Politics

Wall Street Journal Online ROBERT H. BORK

What do the nomination of a replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor, constitutional law, and moral chaos have to do with one another? A good deal more than you may think.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay wrote of America that “providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Such a people enjoy the same moral assumptions, the cement that forms a society rather than a cluster of groups. Though Jay’s conditions have long been obsolete, until recently Americans did possess a large body of common moral assumptions rooted in our original Anglo-Protestant culture, and expressed in law. Now, however, a variety of disintegrating influences are undermining that unanimity, not least among them is the capture of constitutional law by an extreme liberationist philosophy. America is becoming a cacophony of voices proclaiming different, or no, truths.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “if each undertook himself to form all his opinions and to pursue the truth in isolation down paths cleared by him alone, it is not probable that a great number of men would ever unite in any common belief. . . . Without common ideas there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not.”

Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Justice Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted ” ‘moral fact’ that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.” Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that “at the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution, and neither has any definable meaning other than that a common morality may not be sustained by law if a majority of justices prefer that each individual follow his own desires.

Wall Street Opinion Journal JAMES TARANTO Thursday, May 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Secular liberals show open contempt for traditionalists.

I am not a Christian, or even a religious believer, and my opinions on social issues are decidedly middle-of-the-road. So why do I find myself rooting for the “religious right”? I suppose it is because I am put off by self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and contempt for democracy and pluralism–all of which characterize the opposition to the religious right.

One can disagree with religious conservatives on abortion, gay rights, school prayer, creationism and any number of other issues, and still recognize that they have good reason to feel disfranchised. This isn’t the same as the oft-heard complaint of “anti-Christian bigotry,” which is at best imprecise, since American Christians are all over the map politically. But those who hold traditionalist views have been shut out of the democratic process by a series of court decisions that, based on constitutional reasoning ranging from plausible to ludicrous, declared the preferred policies of the secular left the law of the land.

For the most part, the religious right has responded in good civic-minded fashion: by organizing, becoming politically active, and supporting like-minded candidates. This has required exquisite discipline and patience, since changing court-imposed policies entails first changing the courts, a process that can take decades. Even then, “conservative” judges are not about to impose conservative policies; the best the religious right can hope for is the opportunity to make its case through ordinary democratic means.

From Dr. Reynolds blog:

Just as free market economics stems from a Christian world view, so socialism ia fundamentally at war with Christianity. Recently, socialism has become a fad for some Christian college professors. It is not surprising that this would be so since socialism has always flourished amongst the intellectuals and been rejected by the working man. Great union leaders like Gompers and Meaney had no time for the nonsense of socialism as an ideology. Their practical attempts to elevate the conditions of workers through trade unions were opposed by socialists at almost every turn. Healthy unions are the sign of a free society, but to be healthy they must be composed of workers and not be “intellectuals” pretending to be workers.

Marvin Olasky writes: Who’s the major figure behind the election and re-election of George W. Bush? On one level, the visionary Karl Rove. At a deeper level, a theologian most Americans have never heard of: Francis Schaeffer, who 50 years ago this month founded an evangelistic haven in Switzerland, L’Abri.

Francis Schaeffer spoke at a pro-life seminar that me and a friend held while students at the University of Minnesota when I was a student there. He was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic for cancer at the time but still made the trip. May his memory be eternal.

Myron Magnet argues in the Wall Street Journal that Bush’s theory of domestic policy is more profound than “compassionate conservatism.”

I shamelessly lifted this from This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis.

Important Rules for Writing Good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Be more or less specific.
15. Understatement is always best.
16. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
17. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
19. The passive voice is to be avoided.
20. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
21. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
22. Who needs rhetorical questions?

A readers sends a quote by Bishop Tikhon of the OCA:

One might very well agree with Noam Chomsky that terrorism is nothing new, and that what made 9/11 particularly painful was the realization that for the first time we were the victims, rather than the perpetrators of it. Having terrorized Kossovo and Serbia, before that Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, the Phillipines, etc., etc., one would think that “with-it” Americans would have admitted, “What goes around comes around,” no?
I wonder what the citizens of Falloujah think when it is explained to them that they are now being subjected to an attack against terrorism?
Love,
+B.T.

Let me direct the good Bishop to some articles examining Chomsky’s ideas in a brighter light: What Noam Chomski Really Wants, or the antichomsky website.

Thursday, November 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Wall Street Journal

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

By CHARLES J. CHAPUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/opinion/22chaput.html?ex=1099442009&ei=1&en=0626a7e7415fe210

Denver — The theologian Karl Barth once said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

That saying comes to mind as the election approaches and I hear more lectures about how Roman Catholics must not “impose their beliefs on society” or warnings about the need for “the separation of church and state.” These are two of the emptiest slogans in current American politics, intended to discourage serious debate. No one in mainstream American politics wants a theocracy. Nor does anyone doubt the importance of morality in public life. Therefore, we should recognize these slogans for what they are: frequently dishonest and ultimately dangerous sound bites.

Lawmaking inevitably involves some group imposing its beliefs on the rest of us. That’s the nature of the democratic process. If we say that we “ought” to do something, we are making a moral judgment. When our legislators turn that judgment into law, somebody’s ought becomes a “must” for the whole of society. This is not inherently dangerous; it’s how pluralism works.
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