Lots To Talk About For A Holiday Weekend
On The One Hand . . .
President Bush is expected to meet with LDS Church leaders next week, the first meeting since the new general authorities were sustained in February.
The meeting between Bush and the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is scheduled for May 29, said Rob Howell, a spokesman for the church. The White House has not released details of the trip.
Other Utahns will pay handsomely to meet with Bush, as he visits the state to raise money for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and the Republican Party.
Supporters are being asked to raise or contribute at least $30,800 per person or $70,100 per couple to attend an intimate reception with the president hosted by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at Romney’s multi-million dollar Deer Valley home, according to event invitations.
Romney tapped Mormons as a source of political money in ways previously undreamed of - money is the mother’s milk of politics - thus politicians go to where the money is.
However, on the other hand, we have just watched a big chuck of Evangelicals very much marginalize themselves as a political force by getting too big for their britches - a tendency fed by precisely this kind of thing. In fact this is kind of how it started with Evangelicals. I hope, and pray, the LDS are smarter than this.
Hillary Turns Into Huckabee . . .
Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday offered a spiritual defense for continuing her presidential campaign despite the long odds of overtaking rival Barack Obama.
Speaking to a full congregation at the Pabellon de la Victoria evangelical church, Clinton spoke in measured terms about faith in the face of adversity.
“There isn’t anything we cannot do together if we seek God’s blessing and if we stay committed and are not deterred by the setbacks that often fall in every life,” Clinton said.
If Senator Clinton’s faith provides her with comfort at this faulting juncture in her life, then I am honestly happy for her. However, we watched Huckabee hang on, claiming spiritual cover, for reasons of personal aggrandizement, well past the time he was able to use the campaign position to better the nation in accordance with his ideas. Clinton is increasingly looking the same way - and interestingly running home to religion as she does it.
Is religion, any religion, really only about personal comfort? Does it permit us to make things difficult for others in light of our own personal agendas?
I Guess It Is Unavoidable . . .
People keep trying to draw parallels between Obama’s Jeremiah Wright imbroglio and John McCain’s. John Hagee difficulty. I guess it is the press’ idea of “balanced” to tell the same story about two situations with VERY little in common. As Jonathan Martin pointed out:
Which brought forth the enough-is-enough statement from McCain:
“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Rev. Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well.”
McCain went on to point out that, unlike a certain Democratic rival, he hadn’t actually gone to Hagee’s church.
Hagee withdrew his endorsement rather than create further furor. The Obama/Wright relationship is far more complex.
The lesson here from my perspective is that the press really does see religion as a label - something one simply puts on, and having done so, one is defined by it like cookies from a cutter.
Mormon “Issues”
Trouble in D.C. - persecution or architectural taste? Sometimes these things are hard to tell apart. And sometimes one likes to hide in the other.
This story from London is fascinating:
A teenager who was facing legal action for calling the Church of Scientology a cult has today been told he will not be taken to court.
The Crown Prosecution Service ruled the word was neither “abusive or insulting” to the church and no further action would be taken against the boy.
I am no fan of Scientology, and I pray that American free speech laws would prevent something like this from ever coming to a prosecutor’s office (although we are seeing them in university tribunals so you never know), but it does demonstrate the power of that word.
In my life time the so-called “N-word” has moved from insult to the unspeakable. Is “cult” facing the same destiny? I honestly hope not - it has useful, benign purposes - just not in political context.
Evangelical News . . .
Richard John Neuhaus comments on “The Evangelical Manifesto:”
As I say, there is much that is admirable in the manifesto, especially in its theological affirmations. But mainly it comes across as a striking instance of evangelicals approaching their cultural betters with hat in hand and pleading to be liked, or at least less disliked.
I think I have finally found the perfect summation of that document.
On Culture . . .
Proof that people can be of two minds lies in the discussion of polygamy following the FLDS raid in Texas. It is certainly the consensus of our readership, and many other political observers that the FLDS sect would have been used, and still could be, if Romney finds himself the veep nominee, as a cudgel with which to beat Romney in specific and the CJCLDS in general — and that despite the complete lack of association between the FLDS and the CJCLDS.
Nonetheless, there is significant movement in the wake of these events to legitimize polygamy! This link has to do with the Islamic practice in Canada, but you can read about it in lots of places. I have to think there is just some Jerry Springer freak show thing going on with all this.
But while we are discussing changing what marriage is in this nation, and on this continent, I thought I would link to John Mark Reynolds’ comments on the recent California Supreme Court decision on gay marriage:
While ecclesiastical organizations must be separated from state, morality cannot be. Somebody’s moral vision will prevail in the public square. As a result, public benefits should be handed out with great care. Forcing millions of Americans to provide government approval for actions most of the human race believes to be wrong is imprudent. Hi-jacking a social institution created by one group of people to benefit another is unwise.
‘Is’ does not, of course, equal ‘ought.’ Most of us find it difficult to do what we wish or what society needs of us. It is the case that a desire for vice exists. That does not justify acting on it for any of us.
Citizens should and must use their religious wisdom to make decisions about what is good and what the state should approve. Of course, this particular religious reasoning should be communicated and defended to others who do not share their opinions with common language and reasoning where possible. It is naïve or irrational ideology to hope that perfect agreement will be found or that all one’s opponents are bigots or fools. Traditionalists know they may be mistaken, so the wise amongst them have retreated from any state sanction for this vice, but the gay “marriage” ideologues cannot be satisfied with tolerance.
They demand full state approval.
Make no mistake. If gay “marriage” receives state sanction, the experience of Western Europe and Canada suggests that intolerance of any dissenting opinions as to its morality will follow.
That is a very smart and practical approach to the issues that face this blog. WELL DONE! Read the whole thing.
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One Response to “Lots To Talk About For A Holiday Weekend”
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coltakashi on 27 May 2008 at 11:44 am #
With respect to the visit of President Bush to the leadership of the LDS church in Salt Lake: Such courtesy calls are a tradition that goes back at least 50 years, to when Ezra Taft Benson, one of the LDS apostles, was Secretary of Agriculture for President Eisenhower. The LDS Church presidents have welcomed both sitting presidents and candidates of both major parties, specifically demonstrating both patriotism and political neutrality. The tradition is so well established now that for any president or visiting candidate to skip it would be viewed as a cold shoulder to the LDS Church. It should be noted that one of President Monson’s two counselors who serve with him the First Presidency is Dieter Uchtdorf, a German who was a senior vice president and Chief Pilot for Lufthansa, who will not be voting for any Republican or Democrat. These visits are pointedly NOT associated with fund raising for campaigns nor endorsements of any party or candidate.
Back when the Tabernacle on Temple Square was one of the few large auditoriums in the city, it was the venue for speeches by visiting presidents, including John F. Kennedy a few days before his last trip to Texas, and later Lyndon Baines Johnson (which I attended with a group from my jr. high school government class).
ON the story about the objections to the new LDS meetinghouse in Washington, DC: I am amazed that the residents were willing to display their religious prejudice so blatantly. One LDS building in a string of 45 is about the proportion of Mormons in the country and in the DC area (where I used to live). LDS meetinghouse steeples echo the tall, narrow steeples of New England and upstate New York, where the founding generation of Mormons grew up. They are not gothic towers with battlements and bells like the cathedrals of Europe. It will in no way dominate the skyline. As to the “noise” of people going and coming to church, since Mormons don’t smoke, they are not going to be standing around outside the building for nicotine breaks. How the neighbors will be able to distinguish the “noise” of Mormons’ cars driving to and from the meeting house from the cars that pass by the site on busy 16th Street is undoubtedly due to a miracle of aural acuity bestowed on the local residents. I guess it is possible that some of the sound of hymns praising Christ may penetrate from the chapel’s inner doors and again through the doors of the entry hall and then the doors to the outside, but I hope they don’t mind a little Mendelsohn and John Newton with their Sunday Morning coffee and Washington Post.
Finally, the threat of sanctions against Californians who in any way criticize gay marriage is a very real prospect. We need only remember the many ways in which the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender lobby has prevailed on local governments throughout California to anathematize the Boy Scouts of America after the Supreme Court affirmed its legal right to exclude over homosexuals from being in charge of 12 to 17 year old boys. At one point, the California State Bar proposed requiring all judges to take an oath that they did not support the Boy Scouts because of that “sexual discrimination”. I am sure that the proposal will be renewed and extended to all public servants and all members of juries, and who knows, even to people registering to vote. After all, in the eyes of “progressives everywhere”, if it’s the right thing to do, there is no harm in forcing everyone to do it. The entire panoply of exemptions from property and income taxes for churches and church-affiliated schools and charitable institutions will also be placed on the table, to exact a massive financial penalty on any church that insists on preaching what its own scriptures say about sexual morality. The same will go for tax deductions for contributions to those churches. The planning and zoning laws will also be employed to penalize all denominations with a traditional view of sexual morality. California is liable to set up a very direct confrontation between the primacy of the First Amendment freedoms against the primacy of sexual freedoms, with a very real prospect of setting society on the path toward Huxley’s Brave New World of sexually libertine, political totalitarianism.