorism, and trade"
This is a ridiculous statement. Cruz was a much better candidate on every issue here (unless of course you buy into that protectionist garbage by the orange guy who says he "loves" free trade!). And your comment about not electing a theologian is also ridiculous... The #NeverTrump people, like myself, who oppose Trump are not objecting to him because he isn't a theologian. It's because he isn't an honest person, a knowledgable person, or a tempered person.
Posted by Jonathan | July 1, 2016 12:12 PM
Speaking of entering the darkness: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/07/01/mississippi_hb_1523_blocked_by_judge_carlton_reeves.html
Im not sure what the implications of this are, but it cannot be good. If no part of that law is now constitutional exactly what Constitutional protections for Christian churches and their related organizations exist?
Mississippi should just tell that judge to pound sand and enforce their law anyway. I am not sure what else they can do.
Posted by DR84 | July 1, 2016 1:39 PM
Jayman, I'm just now reading a marvelous introductory exposition on Natural Law. But really it's just an exposition of another set of works I've read over and over again: _The Chronicles of Narnia._
C.S. Lewis was steeped in Natural Law. So are his stories. They're filled with great examples of virtue and vice, duties fulfilled and unfulfilled; and it's clear on which side he stands at all points.
The exposition I'm reading is in Part II, Chapters 6 through 13, of _The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy: The Lion, The Witch and the Worldview_, ed. Bassham and Walls. I'm just in the middle of it, I can't vouch for all of it, but so far, so good. I'd call it a very good place to start on Natural Law in general, and a particularly good guide for parents whose kids are reading _The Chronicles_, or who are reading them to their kids, which I suppose ought to be every parent, right?
The book I'm reading now is both (a) definitely introductory, so there's no need to worry about starting at the wrong place in the process of learning the philosophy, and (b) definitely fun for those who love Narnia, no matter how much philosophy you've studied.
Posted by Tom Gilson | July 1, 2016 3:38 PM
Update: Chapters 6 -11 of The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy, yes. Chapter 13 tries too hard to find something that isn't there, so the reader has to try really hard to find what's really there. Chapter 12 has similar faults only more so.
Posted by Tom Gilson | July 1, 2016 7:14 PM