In an op-ed for the Washington Post, R.R. Reno and Marc Geffroy propose a creative way to reform campaign finance—anonymity:
Our system of campaign finance is corrupt. Money floods into campaign coffers, but rarely because of a heartfelt desire to advance a political cause. The three most important words in Washington are access, access, access. Money, of course, buys access.
There is a way to break the iron grip on access that campaign contributions provide. The United States should establish an anonymous campaign finance system. We need a federally chartered clearinghouse for campaign donations that matches donors to designated, registered candidates and political action committees. Under such a system, politicians would not know who supports their careers, er, causes.
While Reid’s argument that health care benefits reduce abortion rates is unsupported, and even disproved, studies do confirm that abortion law has a direct impact on the incidence of abortion. A 2004 study that appeared in The Journal of Law and Economics analyzed the relationship between changes in abortion policies and abortion rates in post-communist Eastern Europe (where under communist rule health care was “universal” and abortion rates were tremendously high). Modest restrictions on abortion were found to reduce abortion rates by around 25 percent.
This is what I am hearing from a very reliable source regarding the ongoing health-care-reform battle:
(1) Stupak is not caving;
(2) Stupak walked out of the meeting this morning with Pelosi, et al;
(3) Stupak is working to kill the bill; and
(4) The dems don’t currently have the votes.
I will update this post if I learn anything else that isn’t already being reported by mainstream-media outlets.
Update: According to Molly Hooper, a Capitol Hill reporter:
Hoyer [is] ”hopeful” that an “executive order” on abortion and the healthcare bill will persuade “a majority of pro-life Democrats” to support the package.
FDL–a liberal, proabortion blog–has more on the possibility of an executive-order “fix” by President Obama here.
Update II: My source (not Molly Hooper) tells me that the executive-order deal is all but dead. The proposed language did not satisfy Stupak or the remaining members in his ever-decreasing coalition. My source also, once again, emphasized that Stupak will not (under any circumstances) cave: “He’s all in.”
Update III: Here is the latest from my source:
Deal just cut. Stupak on board.
Executive order enabled by colloquy on the floor. No language yet, but supposedly forbids Community Health Center money from being used for abortion and prevents anyone who takes govt subsidy from buying into plan that covers abortion.
I cannot see how they are getting all this. Must not be whole story, or a hole somewhere.
Will report more when I know it
Update IV: A few additional thoughts from my source:
Again, I don’t know if it is good or bad. Told we got all the things we wanted. I don’t believe that.
I didn’t want this thing in the first place, abortion aside. Not sure what to think until I see language.
And here is a little Q&A session that I just had with my source a few minutes ago:
Me: But if Stupak has signed on to this EO, then you believe it essentially has the Stupak Amendment language, right?
Source: I can only assume so.
Me: Let’s hope so.
Source: Why give up at the last minute? And I hear it includes everything . . . But i can’t imagine WH agreeing unless they concluded it was going down without it. But again, let’s see the language.
Imagine this: A conservative congresswoman, her voice edgy with religious fervor, stands before a press corps announcing her intention to end abortion rights in her state, and alongside her appallingly theocratic claims that human life at all stages of development is of equal value, she quotes the Bible, and even pushes Catholic piety, praying for the intercession of the Lady of Guadalupe.
Can we begin to imagine the media’s reaction? She would surely be Palinized, and, if all other efforts failed, would be called a pedestrian poser, having breached the cardinal rule of public life—that is, not to mention the transcendent. Well, such a shocking thing did indeed happen today, though its origin was on the persnickety religious left, not the religious right. Nancy Pelosi, chair of the theology department at Pelosi State, today invoked St. Joseph’s intercession as she pushed for health care reform. At a news conference she claimed, incorrectly, that today is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker:
Today is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, particularly important to Italian-Americans. It’s a day where we remember and pray to St. Joseph to benefit the workers of America, and that’s exactly what our health-care bill will do.
Aside from the fact that today’s feast is, in fact, the Solemnity of St. Joseph, a colleague pointed out to me that the feast of St. Joseph the Worker—actually on the first of May—was placed there to foil May Day, a fete wrought with Communist labor philosophies. In any case, Nancy came just inches short of dubbing the United States a “worker’s paradise.” For good measure, she highlighted her recent photo shoots with babies and young people, and gave an admiring footnote to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and their missive promoting the health care as “life-affirming.” Theocracy, theocracy, theocracy!—right?
In a twin conspiracy, a pair of identical twins would pretend to be only one person. For example, in college each twin could specialize in, and then ace, half of the classes; their GPA would soar. They might together make partner in a law firm by handling a lot more work than other lawyers. They could cheat on their spouse and while offering that spouse a near-constant video of “their” activities. In fact, they could always have an alibi for anything they did.
—Economist Robin Hanson thinks this is rare but I suspect this is what the majority of identical twins do all the time.
There’s something wrong with a society that permits adultery to become a pathway to commercial success.
—Maggie Gallagher doesn’t think adultery should be a business model.
Some years after the collapse of Communism, I asked a Russian art critic what had happened to all the Socialist Realists in his country. He said they were still earning a living making other kinds of art, but that the transition hadn’t always been seamless. He cited the case of a painter whose stock in trade had been portraits of Lenin. The man was now earning his living churning out religious subjects. But, my friend added, so ingrained were his earlier habits that every time he painted the face of Jesus, he wound up with a likeness of Lenin.
[T]he captivity of some Catholics to the agenda of current congressional leaders and the White House proves that faith partisans are not a monopoly of the political right, and that some Catholics have an almost frantic unwillingness to see the abortion issue for what it is—a foundational matter of social justice and human rights. It can’t be avoided in developing our public policies without debasing the whole nature of Christian social teaching. No rights are safe when the right to life is not.
Confused about all of these newfangled legislative process terms like reconciliation and deem-and-pass? Here’s a video that explains it in less that two minutes.
The presentation isn’t exactly unbiased (what is when it comes to health care?) but it’s certainly informative.
[Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host a discussion about some aspect of pop culture. Today’s theme is influential books. Have a suggestion for a topic? Send them to me at jcarter@firstthings.com]
Like Cowen’s, mine is a “gut list” rather than the “I’ve thought about this for a long time list.” I also chose to leave out the Bible and other classic works that are a bit too obvious. For the same reason, classic works on political conservatism didn’t make the cut (we’ll save those for another day).
Because I couldn’t narrow it to ten, I cheated by listing ten pairs of books:
Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University will publish compelling new evidence next week that the play, a romantic tragi-comedy by Lewis Theobald is – as the author always maintained it was – substantially based on a real Shakespeare play called Cardenio.
Hammond has been backed in his assertion by the Shakespeare publisher Arden and there are unconfirmed rumours that the play will open at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford when the venue reopens after its three-year closure.
The claim represents 10 years of literary detective work by Hammond. “I don’t think you can ever be absolutely 100% but, yes, I am convinced that it is Shakespeare,” he said. “It’s fair to say it’s been something of an obsession. You need to ask my wife but a fair few of my waking hours have been devoted to this subject.”
Theobald’s Double Falsehood, or The Distrest Lovers was first performed in 1727 at the Drury Lane theatre in London, along with the remarkable claim that it was based on Shakespeare’s “lost play” Cardenio, which was first performed in 1613. Theobald claimed to have three original texts of Cardenio.
As the battle over the health-care reform bill intensified this week, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious sent a letter yesterday to every member of congress assuring them that “the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions” and that they, the LCWR, “as Catholics,” are “all for it.” Never mind that, as Catholics, they are in direct opposition to the statement released by Cardinal Francis George on behalf of the USCCB.
The LCWR claims more than 1500 religious superiors as members and represents more than 45,000 nuns across the United States, but they do not speak with as much authority as they’d like to suggest. Today, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious—the second largest organization of superiors in the United States—released their own letter making that quite clear.
Over the past 15 years, the political conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs has been reframed as a religious war in which leaders from Yasser Arafat to Hassan Nasrallah to Osama bin Laden have appealed to the authority of the Quran to support their goal of eliminating the State of Israel. The authority of the Quran has also been cited in support of a revisionist history that seeks to deny the historical connection of the Jewish people to the city of Jerusalem and to its holiest sites, including the Temple Mount. Ignorant of what the Quran actually says about Jerusalem, Western reporters have recently tended to ignore archeological and historical evidence and give equal weight to the supposedly competing religious narratives of Jews and Muslims: Jews are said to believe that there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem, while the Quran states that the historical and religious claims of the Jews are false.
The transformation of a political conflict over land into a religious war is one of the most dangerous and frightening goals of radical Islamist politicians—but it has nothing to do with the Quran.
Here the Italian Muslim communal leader and Quranic scholar Sheik Abdul Hadi Palazzi examines what the Quran says about the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Far from negating the historical claims of a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Quran actually confirms Jewish accounts of the building of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and supports the Biblical claim that the land of Israel was given to the Jews by God.
As someone who believes that bacon should be one of the four food groups, I am certainly sympathetic to your argument, David. However, I think the case you made has the unfortunate unintended effect of undercutting a key argument against abortion.
The abortion debate often hinges on the question of whether a fetus is a person. But what if the key issue that should be considered isn’t necessarily personhood, but the morality of killing? What if the immorality of abortion can be established irrespective of the question of personhood?
Philosopher Donald Marquis makes such an argument by circumventing the question of personhood and examining the question of what makes killing wrong. This, according to Marquis, is the question that needs to be addressed from the start:
After all, if we merely believe, but do not understand, why killing adult human beings such as ourselves is wrong, how could we conceivably show that abortion is either immoral or permissible.
Marquis concludes that what makes killing inherently wrong is that it deprives a victim of all the “experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted ones future.” It is not the change in the biological state that makes killing wrong, says Marquis, but the loss of all experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one’s future (hereafter we will refer to these as EAPE). We are killing not only the being but also its future self.
These EAPE are either intrinsically valuable or lead to something else that is valuable for its own sake. When a victim is killed, they are deprived not only of all that they value but all that they will value in the future. Therefore, what makes the prima facie killing of any adult human being wrong is this loss of future EAPE.
This has obvious implications for abortion. Marquis concludes that:
Having attended last Friday a forum on the ethics of food animal product hosted by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, I was particularly interested in the Times Literary Supplement’s review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. It is an uncritical and even fawning review and beneath the TLS’’s usual standards (and rather different from the review conservative Christian works usually receive), but seems to summarize the book well.
The review and apparently the book both suffer — as did some of the comments at the forum — from a lack of clarity about what man is and animals are. In arguing against a comparison with “companion animals,” the reviewer writes:
Even if painlessly euthanized at that age, the brevity of its life precludes that life from having been a good one (at best, it was “promising”).
The reviewer seems to assume, but does not even try to argue, that food animals deserve a long and fulfilling life (whatever fulfilling means for them), and therefore to kill them for our use is wrong. But since they have no real consciousness or memory, how can they know, much less care, that their life is shorter than it might have been? (Might have been in human hands, not in the wild, but that’s another matter.)
Would a beef cow fall into despair if told he was being slaughtered on Monday? Would he start lamenting the books he had not read, the symphonies he had not written, the fact that he won’t be grazing in the field with his great-grandchildren? Animals don’t live in time as man does, and therefore being deprived of time is not an injustice.
In its blurring the fairly obvious difference between man and animal, that argument is typical of the kind of argument often offered against the current use of food animals. Whatever is the argument for treating food animals better than we do, that is not it.
On a different subject, at the dinner the night before the forum, the one vegan at the forum, Gene Bauer of Farmsanctuary, ordered a martini. I know there are no animal products in martinis and that therefore they are a vegan drink, but still . . . somehow I feel that vegans should not drink martinis. Beer and wine, yes, but not martinis.
Moral equivalency is a matter of dogma in the mainstream media: When five hundred Christians were massacred in their homes by machete-wielding Muslims in Nigeria’s Plateau Province on the night of March 7, news reports claimed it was simply retaliation for previous attacks on Muslims. That is an outright falsehood, according to The Barnabas Fund, an interdenominational Christian organization devoted to assisting Christians around the world who face persecution.
Nigeria: Media Distortions Of Anti-Christian Massacres In Jos:
The world has been horrified by the bloodshed in Jos, the capital of Nigeria’s Plateau State, as reported by the international media during the last six weeks. It appears, however, that deliberate manipulation and deception at a local level have meant that international reporting has been inaccurate, and has created the false impression that Christians were the aggressors and Muslims the victims when the reality is the opposite. So Christians have become double victims, suffering not only violence but also unjust blame.
Two incidents of large-scale violence have occurred, first in the city of Jos itself on Sunday 17 January 2010, and then in three mainly Christian villages to the south of Jos on Sunday 7 March.
In the latter incident men from the Muslim Fulani tribe, armed with swords and machetes, arrived at the villages in the early hours of the morning. The residents of Zot, Dogo Nahauwa and Rastat were woken by the sound of gunshots and ran terrified into the streets, where the attackers were waiting for them. A horrendous massacre followed. Local police say 109 people were killed, but other sources suggest this figure could be much higher, perhaps up to 500.
[A]fter seeing the online ridicule of Down Syndrome children, I wonder whether the deepest sorrow that pierced Mary’s heart was not the physical suffering of her son, but the cruel taunts and mockery to which he was subjected. It must have been bewildering to her that his tormentors could not see that all the life and goodness, truth and beauty in her Son. Of course our children are not messiahs. But a Holy Cross Priest at Notre Dame reminded us last week that those of us who care for individuals with cognitive handicaps stand on holy ground. Knowing a child with Down Syndrome is like getting a small glimpse of the divine; original sin has been cleansed by baptism, and their souls are barely touched by actual sin. And that’s why we feel that when they are shown disrespect, something innocent and holy and sacred has been profaned.
A group of Muslim raiders with machetes attacked another Christian village in Nigeria on Wednesday morning. The attackers killed twelve villagers—seven women, four children, and one man—and cut their tongues out.
Attackers killed 12 people Wednesday morning in a small Christian village in central Nigeria, officials said, cutting out most of the victims’ tongues in the latest violence in a region where religious fighting already has killed hundreds this year.
The attack almost mirrored the tactics used by those who carried out similar massacres in Christian villages last week when more than 200 people were slaughtered.
Under the cover of darkness and a driving rain, raiders with machetes entered the village of Byie early Wednesday, setting fire to homes and firing gunshots into the air to drive frightened villagers into the night, witness Linus Vwi said.
“It was raining. They took that advantage,” Vwi said.
Vwi said he and about 20 neighbors rushed into the surrounding wilderness, cowering in bushes as they listened to screams.
He said the attackers spoke Fulani, a language used mostly by Muslim cattle herders in the region. Officials and witnesses blamed Fulani herders for the killings last week.
Earlier this week Joseph Bottum asked, “How many more rampages will it take? How many more murders of 500 people here, 500 people there—a land red with blood—before the Nigerian government understands its responsibilities?”
In order to bring attention to the murderous consequences of the failure of Nigeria to defend its own people, First Things is organizing a protest rally, to be held at 5:00 p.m. on April 7 at the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations, 828 Second Avenue in New York City.
In the wake of the endorsement of the current health-reform bill by Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, Archbishop Chaput of Denver has issued this statement:
In the past two days, congressional leaders and the White House have brought tremendous pressure on prolife Democratic members of Congress to support a fatally flawed Senate version of health care reform.
Regrettably, groups like Network and the Catholic Health Association have done a grave disservice to the American Catholic community by undermining the leadership of the nation’s Catholic bishops, sowing confusion among faithful Catholics, and misleading legislators through their support of the Senate bill.
Do not be fooled. Nothing has changed. The Senate bill remains gravely flawed on the issues of abortion funding, conscience protections, and the inclusion of immigrants. Unless seriously revised to address these issues, the Senate version of health care is unethical and should be firmly opposed.
Sorry, guys, it’s true: Women have science—evolutionary psychology!—on their side of the debate about which sex are better drivers. According to the Social Issues Research Centre, our Fred Flintstone-era brains cause us to drive erratically:
The differences between the sexes in terms of their risk-proneness while driving can be explained, at least in part, using an evolutionary psychology perspective. This proposes that much of neural circuitry of the human brain evolved to meet the requirements of societies and cultures very different from our own – that of the hunter gatherer – that existed for over 99% of our evolution as a species. Our 21st century skulls contain essentially ‘stone-age’ brains, and the brains of men are women are different in certain crucial respects.
Stone-age man did not drive. But the legacy of his hunting, aggressive and risk-taking past – qualities that enabled him to survive and mate, thereby passing on his genes to future generations – are still evident in the way in which he typically drives his car.
It is easy for Republicans to chide the Administration for taking an inappropriately hostile tone for an American ally popular with the public [Israel]. But the real scandal in American foreign policy, and the Administration’s point of greatest vulnerability, is continued appeasement of the Iranian regime despite Tehran’s open contempt for American overtures, and commitment to developing nuclear weapons.
On this issue the poll numbers are just as lopsided. Sixty percent of respondents in a March 2 Fox News poll said they believed force would be required to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, while only 25 percent believe that diplomacy and sanctions will work. Fifty-one percent of Democrats and 75 percent of Republicans polled favored the use of force. Obama’s job approval for handling Iran was at only 41 percent, with 42 percent disapproving.
The president’s approval rating would be considerable lower if voters were well informed about the extent to which American policy has groveled before the Islamic Republic.
The news of a $30 million, 3D movie of the creation account based on the Book of Genesis is a reminder that throughout history people have been awed and thrilled by retellings of their culture’s creation story.
Aztecs would tell of the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes, Phoenicians about the Zophashamin, and Jews and Christians about the one true God—Jehovah. But there is one unfortunate group—the children of materialists—that has no creation myth to call its own. When an inquisitive tyke asks who created the sun, the animals, and mankind, their materialist parents can only tell them to read a book by Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins.
No child, though, should have to go without an answer, which is why I’ve decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into an accurate, though mythic, narrative. This is what our culture has been missing for far too long—a creation story for young materialists.
******
In the beginning was Nothing and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it explode. The explosion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.
For no particular Reason—for Reason is rarely particular—Time and Chance took a liking to this wet little blue rock and so decided to stick around and see what adventures they might have. The pair thought the Earth was intriguing and pretty, but also rather dull and static. They fixed upon an idea to change Everything (just a little) by creating a special Something. Time and Chance roamed the planet, splashing through the oceans and scampering through the mud, in search of materials. But though they looked Everywhere there was a Missing Ingredient that they needed in order to make a Something that could create more of the same Somethings.
They called to their friend Everything to help. Since Everything had been Everywhere she would no doubt be able to find the Missing Ingredient. And indeed she did, hidden away in a small alcove called Somewhere, Everything found what Time and Chance had needed all along: Information. Everything put the Information on a piece of ice and rock that happened to be passing by the former planet Pluto and sent it back to her friends on Earth.
Now that they had Information, Time and Chance were finally able to create a self-replicating Something which they called Life. Once they created the Life they found that it not only became more Somethings it began to become Otherthings too! The Somethings and the Otherthings began to fill all the Earth— from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the sky. Their creation, which began as a single Something eventually became millions of Otherthings.
In a USA Today column, Rod Dreher makes the case that voodoo—and other minority religions—shouldn’t be off-limits from journalistic examination:
In a recent New York Times column, religion reporter Samuel G. Freedman rightly lamented the way the American news media have largely ignored voodoo in their Haiti earthquake reporting. But he also chided media commentators (including me) for speculating about voodoo as a harmful cultural force. Freedman quoted academics who praised the Haitian folk religion, and who complained about the ignorance and supposed racism of voodoo skeptics.
This, alas, is all too typical of American media’s religion coverage. We journalists ignore or downplay the role religion plays in the everyday life, or we take a naive viewpoint toward exotic religions practiced by people unlike us.
For years, I’ve watched this instinct show itself in the way most in the mainstream media cover Islam in America. Reporters are eager to find positive stories and often allergic to stories that might, in their minds, give aid and comfort to rednecks, right-wingers and other so-called undesirables. Once I attended a news meeting in which an editor angrily declined to look into substantive evidence that local Muslim institutions were teaching Islamic radicalism to youth by barking, “What about Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?! We never write about their radicalism!”
He was an aristocratic Brit, kidnapped by pirates at the age of sixteen and sent to Ireland where he was sold into slavery. Six years later he escapes, becomes a priest, returns to Ireland, and faces off against hordes of Druids. Because of his work, thousands of Irish pagans came to know Christ and Ireland became one of the most Christian nations in Europe
So raise a glass of green ale today in memory of Patrick, the Indiana Jones of saints.
Roll Call has just reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked all female Democratic members of Congress “to attend a hastily called meeting Wednesday morning.”
She hasn’t said what the meeting is about, but presumably it concerns passage of the health-care bill. At a guess, it may be the meeting where she admits that she doesn’t have the votes for the bill without an abortion ban to lure in Bart Stupak’s coalition.
At least I hope that’s what the meeting is about. There’s something weird and off-putting about inviting only women, however—since I doubt Pelosi plans to reenact the scene where Lysistrata explains her political strategy to Cleonice.
Political junkies rejoice! C-Span now offers free online access to the more than 160,000 hours(!) of television footage.
Some policy nerds may be nostalgic for Dee Dee Myers-era White House briefings or Congressional budget reconciliation meetings. But for the rest of us, the archive offers an abundance of fascinating interviews and lectures from non-politicos.
Readers moved by the news reported in today’s Rally for Nigeria may want to read the Zenit interview with the Catholic archbishop of Jos, Ignatius Kaigama, Co-existence Turned Sour. At one point he explains that despite the persecution, many indigenous Christians are not leaving the north, and offers a cheering (and challenging) story about one group:
in Kano, you have the Maguzawa ethnic group. They are Hausas and normally everybody would expect a Hausa man to be a Muslim. They are not. They are adherents to the traditional religion and when they are not adherents of the traditional religion they are Catholics, Anglicans or whatever. So they are there. They don’t migrate.
The only problem is that they suffer a lot because of their Christian identity and Christian faith. They are denied education. They are denied government employment of the highest ladders; they are employed as night watchmen, cleaners or things like that but never higher than that. And this is what they suffer for being Christians. And the Church has come helping in a very decisive manner by empowering these people, by starting primary schools, again building bush chapels in order to bring them together to bring awareness, and enlighten them and get them going.
And it is working. Now, I can tell you that there are five or more people from those ethnic groups that have become priests and they are working very well. This is to tell you how far we have come and that even though the Catholic Church has been persecuted there are people who live there and still are ready to sacrifice everything in order to proclaim their Christian faith and identity.
