From October 17, 2016, “Consent is necessary. This is not complicated.”

The post below is one version of a rant that I’ve written and re-written dozens of times over the history of this blog. It’s a response to the evergreen lamentation by self-proclaimed conservatives that deranged liberal bogeymen are out there declaring that sexual ethics consists solely and exclusively of consent — that everyone who isn’t them is saying, simply, “Get consent, and do what you will.”

That quote isn’t from six years ago, when I wrote the post below. It’s from last Friday, from Richard Beck, who wasn’t someone I expected to engage in this ignorant nastiness.

And it is both: Ignorant and nasty. It’s ignorant because this perpetual dismissive mischaracterization of consent can only be the result of a determined refusal to listen, to hear, to read, to see, or to engage. And it’s nasty because it accuses others of saying something they haven’t said and wouldn’t say.

The result of that ignorant nastiness is the endless iteration of an absurdist conversation:

“Consent is necessary.”
“So you believe consent is sufficient.”
“No. Listen. It’s necessary. N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y.”
“You’re saying sexual ethics ends with consent.”
“No, we’re saying it starts with consent.”
“So you’re saying that as long as there’s consent, then anything goes!”
“No. We’re saying that without consent, nothing goes.”
[Singing] “The world has gone mad today / And good’s bad today …”

This conversation is stupefying. Figuratively so for progressive folks frustrated by the perversely willful obtuseness of the so-called conservatives, but literally so for those conservatives.

I will be repeating myself here because apparently this needs to be repeated: Consent is necessary. This is the first, unavoidable aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. It starts with consent.

But every time we repeat that simple, modest claim, we get denounced by so-called “conservatives” who go off on mighty rants condemning us as though we had said something very different. Those rants all rail against the idea that consent is sufficient — that it is the whole, and only, aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. That ethics ends with consent.

Their bewilderment is bewildering. What is it about the conservative mindset that prevents them from being able to grasp this fundamental distinction? This is pretty elementary stuff, after all — necessary vs. sufficient is literally Chapter 1 textbook stuff in Logic or Ethics 101. More than that, it’s a basic distinction every student has to grasp before even signing up for such courses lest they mistakenly think that signing up for such Pre-req 101 courses means they’ve completed all the requirements for their major.

“One does not live by bread alone,” Jesus said. Bread — food — is necessary, but not sufficient. Without food, we would starve to death, but food alone is not sufficient — we also need clean water, air to breathe, grace, and a sense of purpose. The necessity of food does not cancel out the necessity of those other things, which is to say bread is necessary, but “bread alone” is not sufficient.

Again, not complicated. Whether or not they use the precise terminology, this necessary vs. sufficient distinction is something conservatives understand and are capable of applying when it comes to a thousand other things.

But not to sex.

Something in their brains recoils and misfires, and every repeated assertion of the necessity of consent provokes a boilerplate rant condemning the foolish “liberal” idea that consent is sufficient.

Here, for example, is blowhard talk-radio guru Rush Limbaugh speaking last week:

The left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. … If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine – whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. … Consent is the magic key to the left.

Limbaugh somehow managed to recite this rant without using the stock phrase used in 99 percent of its incarnations: “Anything goes!” But that’s still his argument — that “the left” believes that as long as there’s consent, then “anything goes.”

But that’s not the claim. The claim is not that consent is sufficient, but that it is necessary. The claim is not that with consent, “anything goes,” but rather that without consent, nothing goes.

This same obtuseness — the same hostile inability to understand the necessity of consent — can be seen in the thousands of social media posts from “conservative” Christians eagerly pointing out “liberal hypocrisy” over the use of the word “pussy.” It’s hypocritical, they insist, for “liberals” to be upset with Donald Trump for saying the word pussy when so many others they don’t criticize are using that word too. Why, Beyoncé herself uses that word in a song!

Their confusion and incomprehension seems genuine. They seriously seem to believe that Trump’s comments were upsetting to others solely because he uttered the word “pussy” — completely overlooking what the rest of the world found deplorable, that he was boasting of sexual assault, of grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent. Such staggering incomprehension is only possible due to these “conservative” folks’ utter inability to grasp the necessity of consent.

We see this same incomprehension manifested in many other ways, such as the constant appalling refrain from religious right types that not criminalizing same-sex couples will inevitably result in legalizing pedophilia and bestiality. Apart from the deliberate cruelty of that claim, it’s simply dumb — appealing only to those unable and unwilling to understand the meaning and primacy of consent.

The stubborn conservative refusal to understand this is as weird as it is frustrating. The idea is so utterly simple and basic, but it just makes them angry. Just look at that astonishing statement from Limbaugh. He’s furious about a basic tent of criminal law, blaming some conspiracy of “the left” for the idea that the absence of consent is what distinguishes rape as a crime. It’s easy to get so distracted by the offensiveness of his remarks there that one can miss noticing how unfathomably stupid that is.

So you “leftists” are saying that sex without consent is rape? Well, yes. That is what we’re saying, and also what criminal statutes in every state say, because that’s what these words mean. Yet even when he’s repeating that back to us, he’s unable to understand it.

What accounts for this angry incomprehension?

I suspect in part this dates back a generation, to conservative backlash against hippies and Woodstock and Aquarian fantasies about free love — the 1960s version of an idea that has always periodically emerged in various would-be utopian communities throughout history. So part of why conservatives can’t hear us when we say “consent is necessary” is because they’re too busy arguing with the vestigial hippies in their heads.

But I think the larger problem is that conservatives just don’t like the idea of sexual ethics or ethical sex. They’ve imagined they don’t need any of that because they have a much simpler, more categorical solution of their own: marriage. That’s the whole of conservative sexual ethics — or what conservatives appeal to instead of sexual ethics. Marriage, they want to believe, is necessary and sufficient for ethical sex.

The logic of this two-part assertion often leads to some ugly conclusions — such as the refusal to accept that raping one’s spouse is possible. But set aside the ghastlier implications of this way of thinking for now and consider the self-defeating nature of this two-part claim. This is a big reason why the defenders of “traditional sexual morality” have been unable to defend traditional sexual morality. Specifically, they’re so focused on defending the claim that marriage is sufficient, that they have failed to make any case that marriage is necessary.

This undermines their purported traditional morality in two important ways. First by distorting it — the claim that marital status alone is sufficient goes beyond, and thereby obliterates, the very ideas they’re trying to defend (just consider any traditional marriage vows — which consist of far more than, “OK, you’re married now so anything goes!”). And second by preventing them from paying any attention to the need to defend the necessity of marriage, which ought to be the essence of their argument.

This indefensible notion of the sufficiency of marriage is, I think, a major driver of their hostility to accepting the necessity of consent. If marriage is, in itself, sufficient, then nothing else can be necessary. Not consent, or dignity, or safety, or fidelity, or love, or a prudent concern for not scaring the horses. So they cannot accept or acknowledge or engage with the necessity of consent because that would force them to concede that their claims for the “sanctity of marriage” mean something other than the all-sufficiency of marriage and that they’re actually going to have to think responsibly about this stuff rather than just relying on the binary categories of married/not-married to do all their thinking for them.

I’m not going to do all of their homework for them, but it seems to me that what these folks ought to be doing is making a positive case for the necessity of marriage. That seems much more like what they want to be arguing for, but they’ll never be able to do so until they accept and acknowledge that marital status cannot be the only necessary consideration.

For the record, I think that marriage can be an excellent framework for supporting and nurturing the many things that ethical sex and sexual ethics require. I am not convinced it is the only such framework. In the parlance of our conservative neighbors, I could thus be said to have “rejected” or “abandoned” traditional morality.

Fair enough, but they should recognize that I have done so, in part, because they have refused to offer an argument not to — focusing instead on their indefensible, and ultimately odious, claim that marriage is not just necessary but sufficient. That has led them to reject the necessity of consent and, thereby, to equate their “traditional morality” with the defense of sexual assault. Their rejection of the necessity of consent, in other words, makes their traditional morality seem immoral.

From September 30, 2009, “In the belly of the fish”

(This was a follow up post to this one on “The sign of Jonah.”)

I request the consent of the chamber to revise and extend my previous post.

1. The whale was in Pinocchio

In discussing the book of Jonah, I try to avoid the notorious bit with the really big fish. That’s what the story says — “fish,” not “whale.”

If you’re not familiar with that bit, here it is, briefly. Instead of heading east, like God told him to, Jonah sails west. So God sends a big storm that threatens to sink the boat. Jonah realizes what’s going on, but instead of telling the sailors to turn around and take him back, he tells them to throw him overboard, because he’d rather die than help God save the people of Ninevah.

But God doesn’t let Jonah drown. Instead, God sends a big fish that swallows Jonah and he spends three days in the belly of the beast. While there, he offers up one of those negotiated repentances (God, if you get me out of this, I’ll …). The fish spits him out back where he started and he finally heads for Ninevah.

My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being “literally” true, and so they’d share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by whales and go to great lengths to argue that such a thing was possible. This led to some rather strange and uninspiring sermons, the main point of which seemed to be that God is capable of creating a fish that could swallow a man whole and keep that man alive for several days. The message of those sermons was, at best, difficult to apply in one’s daily life during the following week.

The larger problem with such sermons, though, was that they were elaborate devices for pretending to engage the story of Jonah while actually avoiding its clear and vehement argument. I’ve come to believe that such evasion is the primary function for a “literalist” approach to the Bible. (See also Genesis 1-11.)

2. I didn’t write the book of Jonah.

We have no way of knowing who wrote the book of Jonah, but I assure you it wasn’t me.

But whoever wrote it really did so as an explicit challenge to and rejection of an exclusive, vengeful perspective found elsewhere in scripture. Don’t take my word for that, read it yourself (it’s short).

When I point this out, some folks get mad at me. That hardly seems fair. I didn’t write it and I wasn’t around when we were deciding what to include in the canon. So if the book of Jonah’s refutation of the stories about the ethnic cleansing of Canaan causes you discomfort because it creates conflict within the canon, please don’t take it out on me.

3. Jesus really liked this book.

In the Gospels, Jesus specifically cites the book of Jonah. Asked for a sign that he speaks for God, Jesus said he would give no sign except “the sign of Jonah.”

Some say that’s a cryptic foretelling of Jesus’ eventual death and burial for three days in the tomb. Three days in a fish, three days in the tomb — get it?

I’m not buying that. Neither Jesus nor his critics would have thought it made any sense for him, when his legitimacy was being questioned, to compare himself to Jonah. You can accuse someone of being like Jonah, but you can’t try to vindicate yourself by claiming to be like him.

I think, rather, that the “sign of Jonah” means something like, “See for yourself, the Ninevites are being saved.” Jesus was responding to his critics by telling them that they could either join the party of they could go off to the desert and sulk, like Jonah. When Ninevah is spared, Jonah rages against God for being “a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

In Jonah’s view, those are all bad things. (I can’t help but think of the recent “empathy” debate.)

And because God is so infuriatingly gracious and abounding in love, Jonah declares that “it is better for me to die than to live … I am angry enough to die.” Jesus’ critics felt the same way about his compassion and abounding love for tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, Samaritans, gentiles, women and other unclean outcasts.

That reading of “the sign of Jonah” is supported by Jesus’ other, more allusive, references to the story in his parables. The ending of the parable of the Prodigal Son seems lifted directly from the book of Jonah. “The older brother became angry and refused to go in.” If his father’s love was to encompass his undeserving younger brother, then he, like Jonah, wanted no part of it.

4. Reconciling canonical conflicts.

“It’s simple,” says the sculptor in the old joke. “I just take a block of granite and chisel away anything that doesn’t look like a horse.”

Just for the sake of argument, some of my fellow evangelicals say, let’s pretend you’re right and there actually are conflicting views present within the canon of scripture. How, then, are we to know which side to choose? How can we know which of these conflicting views we ought to be following?

A classmate of mine asked exactly that question years ago of one of my seminary professors. The professor said nothing at first, but just turned around and walked to the blackboard. Holding a short piece of chalk sideways he made two broad, sweeping strokes and turned back to the class, pointing behind him to the cross he had just drawn. “That,” he said. “That is the standard by which I judge everything we read in the Bible.”

Good answer. That same answer is why I side with the author of Jonah against the biblical views that the story of Jonah attacks.

But while I think that’s a good answer it doesn’t settle the ongoing debate. That same debate in which the book of Jonah is just one fierce volley — the debate between exclusive and inclusive understandings of God’s abounding love — is nowhere near settled. And it can’t be settled by appeals to the Bible, or to the meaning of the cross, because where one stands in that debate colors how one reads the Bible, or what one considers the cross to mean.

From September 27, 2016, “‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’”

That quote from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI hung on a plaque in my dad’s law office. Dad knew that many people saw it as just another lawyer joke, as an expression of contempt for his profession. But he also knew what the quote really meant in context. The character saying that, Dick the Butcher, was plotting treason. Shakespeare and Dick both understood that such plots could only succeed if they eliminated the “lawyers” who would deem them illegitimate. By putting those words in the mouth of Dick the Butcher, Shakespeare was commending lawyers as arbiters of law, legitimacy and truth.

Beware of anyone who wants to eliminate all arbiters of law, legitimacy, and truth. Beware of anyone who dismisses law, or fact-checking, or academics, or science, or data. If they see those arbiters as a threat, then they likely see truth and reality as an obstacle. They’re probably trying to lead you somewhere unreal.

Conservative AM talk radio host Charlie Sykes has come to regret playing along with Dick the Butcher’s plan now that decades of killing all the lawyers has eliminated any need to correlate words with reality:

One of the chief problems, Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had “basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers.”

“There’s nobody,” he lamented. “Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bulls—.’ There’s nobody — you can’t go to anybody and say, ‘Look, here are the facts.’”

“And I have to say that’s one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there’s no way to break through it,” Sykes continued. “And I swim upstream because if I don’t say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.”

Donald Trump is the extreme end-product of this process, but it’s been a long time coming. There was the decision to oppose all things Al Gore by making the chemical properties of carbon a matter of partisan dispute, so that now denying the undeniable fact of climate change is a mandatory Republican stance. There was Colin Powell at the U.N., and “yellowcake” and the flood of lies used to sell the invasion of Iraq to allies, and to Congress, and to the public. The 2004 election brought us swift-boating. In 2008 we met Sarah Palin. And Mitt Romney moved the process along in 2012 — not just by uttering an endless stream of falsehoods about his opponent, but by steadfastly refusing to stop doing so after being repeatedly called out and corrected.

Longtime press critic Jay Rosen has a smart piece exploring what this all means for journalists trying to cover the 2016 election and the campaign of a compulsive fantasist like Donald Trump, “Asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press“:

Now imagine what happens when over time the base of one party, far more than the base of the other, begins to treat the press as a hostile actor, and its own establishment as part of the rot; when it not only opposes but denies the legitimacy — and loyalty to the state — of the other side’s leader; when it prefers conspiracy theory to party-friendly narratives that at least cope with verified fact; when it is scornful of the reality that in a divided system you never get everything you want.

… Trump’s threat to the press goes far deeper than his flagrant abuse of journalists and the threatening noises he has made about libel law.

When I say he’s trying to break the press, I mean the entire system that gives honest journalism a role in the republic. Trump is running against such basic notions as:

• “we need a fact-based debate or there can’t be consent of the governed;”
• “there’s a public record that cannot just be wiped away;”
• “a candidate’s position on major issues should be made clear to the voters;”
• “lying cannot become a universal principle in politics without major damage to our democracy.”

Not only is he running against such fundamentals, the continuity of which is assumed by all forms of campaign coverage, but journalists are the ones who understand best his assault on these basic principles. They’re living it every day. Of course, he’s running against them, too.

A political style that mocks the idea of a common world of facts — and gets traction with that view —  is an attack on the very possibility of honest journalism. Campaign journalists have to find a way to oppose this style without becoming election-season opponents of Trump himself, which is not, I think, their proper role. Nothing in their training or tradition would have prepared them for this moment.

I first saw this unpreparedness that Rosen describes back in 2004, when I was working for the largest newspaper in Delaware. That state happened to be home to one of the leaders of the “Swift Boat” campaign that was spreading demonstrable lies about Sen. John Kerry’s military service. Those lies were about matters of public record — publicly available documents prepared decades earlier by the U.S. Navy. But our paper printed the claims and assertions of the “Swift Boat” smear campaign without also printing the documented facts that rebutted them. “That’s not our job,” the managing editor told me, “it’s John Kerry’s job and we don’t work for the Kerry campaign.” (Then I said that we apparently don’t work for our readers either, since we didn’t see any professional obligation to give them the truth as accurately as we could. And then things got kind of shout-y.)

Eventually, we ran a piece allowing the Kerry campaign to “respond” to the allegations. The claims and counter-claims of the two sides were presented as symmetrically legitimate, with a passing mention that Naval records themselves also had some sort of opinion on what the Naval records said, but that was neither here nor there. The overweening concern in all of that was to appear disinterested so as to be insulated from any accusation of partisan bias. But my boss confused being a dis-interested arbiter with being un-interested in accuracy. And that was exactly what Dick the Butcher’s Swift Boat Veterans Against the Very Idea of Truth was counting on.

Our paper was not alone in dropping the ball when it came to that swift-boat BS. Twelve years later, journalists are now faced with an even more extreme version, but even if they’re belatedly recognizing the need for a better approach to confirming the accuracy of what they publish they’re now less-equipped to do so. By the time I lost my job in the fourth round of lay-offs at that paper, I’d seen more than half of our news-gathering and editorial desks emptied. And that’s been the pattern everywhere, with tens of thousands of people once employed to confirm accuracy now forced to find another way to make a living. “The first thing we do, let’s lay-off all the fact-checkers.”

Journalism — as a profession, or as a craft, or as a business — is even less prepared for the challenge of Donald Trump than it was in 2004. Rosen’s critique is dead-on. His prescription, alas, is woefully unspecific:

Now we’re here and novelty demands novelty. If journalists are to rise to the occasion in the final six weeks of this campaign, they will have to find a style of coverage as irregular as Trump’s political style.

From September 2, 2020, “I am a Christian. Here is what I believe about abortion.”

Subsidiarity, mofos.

I want to talk about abortion with my fellow white evangelical Christians.

More specifically, I am addressing those evangelicals who have not sworn their full allegiance to Donald Trump. We might refer to this group as the “19 percent” — meaning the minority of white evangelicals who did not vote to elect Trump in 2016, but I am hopeful that the share of those willing to read or to listen here will be somewhat larger than that.

We might describe my intended audience here as a spectrum ranging from Michael Wear to Russell Moore, which is to say those of my fellow American evangelical Christians who are Trump-resistant or at least somewhat Trump-reluctant. Some of you are emphatically opposed to Trump while others may be ruefully supportive of him due primarily to his support for judges and policies more likely to end legal abortion.

Wherever you fall on that spectrum, you and I disagree on the meaning and the morality of abortion. This post is not an exercise in persuasion or in condemnation. Nor does it involve the suggestion of any sort of compromise or “middle ground” or “third way.” All I want to do here is to explain, as simply and clearly as I can, what it is that I believe about abortion and what the political implications of that are for me.

The difference between what I believe and what you believe is, in some ways, a lot smaller than you might imagine. The implications of that difference expand outward, producing very different responsibilities and obligations for the law, for citizens, and for all of civil society — including the church.

Here is that difference: You believe that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, which is to say that a fetus, an embryo, a blastocyst, a zygote possesses an equal moral standing to that of any child or adult. To end a pregnancy, therefore, is to take a human life — an act indistinct from taking the life of any other child or adult.

I do not believe that. I make a distinction between the potential human personhood of a fetus/embryo/blastocyst/zygote and the actual human personhood of actual infants, children, and adults. I believe that potential human personhood has great value and great moral significance, but not as great as that of any and every actual human person. Abortion is a serious and significant matter, but it is not at all like “murder.”

The prolific evangelical apologetics writer Norman Geisler put it this way:

The one clear thing which the Scriptures indicate about abortion is that it is not the same as murder. … Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.

That distinction, which Geisler argued was derived from biblical teaching and biblical prooftexts, led him to conclude that abortion was justified and even obligated in some cases:

When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. …

Birth is not morally necessitated without consent. No woman should be forced to carry a child if she did not consent to intercourse. A violent intrusion into a woman’s womb does not bring with it a moral birthright for the embryo. The mother has a right to refuse that her body be used as an object of sexual intrusion. The violation of her honor and personhood was enough evil without compounding her plight by forcing an unwanted child on her besides. … the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.

The crucial point here is that final sentence, so let me repeat it: “The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.”

Please note what this does not say or mean or imply or entail: It does not mean that the potentially human embryo has no rights, or no value, or no meaning, or no significance, or no dignity. To regard “the potentially human embryo” as meaningless or worthless would be wrong — wrong both in the sense of immoral and in the sense of inaccurate.

How, then, ought we to account for and to honor the moral claims and moral value of the potential personhood of the unborn? How do we, as you all often say, “protect the unborn”?

The problem with that question is the word “we.” Who is we?

That is always an essential question in Christian ethical teaching and Christian political thought: “Who is ‘we’?” And the way that Christians, for centuries, have tried to answer that question — to clarify and differentiate all of the potential meanings of “we” — fall under the heading of subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity is both a prudential principle and an ethical one. To violate or to reject subsidiarity, then, is both immoral and ineffective. Subsidiarity clarifies the varied and various roles that different people, different actors, different institutions and agencies have — the varied and various responsibilities and obligations we all share in different and differing capacities. It describes what the epistle calls the “inescapable network of mutuality” that binds us all together directly and indirectly. Our various places and roles in that network shape our various responsibilities and duties to one another. To abdicate the responsibilities that are rightly ours, or to usurp the responsibilities that are not rightly ours, is both imprudent and immoral.

Subsidiarity teaches that those closest to a given situation have the greatest responsibility for that situation. Every other actor and agency in the network of mutuality also bears responsibility, but their indirect responsibility takes the shape of supporting those closest, who hold the primary and most direct responsibility.

I believe in subsidiarity. It seems clear to me that the primary responsibility for “protecting the unborn” is given to those whose bodies are literally transforming for that very purpose, which is to say with the actual human persons, the women* whose bodies are carrying and have carried every potential human person who has ever later been born. They are the most direct actors here, exponentially closer and more responsible than anyone else, and the responsibility and obligation of everyone else is to ensure they have all the moral and material support they require to fulfill that role.

I trust those women. I trust them more than any indirectly responsible actor who would trample on their subsidiary obligations by trying to usurp the responsibilities entrusted to those women by nature and nature’s God.

Will 100% of those women make 100% of the best choices 100% of the time? Of course not. They are, like all of us, human, and no human or group of humans is ever always capable of always making only the very best choices. But their humanity is all the more reason to affirm their agency and dignity to choose, not a license to strip them of that humanity by stripping them of their responsibility, dignity, agency, and freedom.

It is not my job — not my ethical duty nor my capacity — to usurp their primacy here. Not as their neighbor, not as their relative, not as their congressional representative or as their pastor or as their president or as their appellate-court judge. Every other actor, agency, institution, civil society organization, magistrate, and pastor does have an indirect role to play —  the role of supporting these women to make the best choices and to have the best choices available to them.

What does that mean in practical terms? It means, for most of us, working to create a context for their choices in which they are never constrained by desperation or duress, by the market-worshipping coercion of penury, by fear or want or threat. It means working to establish a context in which financial support, vocational opportunity, human potential, human thriving and human dignity are not contingent or conditional or inconstant. It means creating a context which is hospitable to welcoming new life, and therefore a context in which the choice of hospitality is possible and promising. (If I were to choose a text for a sermon on the politics of abortion, it would be the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.)

Sometimes, when I describe this role and this obligation, those who wish only to deny subsidiarity by a top-down decree criminalizing all abortion will accuse me of just trying to change the subject. But this is the subject. Subsidiarity teaches me that what is best for “the unborn” will be what is best for their mothers. The only way to “protect the unborn” is by protecting those carrying them — protecting their health, dignity, wellbeing, financial security, agency, and freedom.

My uncle was an obstetrician in the 1960s. He was hired to reform a regional hospital in central Pennsylvania that was struggling with one of the worst infant mortality rates in the state. He took the job only on the condition that he could, instead, address the crisis that hospital hadn’t recognized — that it also had one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. Some thought that he, too, was trying to change the subject, but he insisted that if they took better care of those mothers, the infant mortality problem would also be resolved. And it was.

If “we” want to “protect the unborn” then “we” must trust those entrusted with that duty. Erasing or outlawing their central role, their humanity, and their agency is both imprudent and immoral. “We” — for any given value of “we” — need to center them, support them, and provide for them a larger context in which they are best able and equipped to do what is best for themselves and for those potential and actual human persons in their care.

This is what I believe. This is my “abortion politics.” The sectarian nuance and the detailed working out of this may vary somewhat, but this is, in broad terms, what tens of millions of other American Christians who are also Democratic voters also believe.

Again, I am not telling you this in an effort to persuade or to convince. I have done that elsewhere and will do it again, but that’s not what this post is about. I am not here attempting to create any compromise or debate and would not welcome either one. (Although I’m sure the DEBATEME!-boi reply guys will still show up in comments, because fish gotta swim.)

I am telling you this only because I think it is something you should know. What you decide to do with that knowledge, what you feel you’re allowed to do with that knowledge, I leave up to you.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – –

* Mostly women, but not only women. That needs to be said here, for accuracy’s sake and not for the sake of what many of my fellow evangelicals might dismiss as “political correctness.”

From August 18, 2013, “Gary Bauer’s Big Book of Genesis Legislation”

“America is on the verge of criminalizing the book of Genesis,” says culture warrior Gary Bauer — who founded the Family Research Council and once ran for president.

For the record, no legislation has been introduced to do this. At least not as far as I can tell — since I’m not sure what “criminalizing the book of Genesis” is supposed to mean. Would it force us all to buy replacement Bibles with only 65 books? Would synagogues have to get new Torah scrolls that were 20 percent shorter?

Bauer said this while he was going on about what he sees as the calamitous perils of marriage equality, railing against recent Supreme Court decisions striking down key parts of DOMA and California’s Proposition 8. But this context doesn’t really help us to make sense of that bit about criminalizing Genesis:

Five liberal justices on our Supreme Court committed an act of judicial terrorism that struck at the very foundation of our constitutional republic. The court’s liberal majority accepted a radical redefinition of marriage and imposed its morality on the rest of society.

In doing so, five unelected judges rejected thousands of years of Judeo-Christian understanding, as well as congressional statutes, and set the stage for invalidating the will of the people in more than two-dozen states that have voted to maintain the traditional definition of marriage. Does the consent of the governed matter at all anymore?

It seems as though America is on the verge of criminalizing the book of Genesis. And with Obamacare’s assault on conscience, the danger to religious liberty cannot be overstated.

That’s pretty baffling. For Bauer, it seems, marriage equality and contraception without copays somehow is the same thing as “criminalizing the book of Genesis.”

I guess maybe Bauer is basing his anti-contraception views on a discredited reading of the weird little story of Onan in Genesis 38, but that still doesn’t explain why his anti-marriage-equality rant should have him bemoaning the “criminalizing of the book of Genesis” rather than, say, “criminalizing the book of Leviticus.” Leviticus, after all, is where the key clobber texts shaping Bauer’s anti-gay dogma are found.

To anchor his anti-gay views in Genesis, Gary Bauer has to be doing one of two very dubious maneuvers with the text.

He could be talking about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah — but that doesn’t provide any textual basis for what he’s claiming here. Those two wicked cities were destroyed in the book of Genesis due to their contemptuous neglect of the poor and their attempted gang-rape of visitors. Gang-raping strangers isn’t really analogous to marriage — and if Bauer thinks it is, then I’m extremely worried for Mrs. Bauer. Plus Bauer has never been at all concerned with those who have “excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy,” so it’s not possible he’s worried about the sin of Sodom.

The other possibility is that Bauer is claiming the origin stories of the book of Genesis are normative. Thus the story of Adam and Eve — one man and one woman — is normative for “biblical” marriage. Any legal definition of marriage that does not correspond with the specific normative model of Adam and Eve, therefore, is the equivalent of “criminalizing the book of Genesis.”

The problem there is that Bauer would be, himself, contradicting most of the book of Genesis. Abraham and Jacob were polygamists, with multiple wives as well as concubines, sex slaves, etc. They don’t fit into Bauer’s normative model of one man and one woman. And the book of Genesis itself tells us that Abraham and Jacob were blessed by God and not regarded as unrighteous for these non-normative marriages. Their multiplicity of wives, in fact, is presented as evidence of divine blessing.

That’s why the whole “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” thing just plain falls apart for anyone who reads a few pages further than Adam and Eve. For the rest of the book of Genesis it’s not Adam and Eve, it’s Adam and Eve and Hagar and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah.

I also wonder what Gary Bauer’s notion of the book of Genesis as specifically normative for American law means beyond just his current obsessive opposition to marriage equality.

Treating Genesis this way would mean we’d have to get rid of the death penalty for individuals, for one thing. Murderers could no longer be sentenced to death or even sentenced to prison. Instead, they would be branded as murderers and set free to roam the world.

Without the threat of execution or incarceration, how would we prevent violent crime? Just do what the book of Genesis teaches us to do: Negotiate with violent criminals by offering them our virgin daughters as victims. If that doesn’t sound just or appealing to you, well then you’re probably “on the verge of criminalizing the book of Genesis.”

While we’d need to get rid of the death penalty for individual murderers, execution would still be possible for entire cities, which could be destroyed with fire and brimstone. Or for entire nations, which could be destroyed with a massive flood. So I suppose if we’re going to avoid criminalizing the book of Genesis, we’ll have to get over our liberal modern notion that collective guilt and collective punishment is an atrocity.

Gary Bauer would probably like one other legislative idea derived from those normative stories of Genesis: the abolition of all taxes. That’s what Joseph manages to bring about in the final chapters of Genesis, where he serves as Pharaoh’s right-hand man. No taxes definitely sounds like an idea Gary Bauer could get behind.

Unfortunately, Bauer probably wouldn’t be too keen on how Joseph gets rid of taxes — which is by centralizing all property and all ownership, establishing Pharaoh as the owner of all land, all commerce, all capital, all labor, everyone and everything.

That’s a pretty extreme form of communist totalitarianism, and I certainly wouldn’t want to see American law rewritten to require what God blesses Joseph for requiring in the book of Genesis. Does that mean I’m on the verge of criminalizing the book of Genesis?

We haven’t even gotten to Judah and Tamar yet, or to Lot and his daughters. But let’s avoid contemplating what horrors would be required if we were to treat those parts of Genesis as normative for contemporary legislation. Some things in some parts of the book of Genesis have long been criminalized, and they ought to be.

From July 4, 1852, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”

I was too lazy to look back to whenever the first year was that I posted passages from Frederick Douglass’ epic sermon here to mark Independence Day, but that’s not the point anyway. The point is that Douglass captures here everything that matters about America’s past and future. This speech has never not been urgently timely, but it’s more fiercely necessary now than ever before — particularly since reading it in a public school classroom is now apparently illegal in several states.

Read the whole thing. But here are some highlights:

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be fight and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed.

But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. …

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to bum their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

… The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. …

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, Welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything—in preference to the gospel, as preached by those divines. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation—a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery.

The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

From June 13, 2014, “A preferential option for predators: Christianity Today hires the Rev. Humbert Humbert to serve as a spiritual adviser to its readers“:

“I’m not sure whether I knew it was a crime or not,” Robert J. Carlson, the Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Louis, said in a deposition released earlier this week. Carlson was talking about the sexual abuse of a child by a priest who served under him when he was an auxiliary bishop in Minnesota.

But that, alas, is not the most appalling, foolish and inadvertently revealing statement this week about sanctimonious sexual predators who target children. That dishonor goes, instead, to Leadership Journal, the magazine for white evangelical clergy published by Christianity Today. Carlson can’t compete with CT’s horrifying decision to publish this: “My Easy Trip From Youth Minister to Felon.”

The anonymous former youth minister, writing from prison, is every bit as narcissistic and self-justifying as Humbert Humbert, if not as repulsively charming as the unreliable narrator of Nabokov’s novel. And his agenda throughout the piece is the same as Humbert’s, only with a sanctimonious sheen of religiosity and pious Bible-talk (including, of course, the obligatory self-comparison to poor King David, who in the writer’s telling was simply not spiritual strong enough to resist raping the tawdry temptress Bathsheba).

The writer’s methodical selection, isolation and grooming of his victim began when she was still in middle school — something readers will find only from reading between the lines of his apologia. But he (and the editors of Leadership Journal) presents the story as though it were a slowly developing romantic affair, a mutual sin entered into by two equals who were equally culpable.

The guy goes on to discuss the impact this “spiritual lapse” has had on him — but only on him. He mentions its effect on his wife and children only in passing, bemoaning that he’s unfairly not seen his children since she packed them up and left. (He does discuss his wife a great deal earlier in the piece — blaming her for his “affair” by piously pretending he’s not doing that.)