Religious Left At Prayer

You wonder about our liberal friends when they agitate for more social programs with fine moral fervor. What about all the money we are already spending? Doesn’t that count?

The religious left had a convocation recently, organized by Jim Wallis and reported by Mark Tooley. The idea was to reignite the Social Gospel movement of 1900.

Like most religious left outfits, Mr. Wallis's groups want to disengage churchgoers from concerns about abortion and homosexuality and refocus them on poverty and the environment... [H]e still looks to the federal welfare and regulatory state as the source of secular salvation.

Doesn’t the religious left worry a bit about concentrating all that secular power in the government? No, because “poverty is not a family value.”

It was at that meeting, you’ll remember that DNC chairman Howard Dean talked about the nation as back in the 1950 with McCarthyism and no civil rights, and all.

Mr. Dean shared hope for America as a "moral nation," with national health care, an increased minimum wage, and a protected estate tax. "The folks in this church are ones who live their faith through works--that is the mark of a real Christian," he assured his audience.

Something there just slipped past me. What exactly does morality have to do with increased government spending and higher taxes?

The truth is that it is politics not the love of God that stirs in the breasts of the religious left. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that many of us just don’t want to be forced to pay for the liberal moral vision.

Doing good works with other people’s money just doesn’t sound like the moral life to me.

But really, I’m just tired of all the phoney-baloney liberal rhetoric about the poor and doing it for the children. As Robert William Fogel wrote in The Fourth Great Awakening, the spiritual condition of the poor is worse than it used to be.

Such problems [in cities] as drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago.

You could look it up.

In Britain, for instance, over the last century, violent crime has increased by over 2000 percent, even as social spending rocketed into the stratosphere. Or was it because social spending rocketed into the stratosphere?

A Word About Our Fighting Marines

We conservatives honor our troops. “Thank you for your service,” is the constant refrain of the talk-show host. But what do we actually do for them? Do we walk the walk or just talk the talk?

In the American Thinker they ran a speech delivered by Marine Maj. Gen. Mike Lehnert, commander of Marine Corps Bases (West) to a San Diego community group.

Lehnert began with his son’s graduation at Stanford, at which Tom Brokaw told the graduates that

that they could likely expect rapid advancement in almost any endeavor they choose and that they were destined to lead the most powerful country in the world. The class was beaming.



And then Brokaw reminded them that the liberties and freedoms they enjoyed were being defended by young people their age that did not have their advantages.

Lehnert was the only parent of the graduating class serving in the military. But the Marines he led

tend to come from working class families. For the most part, they came from homes where high school graduation was important but college was out of their reach.

So when he approached three Marines sitting in the sun at a Marine golf tournament to raise money for wounded Marines and asked them why they weren’t playing,

they said that they’d never learned. No one in their families ever played golf and that this was the first time they’d ever been on a golf course. I asked them how many times they’d deployed. One of the young men had just returned from his third deployment and had been wounded every time...



I asked these Marines if I could buy them a beer. They looked at me and smiled. One of them said, “We can’t ask you to break the rules sir. None of us are 21 yet.”

Yeah. It does kinda give you a catch in the throat. But here’s the kicker.

Later this morning I’ll be meeting with educators across the California University system. We are trying to make California more veteran friendly. California hosts 40% of the combat power of the Marine Corps and 40% of the Marine veterans who leave the Corps do so out of Southern California bases. 96% have participated in the Montgomery GI Bill and are eligible for benefits but only a small number enter the California University system. That’s because California, unlike other states did not provide any veterans preference or even reach out to veterans. These combat veterans score in the top 50% of their age group, are drug free and morally straight but are lost to California and return to other states that aggressively work to attract them.

Governor Schwarzenegger is working to change that. We should all be working for change.

How American Racism Works

Conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager was watching videos of “people reacting to radio talk shows.” No doubt it’s a part of his job, to understand his audience.

But he was surprised to notice that there were no black people on the panels. Why not?

Oh, they used to include blacks, responded the firm that had organized the panels. But they had to give it up. White people on the panels would not publically disagree with the blacks.

Therefore, once a black listener spoke, whites stopped saying what they really thought, if what they thought differed from what a black had said.

To find out what whites thought, they could not be on a panel with blacks.

Makes you think, doesnt it? White racism, do you think?

Years ago I served on a six person jury. We were judging the guilt or innocence of a black man accused of assaulting a police officer. I found that I wasn’t sure which way I was going to vote until I had heard from the middle-aged black woman on the panel. Finding that she was ready to convict, we five white sheep were ready to go along and vote guilty too.

What do you think? Were we all white racists? Or were we just adopting the precautionary principle, staying out of trouble, making sure that nobody could call us racists?

It reminds me of the old song.

Who’s the racist of us three?

Is it me? Is it thee?

Or the liberal behind the tree?

It is all such a shame.

MSM Doesn't Get Freedom of the Press

It is interesting to follow Hugh Hewitt’s interview (perm) of Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board member Elizabeth Sullivan. Sullivan had published an article supporting the New York Times’s outing of the Bush Administration’s program to track down terrorist financing. So Hewitt got to do another of his forensic interviews, the kind in which he manages to show that the MSM journalist in question doesn’t have much “there” there.

HH: [The New York Times] named three specific, they named three specific cases where SWIFT had led to the arrest of terrorists. Those three, then, can be reversed engineered by the associates of those individuals. That's...those are three specific cases. But more broadly, what this FBI, Lormel man is saying is that when you tell and broadcast, you alert the less smart, the less sophisticated...



ES: The...it is, I think, not persuasive in this case. Not persuasive to me that that's the case.

Elizabeth Sullivan basically argues that the media should be the judge of whether to publicize a classified program, and that they should not be accountable for making a mistake.

I just don’t think that the American people are going to like that. The whole point of freedom is that it is not a license to do anything you want without accountability, but that it gives you freedom from prior restraint. But if you make a mistake, if you harm someone, then you should pay the piper.

The reason that we have a legal system is precisely to judge contested actions. Did the government judge correctly that the use of SWIFT for tracking down terrorists was appropriately secret? Is the New York Times correct in saying that its revelation of the classified program does not materially harm the nation’s ability to track down terrorists? Let’s try the facts and the law and find out.

And the MSM is arguing that because they are special, because they are important, they should not be accountable for their actions.

They just don’t get it.

The Future of Marriage Seen from 1926

Eighty years ago advanced people were beginning to understand “that the emancipation of women was changing the nature of marriage.” What would that mean to marriage a hundred years from 1926? The London Times asked some “luminaries from the arts world” for their predictions about marriage. You can see their prophesies (here). Interestingly, the most sensible thinking came from Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and President of the Eugenics Education Society(!). Wrote Darwin:

My anticipations are somewhat different from my hopes. For some time to come the marriage tie will, I believe, become more lax and children brought up without the care of both parents more numerous. Childless intercourse before marriage will increase in frequency, such temporary unions being often followed by childless marriages with the same or some other partner.



The harm done by the abandonment of family life will however become more and more generally apparent and then will begin a slow swing back to more old- fashioned views as to the sanctity of the marriage contract, together with a greater readiness to submit to sacrifices and to impose hardships in order to keep family circles united.

Hilaire Belloc, the comic poet of Cautionary Verses, wrote this:

It would seem probable that the process of regarding marriage as a terminable contract will advance with still greater speed... There is no reason in the new scheme why a man should be compelled to support his wife any more than the wife her husband...



But what I do think probable is conflict between that sort of society and the traditional world which will exist either as a separate area or as a distinct and contrasting social group. I am pretty sure that one will try to kill the other.

The question remains: which group will kill the other first?

Iraq Getting On Its Feet

What is happening in Iraq? With Sunnis appearing to be ready to cry Uncle and end their insurgency, the Shias are beginning to reel in their death squads, the chaps who have been retaliating against Sunni outrages by killing Sunnis.
StrategyPage reports that

the Shia are ready to fight their own, and in the last week, Shia and Kurdish police and soldiers fought Shia radicals, led by men like Abu Deraa.

I’ve been reading about Germany after its defeat in 1918. It’s an amazing story of the stolid Majority Socialists trying to hold the country together while the Independent Socialists and Spartacus whack-jobs were trying to replicate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

There was no army for several months after the Armistice in November 1918, yet the revolutionary left failed to get the German people to make revolution. And the government, such as it was, moved rapidly to set up a democratic election to create a constitutional assembly two months after the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime.

Imagine that. Friedrich Ebert, head of the government by virtue of the previous Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, saying “you’re it,” without an army, with the German Army melted away, organizes Germany’s first democratic election and Constitutional Assembly. All in two months while the lefty whack-jobs like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are trying to work the German workers up into bloody revolution.

The Iraqis aren’t the Germans. But considering that the Iraqis have elected a constitutional assembly, have elected a legislature, now have an elected government in place, and have an army that is rapidly gaining effectiveness, a student of history would have to say that is growing rapidly more and more difficult to imagine the insurgency destroying the power of the current government.

If, as StrategyPage says, the Shias are starting to move against their own radicals, it is beginning to look as if Bush’s policy is working.

New York Times Says Boys Underperforming in College!

Now even the folks at The New York Times admit it. Boys aren’t doing too well in college. Writes Tamar Lewin,

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment.

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Of course, this isn’t new. The schoolboy “creeping like a snail/ Unwillingly to school” was already a stereotype when Jaques mourned about life in the Forest of Arden.

But hidden in the article is this little nugget. It turns out that not all boys do worse than girls in college.

The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education.

Oh really. So “the rich” are doing just fine. It is the middle and lower class boys who aren’t doing too well. The upper-class feminists are taking care of their own even as they visit a murrain upon the sons of the lower classes.

What is to be done, as Lenin once said? Shall we start affirmative action programs for boys? Consciousness raising? New programs to target at-risk male youth?

Let us not be tempted by the the liberal recipe. It is that sort of thinking that got us here, the programmatic, government-funded liberal mindset that turns everything into a government program and turns an independent people into servants cowed by the lash of compulsion.

Let us ask instead big questions, such as:

• What exactly is education for, beyond basic skills such as literacy and numeracy?
• What level of political direction is beneficial, or even prudent, when it comes to education?
• What are we achieving with compulsory education?
• Is it really such a good idea to separate work and learning the way we do?
• What is the point of undergraduate education today?

My own view is that I don’t know what girls want or need in an education. But I do believe that boys need an Education for Adventure, a program that develops in them them a capacity for physical and social risk, so that they can take their adult places in the world with these qualities: “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.” Those are the words of General von Seeckt writing about the kind of soldier he wanted in the German army.

Obviously the current education system is designed for some other purpose.