Article VI Blog

One seeks the office of President of The United States in order to serve the people of the United States.  It is a sacred trust.

There is no more important nor deeper service to the nation that one in such office can undertake than the direct protection of the lives of the nations citizens.  Many, even most, presidents are not afforded the opportunity to so directly and demonstrably offer such protection by simply putting the military between the citizens and the enemy.

This president, Barack Obama, and the likely next Democrat candidate for the office, Hillary Clinton, were offered such a rare and sacred opportunity in Benghazi Libya.

THEY FAILED!

Until this week’s hearings, I had assumed that such failings were a result of incompetence.  I had assumed that they had failed to construct the appropriate communications infrastructure to know what was going on – that they were so focused on other policy that the mechanisms of government simply kept this in the background until it was too late.  The cover-up of the failings was apparent, but standard issue, even weak, stuff when the government messes up.  I figured the cover-up was the crime, not the underlying incompetence.

But no more.  The lack of action on the administration’s part now seems calculated and purposeful.  We know that Clinton spoke to people on the ground in Libya as the attacks were occurring.  We must assume she kept the president informed.  We know talking points were altered.

Peggy Noonan this morning:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.

Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else.

Let me rephrase that just a little.  The administration put its own political gain in front of the lives of American citizens.  They violated the most sacred of trusts in the office.  They did not just fail to measure up to that trust – they purposefully violated it.

Michael Gerson:

The administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack was politically effective, but not without real world costs.

Gerson seems still to think incompetence.  I agree with him there is no criminality here, but the violation of trust between the people and its government is much deeper and more extraordinary than Watergate.  The “real world costs” here were American lives.  In point of fact I have been trying since the hearings to think of a greater historical violation of the trust invested in the office than this one.   To date I have not come up with one.  Bigger mistakes perhaps, but remember this no longer appears to be a mistake – this was purposeful.

We wrote a lot on this blog during the campaign season about Romney’s abundance of character, in contrast to Obama’s relative lack of it.  I thought that was evident even before now, though I have expected Obama’s second term to add considerable evidence to the pile.  I never expected that evidence to include human lives.

I am ashamed.  These particular deaths occurred before the election.  No amount of work or effort on my part – on Romney’s behalf – could have saved these lives.  But how many more will there be before this administration ends?  How many more might there be in pursuit of a Hillary Clinton administration?  That is why I am ashamed.

We all should be – our nation is supposed to be better than this.

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The 2012 election, as I said in the opening post in this series raised a terribly important question:

“Has the culture finally and fully changed?”

For most people that question gets thought of in terms of whether the nation is still committed to “Christian values.”  Does it still believe in marriage, family, etc.  I do think there was a cultural question at the heart of the election, but I think it is on a much deeper level than stances on specific issues.

So deep was the question, so fundamental that it seemed like the two campaigns were talking past each other.  Romney ran a campaign of leadership and issues.  Obama ran a campaign that was about, well, Obama.  Romney sought to differentiate himself from Obama on the issues of the day.  Obama chose to paint himself as the “good guy” and Romney as the “bad guy.”  Team Obama pledged early that they would have to personalize the election because they knew they did not have the issues in their favor.  But there is something about Obama’s personality and how they executed the campaign that made this more than simply a political strategy.

The personal seems to deeply ingrained in all that Obama does, including his current governance.  The month of May, but five months into his second term, has seen Obama pretty much on the ropes.  Daniel Henninger:

Tuesday’s meandering mess of a news conference exposed that his first term’s permanent campaign—attempting to reframe all issues to maximize him and minimize his opposition—is going to be inappropriate for the only thing Mr. Obama has got now: a mere American presidency.

Whether Roosevelt, Nixon, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, every second-term president must in time come to grips with the reality that it can’t be about just his agenda or just him. It, the presidency, is unavoidably about offering clear leadership for all the American people and a watching, always unsettled world. If Barack Obama insists it’s about something else, everyone, including him, will have their bags packed for a long 40 months.

Peggy Noonan:

Republicans don’t oppose him any less after his re-election, and Democrats don’t seem to support him any more. This week he was reduced to giving a news conference in which he said he’s got juice, reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. It was bad. And he must be frustrated because he thinks he’s trying. He gives speeches, he gives interviews, he says words, but he doesn’t really rally people, doesn’t create a wave that breaks over the top of the Capitol Dome and drowns the opposition, or even dampens it for a moment.

Mr. Obama’s problem isn’t really the Republicans. It’s that he’s supposed to be popular. He’s supposed to have some sway, some pull and force. He was just re-elected. He’s supposed to have troops. “My bill is launched, unleash the hounds of war.” But nobody seems to be marching behind him. Why can’t he rally people and get them to press their congressmen and senators? I’m not talking about polls, where he hovers in the middle of the graph, but the ability to wield power.

I think the key phrase in all those words is Noonan’s, “Democrats don’t seem to support him any more.”  “I’m a good guy, he’s a bad guy,” is as old as politics.  What is so startlingly different about Obama more than any other preceding player of that game is that a) Obama did not set it aside when it came time to govern, and b) enough people bought it to re-elect him even after four years of non-governance.

These two factors were able to coalesce and function this time because of the rise of identity politics, and specifically the politics of race and religion.

Race has become the thing that no one wants to talk about, but everyone is thinking about fromt eh 2012 election, and the 2008 for that matter.  An important fact emerged just recently:

The Associated Press is out with a study of the 2012 election concluding that the black voter turnout rate exceeded the white turnout rate for the first time. It’s almost certainly true that black turnout was higher than white turnout last fall — but that also was true in 2008.

Using census data and exit polling, the AP found that black voters were 13 percent of the electorate even though they make up only 12 percent of the population. White voters represented 72 percent of the electorate, outperforming their 71.1 percent share of the population, but not to the same degree they have in past elections. The total percent of voters in each ethnic group who turned out is not included. Census data on voter turnout will be released in May.

Racial identity was a key player in this game – make no mistake.  And therefore it needs to be discussed.  The stats are out there, everybody knows them, they just are not discussed in polite company.  Although Michael Barone must be applauded for doing so recently in the pages of the Wall Street JournaL

What helped the Republicans more than redistricting was the tendency of Democratic voters to be clustered in black, Hispanic and “gentry liberal” neighborhoods in major metropolitan areas. This clustering has produced huge majorities that have made many large and medium-size states safely Democratic at the presidential level.

Even now I am hesitant to hit on this point too hard.  Rather, I am going to assume everybody more or less knows the story and I am going to comment on it.

The thing that is most disturbing about the role of racial identity in the elections of both 2008 and 2012 is how utterly racist it really was.  I am not just talking about the “reverse racism” of blacks voting for blacks because they are black.  Rather I am talking about that line from Noonan, “Democrats don’t seem to support him any more.”  Democrats, in  a significant part elected Barack Obama because he is black, but once they have accomplished that goal, they have abandoned him.  Part of that is his lack of leadership, but part of it is they fact that all they really cared about was that he was black, and once elected twice, they had made their point and moved on.  Is that not the deepest definition of racism? – When all you see is someone’s color?

This may backfire on them.  Said Peter Beinert recently:

The point is that liberals need to realize that Democrats aren’t immune from racism. In politics, bigotry isn’t always connected to ideology; sometimes it simply stems from opportunism. And with more minority Republicans seeking high office, Democrats will have more opportunities in the years to come. Dick Harpootlian’s slur against Nikki Haley offers liberals the chance to show that Democrats won’t get away with it.

Perhaps it is a trite point that the party which runs on civil rights so often is the most deeply racist, but it is here so clearly illustrated that it simply must be looked at.  But this too is an old story, race has been deeply ingrained in the politics of this nation almost since its founding.  From the North/South compromises of the Founding to the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement, race is a big part of who we are.  American is after all an attempt to forge a nation out of something different.  Prior to the United States, nations were accidents of geography and ethnicity.  We, for the first time tried to forge a nation from different stuff.  We tried to forge a nation out of ideas because we were virtually unlimited geographically and massively diverse ethnically.  It must be remembered that the small regional differences (both European and American) that now seem inconsequential to us were enormous gaps at that time.

Prior to the United States, nations formed around men.  A leader that rallied a group.  The United States on the other hand was to be “A nation of laws, not men.”  The QuotationsBook web site attributes this phrase to John Adams as follows:

JOHN ADAMS, Novanglus Papers, no. 7.The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 4, p. 106 .Adams published articles in 1774 in the Boston, Massachusetts, Gazette using the pseudonym Novanglus. In this paper he credited James Harrington with expressing the idea this way. Harrington described government as the empire of laws and not of men in his 1656 work, The Commonwealth of Oceana, p. 35 . The phrase gained wider currency when Adams used it in the Massachusetts Constitution, Bill of Rights, article 30 .Works, vol. 4, p. 230.

It seems the battle to maintain America is, at root, a battle to maintain this ideal.  Yet it is an ideal that even lefties like Beinart are beginning to see us abandon.  Such is the price of the politics that Obama chose to play in the general election of 2012.  But race was not the only identity factor that Obama played on in 2012.  There was also religion.  Obama in his “evolution” to the support of same-sex marriage, created a battle of the religious against the “non-religious” as a sub-text of the campaign.   A sub-text that rang the Mormon bell without having to overtly talk about it, thus not only energizing a good but of his base, but setting the Republican base at odds with itself.  But this is the topic for the next post or two in this series.

One thing that is very important to note here is that Obama was setting the tone of the campaign throughout.  Gov. Romney assumed, most of us believed rightly, that his competence would so outshine this sort of identity pandering that he would carry the day.  Clearly such was not the case.  That is a serious messaging problem – one that must be addressed by those far more adroit at such things than I.  I’ll focus on what I know best – religion and politics.

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At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf responds to a Matt Lewis column with this opening:

In The Week, columnist Matt Lewis, a conservative who is regularly willing to criticize the right, explains why, despite his occasional frustrations, he isn’t tempted to defect. “I am repelled by the Left’s worldview, which implicitly argues that morality is subjective,” he states. “This is a natural outcome of a rejection of the numinous, but it’s an idea that has consequences. When there are no moral absolutes, we make policy decisions based on efficiency instead of compassion. Or we make decisions based on our own individualistic needs, not on what is right or good.”

Given his beliefs, I’d never urge Lewis to defect to the left for all sorts of reasons. But I don’t think the one he’s offered is what should hold him. The left encompasses a lot of people who believe in God, while the right has its atheists. I don’t think that there is any single world view that encompasses the whole left. And even if we presumed for the sake of simplicity that it makes sense to talk about “the” world views of the left and right, I don’t think the left embraces moral subjectivity any more than the American right, despite the fact that so many conservatives insist otherwise. How common is moral subjectivity on the left, according to Lewis? It is unclear, perhaps understandably, since he was constrained by writing at column length for print.

Pending clarification, let’s set the left aside and talk about the American right. To what moral absolutes does it subscribe in practice? Certainly some of the ones that are shared by the whole political spectrum. Slavery is wrong. So is rape. And genocide. Surely we can all agree that, on those significant questions, that neither the American left nor the American right are non-absolutists.

Friedersdorf then goes on to pick on the supposed “hypocrisies” of the right.  The use of torture in the gathering on information on terrorism being his biggest bug-a-boo, but along the way he also discusses immigration, Gitmo and arms control.  Then he says this:

In what moral absolute was their position grounded?

In other words, “How can we preach compassion when we engage in torture or deport the oppressed?”  There are three things at play here that need to be noted.

First, there is a difference between something being absolute and something being universal.  We must always act in compassion, that’s absolute.  But that does not mean we act compassionately to everyone, that’s universal.  Unfortunately, life presents us with situations where to act compassionately towards some we will be required to act harshly with others.  It is an unavoidable reality.  If a man is standing poised to kill another man, killing the threatening killer is, in fact, quite compassionate towards the intended victim, even if it is extraordinarily cruel towards the actor.  Someone is going to die in this situation, compassion cannot be judged solely on the fact that someone is killed.  Compassion is exercised in the choice of who dies and how.  Morality may be rooted in absolutes, but that does not make it simple, by any stretch.

The second thing at play here is the where the moral absolutes are rooted.  We cannot argue religion in public anymore, but there was a time we could invoke God.  However, even then, it was not good to argue theology in the public square.  Once we are discussing the complexities of applying our absolutes, the discussion will become theological very rapidly.  Theology, even amongst protestant Christians, is far more diverse today than it ever was at the time when the invocation of religion in the public square was more common.  In fact, there are some schools of theology that have grown not out of the religion in question, but purposefully to develop religious apologia for a political or social issue previously considered anathema to the religion in question.   For example, the last couple of decades have seen scores of theological arguments attempting to make homosexual practice acceptable; something Judeo-Christian thought as rejected as wrong throughout its history.

Because of the confusion between absolute and universal, the gate-keeping functions inside religion have failed to sort the wheat from the chaff in these arguments and all are deemed valid.  How is a public, largely not trained in how to think about these things, to judge what is a good application of the absolutes and what is not?  Are we to now argue theology publicly?  The result of this dilemma has been the sort of dogmatic approach that leads to the perceptions of hypocrisy that Friedersdorf presents.

The bottom line cause of all of this, and the third factor at play, was mentioned in that last paragraph.  It is the failure of the gate-keeping functions inside religion.  This failure has come as a) religion itself has become more personal that societal/cultural, and b) rather than fight inside the church, groups split off and form smaller groups that lack the critical mass to form the institutions needed to perform the function effectively.

Frankly, in today’s world, there is validity to what Friedersdorf has to say.  It should not be so, but that is a failure that can be laid squarely at the door of the faithful.  We continue to work on our series telling the 2012 election story.  Unlike the 2008 story, the 2012 is not themed so much in politics as it is in the failure of the religious to do and be all that they are supposed to do and be.  Thus that series will lead to a series on where Evangelicalism has failed.  Thus we will leave this third factor at this point and allow the deeper discussion to come at a later time.

We are not the hypocrites Friedersdorf wants us, or paints us, to be.  However, we have to be a lot smarter about our faith and its application in the public square if we do not want to appear as such.

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From Philip Rucker at WaPo’s “Post Politics” blog yesterday:

Faith has been a constant in Mitt Romney’s life, yet when he ran for president, he was extremely cautious about discussing his Mormon religion. He rarely spoke of God on the campaign trail. Rarer still were any references to Mormonism itself.

But now, six months removed from his unsuccessful bid for the White House, the former Republican nominee is opening up about his Mormon upbringing and his strong belief in a traditional family structure.

In a commencement address at Southern Virginia University last weekend, Romney spoke about his Mormon mission to France in the 1960s, in which he explored the reaches of his faith, and told stories of early settlers in Salt Lake City. Repeatedly citing the Bible, Romney urged graduates to find God, marry young and have many children.

So, what was the occasion?

Romney’s address at Southern Virginia University — a small liberal arts college in Buena Vista, Va., where more than nine in 10 students are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — marks a significant departure for the former Massachusetts governor who became the first Mormon to win a major party’s presidential nomination.

The story seems to want to make Romney out to be disingenuous somehow:

At the rare moments when he did talk about spirituality, as in his 2012 commencement address at Liberty University, founded by the late evangelical televangelist Jerry Falwell, Romney spoke broadly about his shared “Christian conscience” and his trust in God, but did not utter the word Mormon.

At a town hall meeting in Wisconsin, when a young man confronted Romney by reading from a book of scripture published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Romney grew visibly agitated with the man’s line of questioning.

“I’m sorry, we’re just not going to have a discussion about religion in my view,” Romney said. He added that he would talk about the practices of his faith, but not the doctrines of his religion.

Yet as he addressed graduates and their families on the grassy quad at Southern Virginia University in the Shenandoah Valley, Romney read from the diary of an 1800s Mormon pioneer and then from the Bible.

“Children are a heritage of the Lord and the fruit of the loom is his reward,” Romney said, quoting scripture. “Happy is the man who hath his quiver full of them.”

I honestly don’t know what to make of all this.  First of all, who really cares anymore?  With all due respect to Gov. Romney, someone I respect a great deal – this stuff does not matter anymore.  Secondly, they are comparing apples and oranges here.  Any reasonable speaker is going to tailor their remarks to the crowd in front of them.  Hence remarks to a largely Evangelical crowd would sound different than remarks in front of a largely Mormon crowd regardless of who is making the remarks – your truly included.  (Having addressed both on multiple occasions.)

But lets go back to why this is appearing even now.  Once must presume there is more at play here than simply winning the presidential election.  Mitt Romney lost – it’s over.  The “not authentic” meme of which the “he never talked about his faith” is part-and-parcel was part of the reason he lost.  It worked because it divided the right.  Evangelicals tend to find Mormons somehow “inauthentic,” and this meme played on that.  And that is why they are still writing this stuff.

They are interested in more than than simply beating Mitt Romney.  They are interested in keeping Republicans on the ropes for, well, eternity.  But there is more.  They are very, very interested in keeping religious people generally out of politics, and making them look like fools.  The “not authentic” charge is really a soft form of the “hypocrite” charge that was so commonly aimed at the religious in my youth.  They just want to keep us down.

We cannot fall for this bait.  Such an argument is not a charge in which we need put stock.  This charge stands as little more than a temptation to stop trying.  It argues implicitly that there is no sense trying to be better because you’ll never make it and just look like a phony trying.  One of the reasons our public influence has waned is because we have bought into this charge and now can barely be distinguished from anyone else.

Leadership demands that we stand apart.  It is time we started to do so.

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First Fact: Jason Collins “came out” as gay in Sports Illustrated yesterday.

Fact Two: SCOTUS is currently trying to decide two cases related to same-sex marriage, one on DOMA and one on California’s Prop 8.

These are essentially discrimination cases.  The claims center on the fact that it is discriminatory to forbid same-sex marriage.  But if you think about it, we discriminate everyday; otherwise, there could be no criminal or non-criminal, no good or bad.  Discrimination is not, of itself, wrong.  It is only wrong to discriminate in certain situations.  Legally, these “certain situations” are defined as a “protected class.”

Protected class is a term used in United States anti-discrimination law.^[1] The term describes characteristics or factors which cannot be targeted for discrimination and harassment.

So, what are the protected classes in the United States?  Wikipedia (linked above) provides a list.

• Race – Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Color – Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Religion – Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
• National origin – Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Age (40 and over) – Federal: Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
• Sex – Federal: Equal Pay Act of 1963 & Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Familial status – Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1968 Title VIII (Housing, cannot discriminate for having children, exception for senior housing)
• Disability status – Federal: Vocational Rehabilitation and Other Rehabilitation Services of 1973 & Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
• Veteran status – Federal Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974
• Genetic information – Federal: Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act

Now, examine that list of characteristics carefully.  It can be divided into two categories.  Let’s call one “Attributes” and the other “Choices.”  Attributes are those characteristics that we have no control over – they are essentially accidents of birth.  So, the protected classes in the category of Attributes would be, race, color, national origin, age, sex, disability and genetic information.

Choices as a category is a different matter.  These are characteristics over which we as individuals do have control. The characteristics on that list that fall into this category are religion, familial status, and veteran.

Now the first thing we have to ask ourselves is if they we are to judge same sex marriage as discriminatory, into which category would we fit homosexuality?  This is where Jason Collins comes in.  Jason Collins is an identical twin:

Something in the media guides did not compute.

Jason Collins is listed at 7-0 and 260 pounds in the New Jersey Nets media guide, while the Utah Jazz media guide lists twin brother Jarron at 6-11 and 255. Aren’t they identical twins?

Yes, responds Portia Collins, the mother of the first set of identical twins to play in the NBA since Harvey and Horace Grant.

So, is Jason taller than Jarron?

After a bemused pause, the answer we knew was coming finally arrived: “Noooo.”

“They filled out questionnaires and have a media archive at their respective schools [high school and Stanford University]. Jarron and Jason let it continue. I don’t think they let it bother them.”

His brother Jarron is married, with kids; by all appearances quite heterosexual:

Late last summer Jason called and said that he was coming over because he had something to tell me. This was nothing new. We speak multiple times a day, always have. He’s Tio Jason to my three kids. He’s like a brother to my wife. He’s my twin, eight minutes older. We live only a few miles apart on the west side of L.A. But while most of our conversations are quick and light, this one was different.

So, here we have two men, genetically identical, that grew up together, were afforded all the same opportunities, went to high school and college together.  They seem as close as brothers can be.  Yet one is homosexual and one is heterosexual.  Clearly then, Jason’s homosexuality is a choice, or perhaps a series of small choices over the course of many years, but it is certainly not an Attribute, as we defined it above.

Many are the claims that homosexuals are “just born that way.”  How many times have I heard, “That’s just the way I am.”  Well, clearly it is not, as so well illustrated by the Collins twins.  Physically identical and walking nearly identical paths until well into adulthood,  one made choices that lead to a traditional lifestyle and the other made choices that lead down the path that was exposed yesterday.

Jason Collins “coming out” should make it crystal clear to SCOTUS that if they are to award “protected class” to homosexuals it will be in the Choices category, not the Attributes one.  But examine carefully that short list in the Choices category.  Religion is set aside as a protected class within the body of the constitution proper, and it is plain letter in the Bill of Rights.  Veteran only makes sense – this is another means of honoring those that have served the nation at the highest risk.  It seems commonsense enough.

Familial status is where the rub lies.  But note, this is not an absolute when it comes to the protections.  The protections are limited purely to housing matters and furthermore, there are notable exceptions.  While it could be argued that same-sex marriage is, in some sense, a “familial status,” it falls so far outside the existing protection limits as to make it plain to the court that they will be creating a whole new protected class should they go that direction with these cases.

Does the court have the power to create a protected class?  Note that each of the classes on the list above were created by legislative action, as cited.  When it comes to Attributes, it could be argued that the court might create, and/or expand a category based on “…the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…,” in the Declaration of Independence.  But as the case of the Collins twins makes so transparent – this is no Attributes situation.

The Court has little choice but to leave existing law in place.  These are choices by the individuals involved and how to deal with such people is a choice for the people generally.  That is why there are elections and legislatures.  If the Court decides otherwise, it will be a clear and undeniable usurpation of power.  It would be a tyrannical act.

Posted in Culture Wars, Prejudice, Same-sex marriage, Social/Religious Trends | 3 Comments » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

So, much and more has been made of Joe Biden’s comment a couple of days ago about the Boston Bombing Boy Band being “knock-off jihadis.”  Said Allahpundit:

Via NRO, someone didn’t get the memo that liberals are still in “pretend the motive is unclear” phase, the most fun part of which is spitballing about Tamerlan Tsarnaev possibly having brain damage from boxing. Could that be it? Could it be that Bin Laden liked to spar for fun too and finally took one right hand to the face too many circa 2001? What about poor Dzhokhar’s “Holden Caulfield-like adolescent alienation,” a hormone-fueled vortex that had him alternating between cooing over how hot Miss USA is and planting bombs next to eight-year-olds? Will we ever know the answer?

Yeah. Biden’s comment was all about motivation – or was it?  Implicit in all this discussion of what makes a “genuine jihadi” is that fact that the only people the left are willing to buy as genuine are Arabs.

I don’t know what’s worse there, the implication that in order to be genuinely evil you must be of a certain ethnicity, or the deep confusion between ethnicity and religion.  Either way, the stereotyping involved in the discussion is such that were it applied to African-Americans the cries of racism would be sufficient to put crowds in the streets.

Long term, what is more problematic is the confusion of religion and ethnicity.  When religion is reduced to an identity factor it loses its real power, both personally and publicly.  Rather than being something that calls us to better ourselves, it is simply something that we are, and we cling to – sometimes violently.

But then, I am building this argument by implication and I am probably making a wrong one.  Biden is a man of the left, and racism only exists on the right.  Just ask anyone on the left.

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