UCC Keeps Digging

I’m beginning to think that the United Church of Christ has a masochistic streak. Instead of finally letting go of the Jeremiah Wright mess, it just keeps flailing away like a medieval flagellant that hasn’t paid enough for his sins. The latest instance is running a Bill Moyers piece as the lead item on its news page. Moyers, a former Southern Baptist minister who is now with the more congenial UCC, writes:

Many black preachers I’ve known-scholarly, smart, and gentle in person-uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I’ve known many white preachers like that, too. But where I grew up in the south, before the Civil Rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.

Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle – forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.

I’m not sure why either the military service of black Americans or Wright’s own service excuses anything he said, but let’s pass on that. The problem with Wright’s statements is most emphatically not their emotional content. Nor is it the “inflammatory” nature of the words he employed. This has to do with neither style nor pathos. It has to do with a racist ideology, the embrace of haters, and lunatic conspiracy-mongering. Of course, whether Moyers recognizes any of those things in Wright’s public statements is an open question as well.

My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.

Yes, that is a fact. It is also a fact that within living memory Germans killed six million Jews. Would that justify someone going around claiming that 21st century Germans are slaughtering Jews? Or would that be a hateful piece of lunacy that deserves pure, unadulterated condemnation and repudiation?

In this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media – the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help – people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.

What Moyers says about the media and its rapacious appetite for controversy is undoubtedly correct. But it has nothing to do with Wright. The whole thing started with irrational discourse in the pulpit of Wright’s There wasn’t any media prodding that went into stuff like running Hamas propaganda in the church’s bulletin. And in his appearances last weekend at the Detroit NAACP and the National Press Club, much of the lunacy came pouring forth unprovoked as Wright was just being himself. I see more than a hint of condescension in Moyers’ excusing Wright by pointing to the media, as if Wright wasn’t perfectly capable of saying just what he believed without media enabling.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court Justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Behold the nonsense. John McCain repudiated Hagee’s anti-Catholicism and general nuttiness, and has no long-term relationship with him. Pat Robertson has long since worn out his welcome among most conservative Christians. Jerry Falwell, ditto, and last time I checked died without endorsing anyone in he presidential campaign (and there’s no evidence that McCain asked for an endorsement when he met with Falwell two years ago). What Billy Graham has to do with Moyers ‘ point is anyone’s guess, but in any case the evangelist was rounded taken to task for those remarks, and he apologized all over himself. What Moyer’s choice of examples here amounts to is the contention that conservative “white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t,” but even that is ridiculous when one considers how many times Robertson, Falwell, James Kennedy, James Dobson (no preacher, but Moyers would no doubt lump him in the same category), and others like them have gotten absolutely pounded (at least occasionally with good reason) by the media and other critics.

Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?

Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently.

He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school.

And your point is…what? Last time I checked, white preachers didn’t advocate, condone, or incite any of these actions. And what does that have to do with what Wright said? This is part and parcel of what the UCC has been doing for the last several weeks–trying to change the subject without either indicating that the denomination had a problem with anything Wright said or agreeing with it and losing all credibility with any but the most radical left-wing Americans. I doubt that Moyers got marching orders from the UCC’s leadership, but he certainly looks like he’s taken his cues from them.

You Knew It Was Coming (UPDATED)

The next step in the dissolution of the Western ethical tradition, that is. Once the unborn and disabled have been de-humanized, and animals elevated to the equal of humans, what’s left except…plant rights! Wesley J. Smith at the Weekly Standard explains:

At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the “dignity” of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called “plant rights” is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring “account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is enough to short circuit the brain.

A “clear majority” of the panel adopted what it called a “biocentric” moral view, meaning that “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.” Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim “absolute ownership” over plants and, moreover, that “individual plants have an inherent worth.” This means that “we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily.”

There’s no question that all human beings have a responsibility to be good stewards (i.e., managers of what doesn’t belong to us, but, in the Christian view, belongs to God alone). Purposeless destruction even of plants is something that ought to embarrass any thinking person. But to suggest that people can’t use plants for their own purposes is to make an equation between human and floral worth that beggars the imagination.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

The interesting thing is that, despite the supposed equivalence between humanity and non-human life, the new approach to ethics assigned different measures for discerning worth:

The intellectual elites were the first to accept the notion of “species-ism,” which condemns as invidious discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable.

Rising to the task, leading bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a “person.” This excludes the unborn, the newborn, and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.

The animal rights movement grew out of the same poisonous soil. Animal rights ideology holds that moral worth comes with sentience or the ability to suffer. Thus, since both animals and humans feel pain, animal rights advocates believe that what is done to an animal should be judged morally as if it were done to a human being. Some ideologues even compare the Nazi death camps to normal practices of animal husbandry. For example, Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka–a book specifically endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals–that “the road to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse.”

The really interesting point in this for me is that, despite the protestations of anti-humanist ethicists, they clearly hold humanity to a different standard then they do animals (and presumably plants). For humans, the standard has to do with cognition; for animals, it’s the ability to feel pain. Why is this the case? To protect the justification for abortion first and foremost, of course. Because for some unfathomable reason, there are a lot of left-wing intellectuals who have no problem with unborn children (who unquestionably feel pain) being ripped apart in the womb two weeks before they would be born, but cannot bear the thought of cows, pigs, or even fish being used by people for food (PETA objects to the use of hooks in fishing because it believes that fish feel pain). So we’ve arrived at a situation where, for some ethicists, daisies and walleye trout have more of a right to life than my daughter had on August 28, 1981, the day before she was born.

And some people wonder why so many Christians think that we’re in a period of cultural decline.

(Via Stand Firm.)

UPDATE: Stand Firm commenter Dr. Joan points readers to a column in the Oregonian of Portland, where columnist David Reinhard offers this quote from Portland city councilman Dan Saltzman:

“It sometimes pains me to think that we have no ability to control their destiny — that a private landowner can take this tree down on a whim. So I think somewhere, woven into all this, is that we establish more of a notion that trees have rights, too, that trees have rights. And that’s what we’re looking at in terms of some of the enforcement policies that we’re working on and the continued designation of more heritage trees for their protection where we have willing property owners but I do think we have to look where we don’t have willing property owners . . . .”

So if property owners don’t buy the idea that “trees have rights” and want to take out a tree on their land, the city of Portland will just have to step in and prevent this egregious example of “speciesism,” this crime against flora.

Nuttiness: It’s not just for Europe any more.