The Reformed Pastor

The Usual Suspects have sent a letter to Congress demanding that the parts of the federal budget that they like be exempt from fiscal reality:

Our witness as faith leaders is grounded in love for God and neighbor and all Creation. Accordingly, we are compelled to speak out against the proposed deep cuts in FY2011 discretionary domestic and poverty-focused foreign aid spending. Jesus challenged people to define themselves by the measure of their love for one another, with particular concern for those struggling in poverty and marginalized by society. His Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) transforms and broadens our definition of the neighbor and lifts up a model of relationship with our neighbors that should define and sustain our community, national and international life.

Let’s grant the theological and biblical points being made here. What the mainliners never, ever want to come to grips with is this: stating these beliefs says nothing–absolutely nothing–about the specific public policy proposals they make. They simply assume that loving neighbor means spending more federal dollars on him, a questionable assumption to say the least, especially since Jesus in the parable is talking about taking personal responsibility for the one in need, while the mainliners want to do their good deeds with other people’s money.

Love acknowledges our interdependence and our responsibility for the future. None of us can prosper and be secure while some of us live in misery and desperation. In an interdependent world, the security and prosperity of any nation is inseparable from that of even the most vulnerable both within and beyond their borders. Our churches remain fully committed to our anti-poverty ministries in the U.S. and around the world. But we also know from this hard-won experience that similarly, our nation must remain committed to providing attention to and opportunity for poor and vulnerable people.

If we are truly responsible for the future, then now is the time to get serious about a debt problem that could ruin this nation and make any provision for the poor impossible. And if they want the nation to provide “opportunity for poor and vulnerable people,” it is time they recognize that government support is not the way to do so, that private sector employment is the engine that can (and regularly does) lift poor people out of poverty.

Discretionary programs that serve the poor and vulnerable are a very small percentage of the budget, and they are not the drivers of the deficits. Unchecked increases in military spending combined with vast tax cuts helped create our country’s financial difficulties and restoring financial soundness requires addressing these root imbalances.

The first sentence here is correct, though it overlooks the fact that spending on those programs has increased tremendously in the last couple of years. There is a great deal of duplication and overlap among such federal programs, and if, as the General Accounting Office said this week, there is a lot of consolidation that can take place in this area, that by itself would bring about both better delivery of services to those who need them and savings in cost. The mainliners want to just dig in their heels and defend the status quo, but that’s neither fiscally possible nor even necessary to the mission of the programs they support.

The second sentence, however, is simply the product of a combination of fantasy and economic ignorance. If the entire defense budget were eliminated, this year’s deficit would still be over a trillion dollars. And the tax cuts to which they refer–the cuts of 2001 that were left in place for the next two years, meaning, in essence, that there have been no tax cuts in the last two years that would have had the effect the mainliners imagine–would not come close to making up the remainder if they were repealed tomorrow. That’s not to mention that doing so would significantly deepen the unemployment problem, since a lot of money that could be used on either investment or consumption would be sucked out of the private economy and put in the hands of the least efficient economic actor.

The primary causes for the explosion of debt is clear and undeniable: a combination of vast social spending increases (including the stimulus that was essentially a trillion dollars flushed down the drain), and entitlement spending that continues to grow rapidly. The mainliners can stick their heads in the sand, and pretend that it’s all the fault of warmongering generals and greedy rich people, but that’s not going to make a public debt that even the reality-challenged White House budget that predicts a near doubling of the debt over then next ten years go away.

We share your concerns over long-term deficits and urge you to find just solutions that will protect future generations both from a legacy of debt and a legacy of poverty and underinvestment. Cutting discretionary programs is not a just solution. These cuts will devastate those living in poverty, at home and around the world, cost jobs, and in the long run, will harm, not help, our fiscal situation. While “shared sacrifice” can be an appropriate banner, those who would be devastated by these cuts have nothing left to sacrifice.

“Underinvestment.” I wonder what book of political euphemisms they got that from. The reference to “cutting” discretionary programs is another. Inside the Beltway, that translates to, “not increasing spending as much as I want.” The funny–or pathetic–thing is that no one know whether a lot of this spending that the mainliners consider crucial to the future of Western civilization even does any good. From the Wall Street Journal story on the GAO report:

The report says there are 18 federal programs that spent a combined $62.5 billion in 2008 on food and nutrition assistance, but little is known about the effectiveness of 11 of these programs because they haven’t been well studied.

And that’s no doubt the case with lots of other federal programs, without which the sky would allegedly fall.

At the end, the letter writers rachet up the rhetoric, almost calling down fire-and-brimstone on the would be budget-cutters:

The unprecedented and dangerous cuts to discretionary domestic programs and poverty-focused foreign assistance will jeopardize the lives and well-being of millions now and into the future. These deep and unwise spending cuts are a betrayal of our call to love our neighbor.

Geez, why don’t you just come out and call John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Kent Conrad heathens. In fact, the mainliners know nothing about what the effect of proposed cuts would be on anyone. They cite no evidence, they mention no facts, they just spout the political line of the day, a line that has been the same–no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the specifics–for decades. For the NCC and denominational bureaucrats who wrote this, theology and ethics may change with the winds, but the old political verities are eternal.

LifeNews.com reports that the prosecutors in the case of accused serial infant murderer Kermit Gosnell are going to seek the death penalty:

Prosecutors in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania announced today they will seek the death penalty for abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell, who faces charged related to killing a woman in a botched abortion and killing babies infanticides.

Gosnell was charged along with several family members and staffers who worked at his abortion center and were involved in either the failed abortion, the infanticides (which number in the hundreds but for with Gosnell and company have been charged on seven counts), or in relation to covering up and crimes and hiding obstructing justice.

Assistant District Attorneys Joanne Pescatore and Christine Wechsler confirmed to the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper that they are looking at pursuing the death penalty related to Gosnell and former Gosnell employees Lynda Williams, Steven Massof and Adrienne Moton. The three are accusing of assisting Gosnell in the infanticide “abortions” where unborn children late in pregnancy were purposefully birth in order to kill them by using medical scissors to “snip” their spinal cords.

I’m against the death penalty, and would consider it appropriate punishment for Gosnell to spend the rest of his life in solitary forced to listen to recordings of the cries of the children he killed 24 hours a day. In this case, however, I can’t say that it would break my heart for him to be sentenced to die. At the age of 70, given the length of time for appeals in capital cases, the chances are that he will still die in prison of natural causes, but will have had the specter of execution hanging over him teh entire time. There may be some justice in that, as well.

I love Ed Morrissey‘s headline on this story: “SCOTUS: No jackass exception to the First Amendment.” It’s probably the right decision, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. According to the Washington Post:

A nearly unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects even hurtful speech about public issues and upheld the right of a fringe church to protest near military funerals.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing “is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible.” But he said government “cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.”

“As a nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate,” Roberts said.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was the lone dissenter.

“Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case,” Alito wrote.

You can find the majority decision here, and the dissent here. I’ve only had a chance to read excerpts so far, and as I said I think it was probably rightly decided, but Alito makes a very good case for Westboor’s opponent based on his status as a private citizen and the invective that was aimed directly at his dead son, who though a Marine was also a private rather than public figure.

I still think the best way to face down Westboor is public ridicule, and hope that those who oppose these anti-Christian cultists will do so at every public opportunity.

The “On Faith” column at the Washington Post offers a preposterous question for discussion this week:

The U.S. House of Representatives voted last week to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions, along with a variety of health care services for women. The Virginia General Assembly last week approved legislation that requires abortion clinics to be regulated as hospitals, and providers say the stricter regulations will force many of them out of business. Both measures were pushed by anti-abortion activists. Should personal and religious views be allowed to prevent women from having access to a legal medical procedure?

The way this is asked, it is essentially asking whether those who oppose the availability of abortion without any restrictions (even those the Supreme Court says are constitutional) and or/funding of Planned Parenthood should have any right to pursue their public policy preferences legislatively. In other words, the panelists are asked, “do you think that some Americans should be disenfranchised and abortion made the only absolute right?” And even at that, they get agreement from some of the usual suspects. First up, Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

I hailed the ruling in Roe v. Wade when it was handed down in 1973 and still support it today. But in hindsight, there was one element missing from that landmark decision: A frank declaration that attempts to deny women reproductive freedom are grounded in religious dogma and that this raises serious concerns in a nation that separates church and state.

Consider what this would mean: for Rev. Lynn, Martin Luther King’s struggles against segregation and Jim Crow was invalid, because there were religious motives and concepts behind them. The abolitionist movement was invalid for the same reason. This is secularist totalitarianism, pure and simple: you don’t get to take part in public life if you don’t have approved secular motivations and reasons for taking the positions you do.

The ink on the Roe decision wasn’t even dry before it came under sustained political attack by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestant clergy. We were told that legal abortion violated papal dictates or some right-wing minister’s interpretation of the Bible. That may be true for the respective believers, but it should never become the grounds for denying access to a medical procedure in America.

Not only is Rev. Lynn a totalitarian, but he’s either an ignorant one or a dishonest one. He acts as though “papal dictates” or biblical texts are the basis for the opposition to abortion. In fact, opponents Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and secular have consistently for decades made arguments based on reason, evidence, and ethics based in natural law and thus accessible to all people. If Lynn is really so uninformed that he has never encountered any of these, he clearly needs to read something besides Doonesbury and Democratic Underground.

Next up, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite of the Center for American Progress and former UCC seminary president:

When Jesus tells us to take care of the “least of these” (Matthew 25), he includes taking care of those who are sick. Eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood is a direct attack on the basic health care of women who can least afford it, and thus a rejection of one of Jesus’ core teachings. Instead, it is a direct attack on the most vulnerable in our society.

Sick? Pregnancy is an illness, now? The fact is that except in very rare cases, the core business of Planned Parenthood (abortion and birth control) has nothing to do with illness, regardless of whether the person is poor or not.

Planned Parenthood provides many crucial health services to women and girls. As Jessica Arons and Alex Walden of the Center for American Progress argue, “Planned Parenthood is a safety net provider to millions of people who do not have health insurance, many of whom are people of color and immigrants. Government funding allows Planned Parenthood to provide marginalized communities with family planning services, screening for sexually transmitted infections and reproductive cancers, prenatal care, and basic well-woman care. These services account for 97 percent of the care they provide.”

I believe Col. Potter referred to this as “horse hockey.” The people who don’t have health insurance and are going to Planned Parenthood are mostly on Medicaid, college students who can go to their school’s clinics, or people who can afford to go to other providers. There is nothing that Planned Parenthood does that is not done by many other providers who don’t have the taint of PP’s criminality. I also find that 97% figure highly questionable–it makes it sound as though abortion is somehow peripheral to PP’s work, whereas it provides a revenue stream in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

I doubt that the majority of Americans of faith wake up in the morning and say to themselves, ‘today I will try to prevent poor women and girls from getting the basic health care they need.’ No, these attacks on the most vulnerable among us are presented to people as ending abortion and packaged as “pro-life.” But after years of physical attacks, including murder, of those who provide abortion services, the “pro-life” movement has lost the right to use that terminology.

What does one say to this kind of intellectual dishonesty? Imagine, for instance, Thistlethwaite being confronted with the violent incidents that take place each year at the behest of some union boss or another (a number of them have happened on film in the last couple of weeks at union rallies). Would she say that that discredits the entire union movement? Of course not, and it doesn’t. It’s only in the relentless pursuit of the vilification of her political opponents that a former seminary professor would say anything so grotesque.

Over the years, therefore, I have come to believe that the real end game of the political and religious right is not to prevent abortion, but to control women’s capacity to reproduce. These most recent decisions bring us ever closer to losing access to contraception, the only thing that has ever actually helped prevent abortion.

What, no Handmaid’s Tale reference? I believe the accepted terminology for this kind of thing is “paranoid fantasy.”

You say, ‘abstinence prevents abortion,’ but women and girls are routinely subject to forced sexual activity through rape. That’s reality. Contraceptive pills and implanted devices work even when girls and women are subject to rape. Pills and devices do not, of course, prevent HIV infection or other STD’s; women and girls are still at risk in body, as well as mind and spirit, from rape, but forced pregnancy is prevented.

Please. Does she really think that the answer to “abstinence prevents abortion” is to cite rape? Only about 1% of abortions each year are the result of rape or incest, and about 5% are due to genuine threats to the mother’s life or physical health. That means 94% of abortions are the result of someone failing to practice the one certain form of birth control, abstinence, at a time when a pregnancy was not desired (many of whom are teenagers who are encouraged by Planned Parenthood to take every opportunity to “explore their sexuality”). And again, contraception is available elsewhere than just Planned Parenthood.

Tom Flynn of the Council for Secular Humanism (or in this case, anti-humanism) sounds a lot like a certain United Church of Christ minister:

In a secular society that observes the separation of church and state, neither personal metaphysical views about, say, fetal ensoulment nor religious doctrine should have any role in obstructing women’s access to a legal medical procedure. That said, I also recognize that some of us haven’t lived in that United States for the last 30 years or so — and that way too many House Republicans are drawn from that group.

True. Some of us have been living in a country where there is no religious test for participation in the political system. Some of us have been living in a country where those motivated by religious ideas are not banished to the outer darkness. Some of us have been living in America, while others have been trying to resurrect the Soviet Union in the Western Hemisphere.

Will their views prevail? Sadly, I think they just might. For too many years abortion-rights advocates felt invulnerable beneath the sheltering mantle of Roe v. Wade. For strategic reasons they retreated from the hard work of educating America as to why abortion is morally licit, preferring to focus on what they viewed as a slam-dunk rhetoric of “choice.”

There’s a problem with this approach, and it’s bearing bitter fruit today. That problem is that when abortion-rights advocates restrict themselves to talking about choice, abortion opponents have the arena of moral discourse all to themselves as they make their arguments that abortion is hideous, sinful, selfish and so on. Too few voices rebut them to argue that (to use atheist Ann Gaylor’s wonderfully ironic trope) “abortion is a blessing.” Too few voices argue that since the capacity for personhood does not exist until the infant brain begins some internal wiring well after birth, the only justifications for imagining that abortion is murder flow solely from personal metaphysics or religious doctrine. Too few voices argue that in a secular society, personal metaphysics and religious doctrine are properly off-limits as drivers of public policy. [Emphasis added.]

Thank you, Mr. Flynn. You’ve just made a case for infanticide, and equated it with abortion. Given the nearly total revulsion, based on sound moral reasoning, toward the former, you’ve nicely made the case against the latter as well. See, Mr. Flynn, we don’t grant human beings the status of “persons” because they’ve met some arbitrary physical standard (which is why we have no hesitation saying that multiple amputees or people with Alzheimer’s or Down’s Syndrome are still persons rather than things); they have that status inherently by virtue of being of the same species as the physically sound and mature. But you just go on making that “moral” argument–do so long enough, and abortion may yet be banned.

I’m sure there will be more responses to the Post‘s absurd question. I’ll have those when they appear.

One wonders why the anti-Israel movement, including Friends of Sabeel-North America and the Israel Palestine Mission Network of the PCUSA, publicizes the ravings of Naim Ateek of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Center in Jerusalem.

Oh, yeah, I forgot–it’s because they agree with him.

FOSNA has an article up (to which IPMN links) about his speech to the recent Eighth International Sabeel Conference:

“Empires have always used religion and theology to their advantage,” Naim Ateek told the Eighth International Sabeel Conference. “Israel is an integral part of American empire; in its hegemony over Palestinians it acts and governs as empire.” Ateek is the founder and director of Sabeel, the ecumenical liberation theology center based in Jerusalem.

“Empire” is the in-word with the religious left these days. I guess they’re trying to say that the United States its like the Roman Empire or something. If so, it’s the most inefficient, self-interest ignoring, conquest-avoiding empire in history. Israel’s not much better–instead of expelling, enslaving, or simply killing their enemies on the West Bank and Gaza, they gave over the later to the rule of people who want to exterminate them, and put most of the former into the hands of who had formerly sworn to destroy them. Not a very well run empire, that. They really could have learned something from the Ottomans, or the Muslim Caliphate.

“The United States acted as empire last week with its veto in the U.N. Security Council, overpowering the votes of 14 other nations,” Ateek said. The veto defeated a resolution that condemned Israeli settlement building in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, contrary to U.S. policy stating that settlements are illegal.”

Ateek should stick to whatever it is he allegedly knows, and leave U.S. foreign policy out of it. As Gilead Ini of CAMERA, responding to Harvard government professor Stephen Walt, points out, it has not been official U. S. policy that the settlements are illegal since Ronald Reagan was president. As far as it goes, I’ve often wondered why there is so much stress in the anti-Israel movement about the settlements being “illegal.” I think they were stupid policy from the beginning, but in an region where virtually no regime other than Israel operates on the basis of the rule of law, what difference does “illegality” really make?

“The establishment of Israel was a relapse to the most primitive concepts of an exclusive, tribal God. At its core is the way some secular Zionists interpreted the Holocaust,” Ateek said. “For some, the only authentic response to the Holocaust, religious or secular, Jewish or not, must be total commitment to the security and wellbeing of Israel,” he said.

And here we go off into anti-Semitic territory. Given the generalized adulation of Ateek on the religious left, I’m going to assume that this would be an applause line at a convention of the IPMN or FOSNA or other mainline anti-Israel activist groups. Keep in mind that such groups are made up almost exclusively of political leftists. Now, add to that the fact that for at least fifty years, one of the most dominant mantras of such people has been the right of “self-determination.” Ateek himself has used that expression with regard to the Palestinians. Supposedly, every ethnic group, or at least every national people, have the right to determine their own destiny, to decide their own political, social, economic, and cultural arrangements. It was used to support decolonization in Africa and Asia; it was used to support independence movements in places such as East Timor, Algeria, and Chechnya; it was used to combat apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia; it was used to oppose American foreign policy in places like Nicaragua, Iran, and Chile. It is one of the guiding lodestones of post-World War II leftism (in many instances, appropriately and rightly), and yet apparently there is one people who do not have the right of self-determination, and whose struggle for a state of their own brings only condemnation. For Ateek, Palestinians have the right of self-determination, but Jews do not. It is just that simple.

As for his claim that the establishment of Israel was expressive of a “primitive concept” of an “exclusive, tribal God,” one could say that this is simply the anti-Judaism of a Christian bigot who accords no validity to Judaism at all. Or one could say that it is simple name-calling. Or one could point out that a quarter of the citizens of Israel are Palestinian Christians and Muslims whose families did not leave during the War of Independence, whereas most of the Middle East is Judenrein, or nearly so, by virtue of the expulsion of almost a million Jews from such inclusive, non-tribal states as Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, etc. after World War II.

Ateek told the conference that “Israel has adopted a new god, one named Betahone, meaning security. This god is nourished continually by the American empire with the most up-to-date military technology.” Israel’s export of arms is fourth in the world, he said.

Israel’s “god” is security, because it believes in defending its people from those who would slaughter them. It’s a good thing that no one in the West Bank or Gaza is armed, or thinks that their people have a right to security, because that would blow a hole in Ateek’s claim that only Israel “worships” security.

“The God that I have seen in Jesus Christ is not the god of armies, not the violent god found in certain biblical texts,” Ateek said. “It is the vulnerable God of love in Jesus Christ who was nailed to the cross. God is not the god of empire but the nonviolent God who is found in the refugee camps, suffering with the families while the Israeli army carries out its incursions,” he said.

Next question for Ateek: which other biblical texts does he reject? The ones that say God chose the people of Israel to be His vessel for blessing the world? The ones that draw Jesus’s lineage back through the Jewish people to Abraham? The ones that show Isaac rather than Ishmael being the one to bear God’s promises to Abraham to the future? Frankly, the division he draws, at leats by implication, between the Old Testament and the New suggests an adherent of the Marcionite heresy. But Ateek has far bigger political fish to fry than mere theological orthodoxy.

“The power of God is not expressed in war, violence or assassination, not in oppression, checkpoints and Apartheid walls, in lies and injustice,” Ateek said.” The biblical God is full of truth and justice, love and mercy and compassion. This is not the god of `Christendom’ or `Israel-dom.’ The biblical God expresses power through forgiveness, peace and reconciliation,” he said.

“I believe God’s power could be seen in the nonviolence of the recent Egyptian revolution,” Ateek said.

Already the events in Egypt are being mythologized. I wonder what the Coptic Christians of Egypt think of that “nonviolence”:

In any case, Ateek’s rhetoric at this point is nothing more than that. There’s no recognition here of the distinction between Christian and non-Christian polities, nor any analysis of the rightful place of force in the administration of justice and protection of public safety that Paul indicated was a legitimate function of government. It’s just rhetoric in the service of a politician’s cause, which is all Ateek has ever been or had. Same goes for his disciples.

(YouTube link via Dexter Van Zile.)