Recently in Social issues Category

For many years I took the position that a society was best served by a government that allowed anything and a culture that encouraged the right thing. Only this, I thought, would produce the right incentive to do the right thing.

Rand Paul attempts to bring this approach, condemning racism while saying it's not his place to ban a business from practicing it. It is intellectually defensible.

The rub is that we all know that, if we let people do things we don't want them to do, they'll probably do them no matter how much we cry. That's why so many conservative evangelicals, who claim in theory to want small, non-meddling government, in practice are on crusades to ban abortion pills, gay marriage and so on. They know that they'll never control the culture enough to squelch such behaviors -- and even if they did, those behaviors would go on anyway.

Cigarette smoking is on the decline in California, but not because of the social pressure, but because the various bans and the pressure together affected behavior. It might be coercive, but it kinda works.

Yet in the South, a century and a half of forced freedom for the black man still hasn't resulted in the vast majority of white people becoming color blind. Imagine how bad they'd be, then, if government hadn't meddled.

That's the problem with libertarian ideals. A democratic citizenry steps back and lets its social groups and institutions do what they want -- and eventually the democratic citizenry has to get involved.

That's when those social groups and institutions start claiming that the democratic citizenry is a fascist or totalitarian state. It's all a little too convenient, isn't it....?

Hmm, I think these folks are oversimplifying my criticism of Bristol Palin, but that's certainly their right.

Gail, Jonathan and Earl, I'll hereby join the profiling fray. I'll take a typically independent position -- from both liberals who decry what they see as racism within efforts to keep our streets and our shores secure, and from hard-bitten conservatives who believe liberals need to lighten up.

On the one hand, I may tip slightly closer to the conservative position. And I'll begin with an observation about dust specks in the eye and logs in the eye: Racism and xenophobia strike me as universal quirks of human nature. Downtrodden minorities are as susceptible to them as The Man is. The evolution of the tribal man and woman has wired us to, um, profile carefully anyone who may represent a rival tribe, and our best intentions don't often overcome this tendency.

Let he who is without bigotry cast the first condemnation of bigotry. Hmm, I hear crickets, but I also hear some quiet grumbling and muttering in the background. Still, I think that it's best to handle the insults of life with some grace, rather than to picket every real and perceived insult against a member of our so-called group. I wish that the members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, for instance, would be as committed to helping victims of the jihadist distortions of their faith as they are to condemning any profiling that may come as an inevitable consequence of the actions of these jihadists.

Now let me offer the "on the other hand": After I once wrote that Pakistani-Americans like me should steel ourselves for some profiling as a political necessity, and that we should handle it with good humor, I got put through the profiling wood-chipper on a trip to Israel. Five hours of tension, isolation and interrogation in the Ben-Gurion airport. It rattled me and made me feel like an unwelcome cockroach. Local police later asked me to forgive what they said was a necessary investigation. I could forgive it, but I also felt there are other places I'll spend my vacation dollar in the future. My views of profiling turned out to be easier to preach than to practice. I don't want to be in a place where they don't believe I belong.

In the end, I think stuff happens and profiling happens. I'd love to see the liberals complain less about other people's bigotry, and I'd like to see the conservatives be less audacious about minimizing the effect profiling has on the recipient.

Okay, I'm out of hands.

I've noticed the tabloids in recent months are signaling a meltdown in the Brangelina situation. It does remind me of my puzzling over why social conservatives didn't complain loudly about how Hollywood's glamour couple was redefining marriage far more dramatically than two guys in West Hollywood: the two guys in West Hollywood are seeking the legal rights that accompany a lifelong commitment; but Brad and Angelina left lifetime vows in the dust in order to shack up, adopt and have babies, and then crack this large new family up too. Unless you believe that being gay could become a pandemic, the Brangelina situation seems like a far bigger influence on straight 16-year-olds.

Brangelina posed a far greater "threat" to the traditional definition of marriage. But social traditionalists didn't hit them the way they hit gays. Why is that?

My ruminations about the intersection of religion and politics have caused quite a ruckus among many people. What I find fascinating is a particular division among Christians: conservative Christians find my stuff to be awful and misguided, while liberal & progressive Christians find it to be exhilarating and eye-opening. Go figure. What's even more interesting is that I once sided with the conservatives in hating the kind of person that I am now.

But if you're going to read one book relating to my spiritual processings, I'd rather you read this one, by the Rev. Greg Boyd.

In it, Boyd offers precisely the sort of Biblical evidence that some readers here are demanding regarding the contention that the current conservative mix of faith & politics constitutes a kind of flag-waving idolatry. He uses Pauline theology skillfully to dismantle notions that any country can find "favor" in the eyes of the Lord within a world which Paul says is ruled by sin. If you're a conservative who can read this and not be challenged or even changed, you're spiritually and intellectually dead.

Many of my evangelical friends are disappointed with how I drifted from the Church, after spending all those years studying Calvin, Luther, Barth, Brunner, Schleiermacher, Yancey, Nouwen, Lewis, Merton and countless others.

I tell them that if there were more guys like Boyd, I'd be serving communion with them this Sunday. But the fact that there aren't many guys like this does have an impact on what I see God in heaven up to, as it relates to evangelicals.

This stuff is all so deeply personal, I know it is. I know some friends feel I'm being uncharitable in how I assess Christians and how I'm so outraged by the "rightwing clump" that I see in my imagination. I myself spent 15 years saying, "These folks aren't the real Christians"... and finally I decided, "Actually, maybe they are the real Christians, and the rest of us are the imposters...."

But as for Mr. Newland on this board, I find it interesting that he believes the Roman Catholic Church is the one true authority on Christian faith, when his last two popes have taken a sharply different view of politics than he does. Cafeteria Catholicism strikes again...?

I'm darker than thou. I don't know you, but that's based on the demographic odds. I'm also shorter than thou, assuming you're male -- again, based on the odds. Science says there are biases involved in such matters. I'm a victim of Mother Nature, and I intend to sue her pants off.

But I don't have much to complain about with Senator Reid, or even Joe Biden, who Jonathan says is a bigger problem than Dirty Harry. We're still learning what it means to be human, we're still learning what is truly inexorable in human nature and what is cultural. As a minority, I'm keenly aware of the peculiar tendency of Pakistanis and others to cherish lighter skin within their groups. And I'm not naive about how my political prospects in America would be helped by my dressing and speaking like a "regular American" than if I wore traditional Pakistani garb and spoke with a thick accent. What's the surprise here?

I want to see more grace toward those who put their foot in their mouth -- not just the Harry Reids of the world but even the Rush Limbaughs and Michael Savages of the world, who skate on dangerous racial ice for the sake of demagoguery and ratings. If we're all slouching toward enlightenment, we can't be so quick to crush those who may appear to be lagging behind.

I'm touched by Gail-Tz's story about Michael Weisser and Larry Tripp, and I believe it's essential to counter the Furrows of the world.

There is an incredible amount of hatred today in the air, born of the excruciating economic and societal uncertainties of our times, and I don't think we make much headway by shaming those who think and talk and act shamefully.

Sometimes we get pulled into pointless but vicious debates about "which side" is more guilty of hate, and why we're justified in, well, hating those whom we believe hate us even more. It not only derails our efforts to become better as individuals and as a society, it accelerates us down a cliff.

The Weisser way is, with apologies for punnery, the wiser way.

I've said this for years on this blog, but it'll be taken more seriously coming from the Wall Street Journal's uber-conservative editorial pages. Says Thomas Frank:

Indeed, if political figures stand for ideas, victimization is what Ms. Palin is all about. It is her brand, her myth. Ronald Reagan stood tall. John McCain was about service. Barack Obama has hope. Sarah Palin is a collector of grievances. She runs for high office by griping.

This is no small thing, mind you. The piling-up of petty complaints is an important aspect of conservative movement culture. For those who believe that American life consists of the trampling of Middle America by the "elites" -- that our culture is one big insult to the pious and the patriotic and the traditional -- Sarah Palin's long list of unfair and disrespectful treatment is one of her most attractive features. Like Oliver North, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas, she is known not for her ideas but as a martyr, a symbol of the culture-war crimes of the left.

To become a symbol of this stature Ms. Palin has had to do the opposite of most public figures. Where others learn to take hostility in stride, she and her fans have developed the thinnest of skins. They find offense in the most harmless remarks and diabolical calculation in the inflections of the anchorman's voice. They take insults out of context to make them seem even more insulting. They pay close attention to voices that are ordinarily ignored, relishing every blogger's sneer, every celebrity's slight, every crazy Internet rumor.

I'll add, that after watching her resignation and reading Purdum's recent piece on her, it's become more obvious to me that she's unprecedentedly thin-skinned as she moves from perceived persecution to perceived persecution. She and her husband Todd seem to rally together around their shared anger at a cruel world. And yet the GOP voters like her more than ever, proving Thomas Frank's concerns correct.

What part of "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission " does a wayward husband not get?

Through a spokeswoman, Mrs. Sanford declined requests to be interviewed for this article, but told The Associated Press she learned of her husband's affair early this year when she found a letter he had written. She told him to end the relationship, but he repeatedly asked permission to visit the woman in Argentina in the months that followed.

Social conservatives will soon tire of liberals' snickering about the latest true confessions of philandering GOP would-be presidential candidates. I think the larger problem for the conservative faithful is that they've gleefully led a divisive culture war in recent decades, condemning media and universities for warping the values of the mainstream. So I don't think they convince others when they then blame innate human weakness for their own foibles; they'd been arguing that their way is better and healthier. If they're going to maintain that position, it would be more credible if they focused less on cultural street fights and moralizing on Fox News, which then leads to a loss of credibility when "life happens."