Month: March 2006

Here’s a site where you can view the advertisements for the United Church of Christ. The funniest is the ejector seat one, in my view. And this one is oddly moving. I’m just glad to see that the non-fundamentalist part of Christianity, the part that used to dominate, is not going to give up its traditions of inclusion and acceptance easily. They seem more compatible with the Gospels than the prerogatives of exclusion and judgment.

"Some impose upon the world a belief they do not really hold; others, more in number, make themselves believe what they believe, not being able to penetrate into what it is to believe," – Michel de Montaigne, "The Apology of Raymond Sebond."

Card, as I’ve written, was obviously worn out. But Bolten is hardly fresh as a daisy either. He has been there from the beginning; he represents continuity more than change; and it appears that Card volunteered his resignation. Of course this could be a convenient fib; but for public consumption, Bush has not fired Card. Bottom line: this is better than nothing, but also merely the minimum necessary. Maybe there’s more to come. And maybe next time, it will be someone outside the cocoon.

A reader writes:

On the issue of atheist parents losing custody of their children, Thomas Jefferson is surely rolling in his grave. The practice of taking children from atheist parents and "Free Thinkers" was attacked by Jefferson in his 1781 essay "Religion in Virginia." In this essay, he decried the fact that relative to "a father’s right to custody of his own children … they may be severed from him, and put by the authority of a court into more orthodox hands."  He denounced this practice as evidence of "that religious slavery under which a people have been willing to remain." He concluded:

"…our rulers can have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. [emphasis added] It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg….Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man…Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Given a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation.  They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only."

It seems to me that this principle – which seemed self-evident to most of our Founding Fathers and upon which, among others, our Republic was founded – is the one principle that if it were grasped by the majority of Americans would render obsolete most of the present social and political discord."

I couldn’t agree more. Our core political and philosophical predicament in this country is religious fundamentalism. Until we have tackled it, as Jefferson and the founders did, our polarization will deepen.

Eugene Volokh has just written a law article (PDF file here) on how atheist fathers and mothers are routinely discriminated against in child custody cases. He cites over 70 recent cases across the country – and these were only the ones which were appealed, so they probably represent a fraction of the actual cases. Volokh recalls how Percy Byshe Shelley was the first father to be denied custody because of his atheism – but his dilemma doesn’t belong to a different time and place:

"That time and place, it turns out, is 2005 Michigan, where a modern Shelley might be denied custody based partly on his ‘not regularly attend[ing] church and present[ing] no evidence demonstrating any willingness or capacity to attend to religion with [his children],’ or having a ‘lack of religious observation.’  It’s 1992 South Dakota, where Shelley might have been given custody but only on condition that he ‘will agree to present a plan to the Court of how [he] is going to commence providing some sort of spiritual opportunity for the [children] to learn about God while in [his] custody.’ It’s 2005 Arkansas, 2002 Georgia, 2005 Louisiana, 2004 Minnesota, 2005 Mississippi, 1992 New York, 2005 North Carolina, 1996 Pennsylvania, 2004 South Carolina, 1997 Tennessee, 2000 Texas, and, going back to the 1970s and 1980s, Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska.  In 2000, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a mother to take her child to church each week, reasoning that ‘it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training’; in 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the same, partly on the grounds that weekly church attendance, rather than just the once-every-two-weeks attendance that the child would have had if he went only with the other parent, provides superior ‘moral instruction.’"

Of course, this is an outrageous attack on religious liberty. Imagine if Christian parents were denied custody because of their faith. O’Reilly would have weeks of programming. But atheists? Naah. When Christianists declare that they are fighting for religious freedom, bring this issue up. It will determine whether they are in good faith, so to speak, or not.

The quote about freedom being the right to decide for oneself the meaning of the universe was officially authored by three Supreme Court Justices, O’Conner, Souter and Kennedy, the real conservatives on the court. But most court observers see Kennedy’s style at work. I am not surprised. And the OED citation for the first use of the word "neoconservative" is from an 1883 edition of the Contemporary Review, in an article called "The Conservative Dilemma" by Henry Dunckley. Alas, I don’t have the full context, so I don’t know whether his meaning comes even faintly close to what we now call "neocons." Macdonald’s reference clearly does. So Dwight still has it, unless any other readers can set us straight.

A troubling development.

"Suppose that intellectuals of the left were thinking more clearly about the American nation as (a) a whole and (b) a work in progress? Suppose that ideas about actual American potential proved more appealing on the putatively left-wing campus than sticking up, in code and despair (albeit with flourishes), for all kinds of exotic indeterminacies, theological neo-Marxisms, and third-worldist romantic fancies?" – Todd Gitlin, TPM Cafe.

"There can be no doubt that the left in general, but the campus variety in particular, is profoundly pessimistic and dour in its attitude towards this country. It seems to be built in to the DNA of campus leftist activism to be as over-the-top as possible in describing America as a den of corruption and injustice. It is the luxury of students who by and large have never known what true corruption and injustice look like but who are attracted to the romance of revolutionary thinking," – a reader from TPM Cafe.

Both writers go on to criticize the right, or aspects of the right. Fine. But what we are beginning to see on the honest right and honest left is a genuine attempt to re-think the world after the last five years. It needs rethinking; both "sides" have an internal accounting to do for their positions; and the calcified rhetoric on both extremes is an attempt to stop it.

The next phase in the Medicare prescription drug entitlement is pretty obvious: the law will be changed soon to ensure that the federal government negotiate with drug companies for the price for the drugs. You can see the logic here at the DailyKos. Once you have laid the groundwork for a new entitlement, the full power of the state is involved. Once you have conceded the principle that all seniors should be able to get the latest drugs by borrowing other people’s money, it’s weird to put any restrictions on demand – it will soon grow exponentially, and the "donut hole" will surely be removed by a future Congress. So we’ll soon shift to a system of fantastically expensive free drugs of all kinds for all seniors and a crippling of the pharmaceutical industry’s research and development arm. The trade-off will be complete: a collapse in research in return for free drugs for the most pampered senior generation in history. Those boomers still have clout! Bush’s mixture of statism and incompetence has already made this inevitable. But a giant leap to the left on healthcare is just poised to occur. That leap is Bush’s legacy. Just watch it unfold.