The Buttigieg-Evangelical Pincer Move
I grew up in an evangelical world that constantly said that character™ mattered, especially for public officials. The character qualities in mind were always Christian and almost always about sexual activity. The world I inhabited also wrote off most Democratic politicians as lacking character™, either due to their stance on abortion, openness on sexual and cultural revolutions, or being theological liberal or sterile. You needed to vote GOP, either because the Democrats were godless, or because the Republicans were faithful to God.
Then came 2012. Something odd happened in that election…
Infanticide and Guilt By Association
One week ago (January 23rd, 2019) the government of the state of New York enacted a bill legalizing abortion all the way up to delivery and legalized leaving infants to die who survive a botched abortion. The One World Trade Center was lit up in pink to celebrate this legislation, with the morbid irony that it has a monument to all the unborn children killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Yesterday a Democratic delegate to the Virginia State Assembly defended bill she submitted to the assembly that would allow abortion up until the moment of delivery, even if the baby is full-term and the mother is dilated…
The Gospel According to John Galt
This post is based on two essays that I originally wrote six years ago, edited to fit your screen.
This summer I read everything that Ayn Rand wrote, fictional and nonfictional. I had read all of her nonfiction before, so that was mostly review, but I had never touched her fiction. Her four prominent fictional works are We The Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, which are the ones I’ll be addressing here.
Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 20th century and lived through the Soviet revolution as a young adult. By the late 1920s she had escaped to the United States and started writing in the 1930s. Her work was clearly directed against Karl Marx, Soviet Stalinists, and their guiding philosophical principles…
On Andrew Brunson on Trial
EPC Pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been held on trumped up and false charges in Turkey since October, 2016, had the first stage of his trial on April 16th. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom had their ambassador…
On Voting As Moral Endorsement
Stephen Wolfe has an excellent piece at Mere Orthodoxy on the consequentialist theory of voting. He challenges the assumption that voting for a candidate is an endorsement of their moral life, and that it is necessarily hypocritical to tolerate immorality for a candidate in a given situation, but not another. His demonstration that the assumption of endorsement is misplaced is strong, but ultimately fails to convince in his conclusion. His principle is,
Voting for a candidate is an endorsement of the candidate’s moral life as it pertains to his external conformity to civil righteousness sufficient to qualify the candidate for civil office, qualifications judged by the likely preponderance of good or bad in the long-term consequences of his term in office determined by his political actions after mediated through the institutional constraints of his office and the checks and balances of other institutions.
The candidate’s ability to enact policies, the details of those policies, and the bearing of the candidate’s morality on those policy enactments are the only endorsement of the candidate’s moral life made by voting. Wolfe in his conclusion states, “And as I argued above, a moral standard as a first condition for vote-worthiness is arbitrary, unless it is shown to be relevant to good civil outcomes resulting from civil actions in a particular time, place, and set of circumstances mediated through particular political institutions…”
