Category: Government & Politics

One would be hard-pressed to find in the rantings of Westboro Baptist Church picketers anything resembling the biblical gospel.

[As Ed Stetzer (@edstetzer) said, the only thing correct in the name is the congregation’s location.]

Even finding an example of biblical prophecy — the “forthtelling” which indicted God’s people for violations of the covenant relationship — in Westboro’s picketing seems an effort in futility.

Yet as much as biblical Christ-followers cringe at the apparent distortion of the biblical gospel, the abuse of the prophetic role in society, and the consequent maligning of the gospel and God,the Supreme Court is right.

Under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, the government has no right to decide what constitutes a true church, what constitutes a biblical — or even true — message, or what people claiming the name of Christ can shout from a street corner.

In short, the Supreme Court is not a “repugnance cop.”

If it were, we would look much more like the Middle East despots who are even now being toppled in part because of such behavior.

And, given the world-wide tenor of attitude toward Christian belief, American believers should be thankful that for now our government protects the right of believers not only to practice their faith free of public intrustion, but also to talk about it openly.

This is good news in light of the problems that open-air evangelism is experiencing in Michigan, outside an Islamic festival. Good news in light of the United Kingdom’s disqualification of foster parents because of their biblical belief against homosexuality. Good news in light of the killing of a Pakistani minority minister who refused to prosecute Christians. Good news, indeed.

So while Christ-followers pray for Westboro members to examine their hearts and words, we express our thanks to God that Westboro is still able, in this country, to reveal even uncharitable hearts and express even hurtful words without repercussion.

Congress, with its batch of fresh faces from the November election, vowed to address the subject of earmarks in appropriations bills (e.g., bacon for voters to chew on).

Conservatives proposed banning the practice of earmarks altogether. To do so would mean that individual congressmen would no longer be able to attach the approval to spend money on his district’s rattlesnake rodeo to unrelated bills addressing the USDA meat inspection practices, for example.

In the scheme of trillion-dollar budgets and even bigger deficits, earmarks don’t amount to much. But to ordinary taxpayers, and because of the ideology of big government it represents, they do.

But even some Republicans balked at the notion, on the grounds that ‘it is my duty to make sure I secure some federal money for my constituents back home.’

Let’s review a few basic principles from Civics 101.

The ‘federal money’ only exists because the U.S. Government takes it from citizens. It takes money from citizens by taxing us: income tax, business tax, fees, regulations, etc, etc.

So, to ‘secure’ federal money for constituents is to capitulate to the most inefficient scheme ever: send money to Washington through taxes, then beg for it back after politicians, bureacrats and regulators have extracted salaries and fees and generally wasted a bunch of it.

If congressmen were really concerned about constituents, they would seek to end the practice altogether. If people in your district need money for the rattlesnake rodeo, don’t beg for it from Washington: instead, don’t send it to Washington in the first place.

The attempt to ban earmarks? Failed.

I once discussed with a couple of law school buddies the episode of then Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and Federal Judge Myron Thompson’s brouhaha over Moore’s Ten Commandments display in the Alabama courthouse.

They were giddy that Thompson had judicially thumped Moore by ordering the display removed on the threat of huge fines and, ostensibly, military action if Moore did not comply.

When I suggested (only partially tongue-in-cheek) that Moore resist the order and compel Thompson to send in the Green Berets to storm the courthouse and take the Ten Commandments by force, they looked at me as if I had just performed an alien mutilation on a local cow.

They had no concept that significant issues of state sovereignty, federalism, and religious freedom were at stake. They were only impressed with the power of the federal judiciary.

We are again impressed with the power of the federal judiciary, but not in an altogether favorable sense. A single federal judge, Vaughan R. Walker, struck down the will of the California populace to find a “right” to homosexual marriage in the U.S. Constitution.

As Albert Mohler expressed it: “Judge Walker’s decision is sweeping and comprehensive, basically affirming every argument and claim put forth by those demanding that California’s Proposition 8 be declared unconstitutional. That proposition, affirmed by a clear majority of California voters, amended the state’s constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In one brazen act of judicial energy, California’s voters were told that they had no right to define marriage, and thousands of years of human wisdom were discarded as irrational.”

This should come as no surprise, because all of government has come to signify the interest of a few, supposing that they are the brightest and wisest of the bunch, in controlling the lives of everyone else. From using Google Earth to find swimming pool criminals, to ordering every American to purchase health insurance, to requiring every religious objector to accept homosexual marriage, the trend is disturbingly definite.

Homosexual marriage, however, is a sort of piece de resistance: should its proponents succeed in making this the law of the land, it will have codified the underlying aim of homosexuality in general, which is to flout openly the Lordship of God in the world he created, and to revel in rebellion.

The Louisiana governor, charged with protecting the citizens of his state as much as possible from things such as ecological disaster, and also cognizant of his state’s relation to others via the national government and the U.S. Constitution, is torn: build some sand berms to buffer fragile ecosystems from an advancing oil slick, or honor the looming figure of Uncle Sam personified at present through the person of President Obama.

Apparently gaining the approval of Uncle Sam is a process mired in red tape and the detached, intellectual conservationism of those who are far removed — geographically and emotionally — from the myriad oil-covered carcasses washing up on Louisiana’s shore, and whose concern would only reach rational levels when the oil problem affected their consumption of imported shrimp and crawfish etouffee.

Let’s just say, hypothetically, that Louisiana built its protective sand dunes without the approval of the feds. Would the present administration actually put itself in the position of bringing in U.S. military engineers to remove them?

Gov. Jindal, build your berms.

Speaking of “Zero-Tolerance,” if it’s such a good thing for catching those subversive Boy Scouts and their confounded camp tools, why not for Congressmen who don’t read bills?

By the way, the little-known and only recently discovered Federalist Papers, Part 2 reveals that many of the Framers had a solution for awful Congressmen who keep getting voted in by their districts: once a year each State could exercise an Interstate Veto and fire a Senator or Representative from any other State.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, like many nominees, has come under fire for the things she has said.

In defending her judicial philosophy that she would hope that a ‘wise Latina’ would make a better judgment than a white male, Judge Sotomayor pointed to a remark that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had made: that a wise woman and wise man should be able to come to the same conclusion. Judge Sotomayor, contrasting their respective statements, concluded that Justice O’Connor could not have meant what she said.

Judge Sotomayor also defended these and other of her remarks by claiming that she was ‘misunderstood’.

Let’s review: a justice is required to take the words of another, apply them to a set of facts, and issue a ruling that explains the application of words to facts.

In Judge Sotomayor we have a Supreme Court nominee in whom are combined first, the presumptive ability to discern what a Supreme Court Justice could not have meant by her plain words, and second, the almost unbelievable inability to make herself ‘understood’.