Category: Government & Politics

By the end of this week, the U.S. Supreme Court will have heard arguments on two significant cases related to marriage and to homosexual unions.

I use those terms because at present, they are the primary positions advocated in one degree or another in the pending debate. It is highly improbable, however, that they will remain the primary positions advanced, and it is likely that we will begin to see increasing variations on what people claim to be a “civil right” related to marriage.I use those terms because they offer a bit of clarity. “Homosexual marriage” is an oxymoron; “heterosexual marriage” a redundancy. This is not meant to offend, but to affirm the reality of the situation. According to some, the first legalization of homosexual unions occurred in the Netherlands roughly a decade ago. Corresponding distortions of the language quickly followed. Consequently two millenia of Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage, and its counterpart in the broader culture, is balanced against a few years of its opposite.

The Court won’t release an opinion on these cases for a few months, but in the meanwhile pundits and prognosticators will analyze every question, every posture change, every raised eyebrow, timely cough, and rolled eye to offer suggestions about how the Court will ultimately rule, which should affirm for everyone that predicting such things is as certain as placing the entrails of a chicken on the table and finding in their chaotic distribution a viable plan for funding your retirement account.

In these two cases the Court will address the validity of the national government’s Defense of Marriage Act, which restricts government benefits in some ways to married couples (prohibiting those benefits to homosexual unions), and California’s Proposition 8, which defines marriage as being between one woman and one man.

What will likely emerge as the favorite argument to convince the Court to mandate its view on every State in the union, and on the national government, is that “marriage” is a “civil right,” on par with those recognized on the basis of gender and ethnicity. However, such an approach will prove ultimately unworkable.

Marriage itself is not an unrestricted civil right. Even between one man and one woman, we prohibit some from participating: those who are too young, those who are incompetent, those who are too closely related (notwithstanding jokes about Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi). If “marriage” is deemed to be a fundamental right by the Court, or by some governmental act, the immediate application will be that homosexuals may now participate in it. Yet once it is decided that marriage is no longer limited to one man and one woman (who are of sufficient age, competence and un-relatedness), the question necessarily becomes what precisely is being guaranteed.

Even if upcoming Court decisions or governmental actions specify that the new “marriage” right is for one pair of humans (of sufficient age, competence, and un-relatedness), nothing in reality can be restricted. For if no traditional limitation is placed on “marriage,” then it is reduced merely to a consensual agreement for the public to recognize its existence: that agreement could be made between a man and woman, two men, two women, a threesome, or between a man and his favorite dog, car, or golf club.

In either event, the definition of “marriage” by the Court or government has been put in the hands of lawyers, at best, or elected representatives, at worst (or vice versa, depending on your perspective). It is precisely at this point that human, earthly wisdom pales in comparison to that of the Creator, whose design reveals the answer to an apparently puzzling question, should we only care to look at it.

The Supreme Court’s decision regarding ObamaCare is filled with high drama: the Chief Justice, appointed by Republican George W. Bush, sided with the more liberal/progressive Justices appointed primarily by Democrat presidents to reach a 5-4 decision upholding the legislation; in so doing, he declared the Act to be a tax, something President Obama and his lawyers had been insistent that it most definitely was not.

Sure, the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution did not authorize such a sweeping power-grab, but the Tax Clause does.

After the secretive nature of the passing of the bill (“We have to pass it to find out what’s in it” — Pelosi), and given the subsequent dislike which the majority of Americans feels for the monstrosity after discovering “what’s in it”, receiving a 5-4 decision from those who are touted as Constitutional experts is hardly satisfying.

Even worse is the obvious conclusion that the Court is politicized. It has become a microcosm of contemporary politics: 40% on the left, 40% on the right, and 20% allegedly “neutral.” Only in the most mundane and obvious of Constitutional questions does the Court reach anything resembling consensus.

It is high time that the Court did away with split decisions. Otherwise, given every successive President’s attempt to pack the Court in miniature, the Court is simply a very small Congress with longer tenure. This is not what the Framers envisioned, and is not conducive to confidence in a neutral arbiter of Constitutional questions.

Some time ago I posted an article entitled Running the Country 5-4, which addressed the issue of significant national questions being decided along party lines in the U.S. Supreme Court.

We have 100 U.S. Senators, 435 U.S. Representatives, and a President. With all that mental power being directed toward dealing appropriately with national issues within the confines of the U.S. Constitution, it would seem that we should not have so many important issues still falling in the laps of 9 unelected Supreme Court Justices.

It is a travesty that such crucial issues are decided by a bare majority of unelected officials. Yet that is precisely what is once again on the horizon regarding the constutionality of national healthcare, aka ObamaCare.

If Justices did not cast ballots along such clearly partisan lines, close votes would be much more palatable. Here’s hoping that the ObamaCare result will be an outlier.

The current administration and its pundits protest their collective helpnessess in the face of rising oil prices and the concomitant spike in gas prices at the pump. “There is no quick fix” they say.*

Not too long ago, the same administration oversaw the closing of hundreds of automobile dealerships and took control of GM, micromanaging the production of an electric vehicle called the “Volt.” The administration subsidized the expense of the Volt’s production in order to affect retail prices at the dealer level, and at present propose even larger subsidies.

Not too long ago, the current administration pushed passage of government-managed healthcare (flashback: “we have to pass it to know what’s in it”) claiming that government control of that sector would reduce insurance premiums for everyone.

*The President and his energy secretary have both expressed their hopes that gas prices in the U.S. would rival those in Europe.

Maxine Waters (D) refers to John Boehner (R) and Eric Cantor (R) as “demons” to the approving hoops and hollers of her partisan audience.

Republican presidential candidate and former Senator Rick Santorum refers to Satan as, well, Satan, before an audience of Catholics.

Media assessment: it is Santorum who has the dangerous spirituality.

Taking a step back to view the recent imbroglio over the administration’s decision to require even objecting religious organizations to provide employee health insurance with contraceptive coverage, one might reasonably conclude that this was no mistake by an amateur political team. No one was talking about abortion and contraception before this decision: not the President, not the Republican candidates…no one. They, we, are now.

Here’s the problem with such discussions.

It is a right to engage in copulation. It is not enshrined in the Bill of Rights; there was no need. There are, of course, limits, and State laws restricting the ages of those involved, banning the use of force, and so forth are perfectly reasonable. But there is no right to be protected from the consequences of copulation, which, as we all know, is pregnancy. Which, we know but don’t always admit, is a small human.

The Administration and pro-abortion camps and ‘women’s reproductive freedom’ advocates see no problem with requiring insurers and the employers who contract with them to provide contraception and abortifacients — all of which seek to avoid the consequences of copulation — even when it violates the religious conscience of those involved and actually violates a right that IS enshrined in the U.S. Constitution: the free exercise of religion as expressed in the First Amendment.

If we apply that same logic to actual, specified rights, we see how flawed the thinking is.

The First Amendment also contains a right to speech and the press. Allowing for technological advance, this preserves the freedom to print speech, or to Tweet it, or facebook it, or blog it, or otherwise record it for others. There are certain limits, but again, applying the contraception imagination, this right of mine to speak and to record it for others includes the requirement that the rest of you pay for my printing press and the employees to run it, for my Internet connection, and for my computer.

The Second Amendment contains the right to bear arms. Applying the contraception imagination, this also requires the rest of you to purchase my Kimber .45 auto, my Armalite .380, ammunition, target practice, gun safe, cleaning supplies, etc. etc.

The Fourth Amendment prevents the government from infringement of security in our “persons, houses, papers and effects” against unreasonable search and seizure. I already have my “person,” thank you very much, but in order to act on my right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure in my house, why, all the rest of you are required to purchase a house for me to be secure in.

There are many other examples, of course. The right to education requires the rest of you to pay for mine. The right to life requires that the rest of you pay for my food, clothing and shelter. The right to the pursuit of happiness means that the rest of you fund my chasing of it. And on, and on, and on it goes.

The right to copulate — and the ensuing demand by some that the rest of us pay for their consequence-free practice of it — runs right up against the right to exercise religion freely, because a demand for the latter to fund the former violates a specified right. The reverse is not true.

I am unable to exercise my religious faith freely if required to pay for your contraception. Yet you may still copulate and attempt to do so without consequence if I am allowed to exercise religious faith freely.

This discussion about contraception demonstrates a woeful misunderstanding of the concept of rights. Rights restrict the actions of government; they do not place burdens on other citizens.

The President is not King.

Nor is he dictator. Nor czar, nor emperor, nor CEO.

Yet I’m afraid that many believers go about choosing presidential candidates as if they were all of these.

Christian media is abuzz with discussions regarding the various reasons that we should question supporting each of the presidential candidates. Supporting Mitt Romney means endorsing his quasi-cultic Mormon beliefs. Supporting Newt Gingrich gives a thumbs-up to serial divorce, opportunistic self-interest, and dubious conversion claims. Supporting Herman Cain (no longer in the race) means that we approve of womanizing.

Some refuse to support Rick Santorum because he does not allow for U.S. foreign policy complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and some even because he gave an “unpresidential” head shake at a debate.

Is our thinking that muddled?

If Christ-followers were selecting a king — along the lines of a Saul, a David, a Solomon — then issues of moral character are obviously crucial. Witness the problems that those three kings encountered when they slipped morally. Were we to grant someone kingly authority and power, then we would be wise to demand kingly character.

But we are not selecting a king, and despite what recent presidents seem to think, and despite what media and Congress and pundits would have us to think, the President of the United States is not all-powerful. Ours is a government of the separation of powers: each branch of government serves as a check and balance to the other.  As a result, the personal moral failures of a Justice or a Congressman or a President — or the megolomanical machinations of any of the them — does not spell doom for the country.

National destruction would need to be conspiratorial (that is, each of the three branches would need to abdicate its constitutional responsibilities).

So, just how perfect does a presidential candidate need to be? This is not the same question as what advice we should give to candidates who claim the name of Christ, but threaten the witness of the gospel by their political behavior. Prominent Christians advised Herman Cain to exit the race, but if he had not, would that fact alone require those Christians to vote against him in the general election facing Barack Obama?

Since, then, the effect of a candidate’s shortcomings are lessened in our separate-powers government, can believers vote for a tainted candidate? Another way to view whether our standards are appropriate is whether — if faithfully and consistently applied — they would permit us to vote for any of the current slate of candidates, including the current President?

Some who have had no problem eliminating candidates from contention have a much more difficult time promoting any of the others. But why write articles, submit blog posts, and announce to the world on social media why we can’t support Candidate A, when we can’t say who we do support? Would it not be better to discuss, as believers, what principles to use to discern the best candidate given our political system and current need? Otherwise, one views the political landscape and finds that collectively we Christians have effectively eliminated everyone.

If we apply standards haphazardly, or if they leave us with no one to vote for, we should reassess our standards.