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Category: Government

  • Equal Justice For All?

    Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

    You are not to be unjust in deciding a case. You are not to show partiality to the poor or honor the great. Instead, decide the case of your neighbor with righteousness. (Leviticus 19:15)

    When the investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia began, while I was bothered about the double standard applied to Trump vs Clinton. I believed that Trump was being treated normally and Clinton was effectively given a get out of jail free card. While I did not believe the charges and thought he would be cleared, I am not really a Trump fan and if the investigation did find evidence of collusion, that was fine as frankly I would much prefer a President Pence.

    As the investigation has dragged on, my main concern is that it is distracting us from more important issues. If, after nearly 18 months, you look past the daily hype and speculation, something has become clear: there is no evidence of collusion. Now, admittedly much of what would be evidence is classified, everyone who has seen the evidence and who has commented on what they have seen, including Democrats, have said they have seen no evidence of collusion. So why is there still an investigation?

    To be clear, this is not to claim that Russia did not try to disrupt the election – of course they did. They want to cause problems for our government, and did not care which side won. This is why they have been caught funding the rallies of both sides. They are not interested in one side or the other of our internal domestic politics. They are interested in generating plenty of heat such that we are divided internally and ignoring what they do internationally. As we have learned more, the origin of the special council is now at best dubious. Former FBI director Comey admitted that he leaked government documents to a friend, so he could give them to the press, hoping the ensuing controversy would spawn a special council, which it did. Then, out of all the people in the country who could have been appointed, Muller, a close friend of Comey, was chosen. So the special council started off with a serious conflict of interest, and that is before one even begins to considers Muller’s hiring of staff whose objectivity is likewise in doubt.

    True, Muller has made some indictments, Paul Manafort and General Kelly, but even here there is cause for question. The idea of a pre-dawn, guns dawn raid, where Manafort’s wife is not allowed to leave her bed until she had been searched, is treatment normally reserved for gang members and drug lords, rather than white collar criminals, and thus it is hard not to see this as little more than harassment. As for General Kelly, his interview has been described by those who know, as a classic perjury trap, particularly given that what Kelly is supposed to have lied about to the FBI was not illegal.

    Long ago, I became trouble by these perjury traps, particularly when there is no underlying crime. The simple fact is that human memory is not good enough to remember everything perfectly. In fact, it is not uncommon for people to think they remember something and yet find out they were wrong. So it is not difficult to question someone enough and have some sort of inconsistency to occur. Talk to an FBI agent, and you could end up in jail if they want to get you.

    And that is the point. With the Clintons and their allies, there were numerous blatant “inconsistencies” that the Justice Department simply ignored. No harm, no foul. That is because they wanted to let her off. They want to get Trump so they use every means possible. Add to this, the report that if Kelly had not agreed to plead guilty, they threatened to go after Kelly’s son, and again one has reason for concern. What would you do to protect your child from a Special Prosecutor with an unlimited budget, and a proven record of using his tools to punish his targets?

    So why are we doing all of this? Collusion with the Russians? To date the only actual evidence of one side working with the Russians, has been the Clinton campaign paying for Russian “information” to include as part of a dossier on Trump ,that was then given to the FBI and used to get wire taps on members of the Trump campaign. The results of these wire taps were then sent to the Obama White house where the names were unmasked and leaked to the press.

    We are told by Democrats that there was nothing wrong with all this. Really? Is this really the new norm? So in 2020, the Trump campaign can pay for dirt and gossip about the democratic nominee and then use that to get a warrant to wiretap the Democratic campaign? Then Trump’s White House can request the names be unmasked so they can leak them to the press? Is that really the new norm? I sincerely hope not. But it does show the level of hatred toward Trump that would excuse such actions directed against him. A hatred that blinds people to the long term ramifications of what they are doing.

    You can also see this in the arguments that it was illegal to fire Comey and would be to fire Muller. Again really? According to the Constitution, all executive authority is vested in the President and as such all officers in the executive branch serve at the pleasure of the President. If Trump cannot fire them, no one can, and they would be accountable to no one. Is that really what we want? That would effectively be a police state, and as benign as it may be now, there would be no guarantee that it would remain so in the future.

    Now that Russian collusion appears to have been a dry hole, the investigation seems to be expanding in its effort to find something – anything – on Trump. This week we saw the seizing of the President’s attorney’s papers, something that has never happened before in history. This would have been met with an outcry had it happened to any previous President. But this is Trump, so most, but not all, of the civil libertarians have remained uncomfortably quiet. And if they can do it to Trump, they can do it to anyone.

    Yet again the double standard, with the Clintons,is astounding. Ignoring standard practices, guidelines and even ethical standards, the Justice Department allowed Cheryl Mills, an actor in the very things being investigated, to claim attorney-client privilege, a claim they then respected, even though she was not Clinton’s attorney at the time of the investigation.

    We are told that the raid was justified because of Cohen’s involvement in a campaign law violation. Yet the campaign laws are so complex and difficult that many politicians run a foul of them in every election and simply pay the fines as a part of doing business.

    Following Obama’s election, his campaign was found with millions of dollars in questionable donations and paid a fine of over $300,000 as a result. This is not an indictment of Obama. Because of the number and complexity of the campaign laws, many, if not most campaigns Republican and Democrat, have had to pay such fines. They are often seen as just a cost of doing business and no one pays much attention to them. Given this, and the fact that the fine to the Obama campaign was larger than the payment here, was Cohen’s payment a real concern or just a convenient pretext to seize the President’s papers? If this was anyone other than Trump, the answer would be clear.

    So while I began, 18 months ago, thinking that the problem was that the Justice Department had simply gone easy on Clinton to let her off, now I believe that many of our protections and safeguards are being broken down in the attempt to get Trump. I have no doubt that they can get him. Not only have “all sinned and fallen short,” the current laws are so numerous and complex, even contradictory at times, that a determined prosecutor who free forms the normal constraints, should be able to find something on anyone.

    What is clear to anyone willing to look, is that we have a highly politicized Justice Department and how you are treated depends on whether they like you or not. If allowed to succeed, they will be left with the tools and precedents which will allow the administrative state to remove any President that they do not like. While many would undoubtedly celebrate Trumps removal regardless, such power and privilege, once granted, is hard to remove but easy to expand and even easier to abuse.

    Elgin Hushbeck, Jr.

  • Allan Bevere: The President as Pastor-in-Chief?


    Words, sentences, and paragraphs have context and content. Often what we say reveals deeper things about our convictions than we realize when we utter them; and if we reflect upon what they actually reveal about us, we might wish we had not opened our mouths.
    It has been common for Donald Trump’s evangelical supporters to justify their support of a man of extremely questionable character by uttering the now familiar shibboleth that the POTUS is not the “pastor-in-chief” (a phrase first uttered in reference to President Obama). I think if we drill down beneath that phrase we will find something unacknowledged by those who have used it and also something quite unsavory. Let’s get underneath the topsoil, shall we?
    Read more …
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  • History, the Confederacy, and Monuments

    Recently here on EDN, Robert Cornwall had an excellent article on the need to study history. On that point I completely agree. That said, I thought the view of history in the article he recommended was a bit binary and one sided. To be sure, there is a lot of truth in the description of Confederate monuments being linked to the “the Lost Cause” and when I was younger (i.e., the 1960s and 70s) it was still not all that uncommon to hear at least some of the older southerners refer to “the war of northern aggression.”
    While there have been some attempts to remove the issue of slavery from the Civil War, instead trying to find some sort of economic justification, ultimately those attempts have failed. Whatever other factors may have been involved, they were clearly secondary. If one could somehow erase the issue of slavery from the early history of the United States, there would have been no Civil War.
    Granted, in the early part of the war, many in the North were focused mainly on preserving the Union. Any such pretext was removed with the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the latter half of the war both sides fought over slavery, the South to preserve it and the North to end it.
    Slavery, the original sin of the country, ran deep, dividing the it from its earliest days. It stained the Constitution, dragging it away of the goals of the Declaration of Independence where “all men are created equal” into a 3/5 compromise. It repeatedly plagued the early years of the country as a cancer eating away at its victim. Periodically, it would bubble to the surface, resulting in yet more compromises.
    While the Democratic Party was mostly pro-slavery, the Whig party was split between those who wanted to restrict or even end slavery, and those who were willing to accommodate it or did not care. As the abolitionist movement grew, this split among the Whigs eventually destroyed the party and out of its destruction emerged the clearly anti-slavery Republican Party. With the election of the first Republican President, Lincoln, the South, fearing what the anti-slavery Republicans would do, started the Civil War.
    The war ended, but the stain remained. While Republicans moved more towards the idea of the Declaration, Democrats continued to view issues through the lens of race. As Republicans began to lose political control of the South, the Democrats began to impose another form of racism: Segregation, which sadly would last until the 100th anniversary of the Civil war. While there are some notable Democratic exceptions, as there were for Republicans as well, for the most part the Democrats were the party of race, first supporting slavery, then of segregation, and the KKK was the base of many Democratic politicians who were often members themselves.
    I was recently asked by a young software developer how is it that this was turned on its head? I answered that in many respects it really hasn’t. Democrats still tend to see everything through the eyes of race while Republicans are still the party where the color of one’s skin just is not that important; what matters is what one does and believes.
    For many Democrats the focus on races and dividing people into groups is so strong that they have a hard time accepting that Republicans really do not care about skin pigmentation. Instead they take the resistance to dividing people into groups as itself a form of racism, and then create myths such as the southern strategy to project their former evils unto their political opponents.
    Yet a Republican can, as many did, oppose Obama and yet enthusiastically support Ben Carson because of their policies and positions not their skin color. For Democrats, Republican opposition to Obama is frequently portrayed as racism, and the explanations for Carson, when offered, range from the incoherent to the disgusting (i.e., portraying Carson as an Uncle Tom).
    So where do I come down on Confederate monuments? While, my mother was from North Carolina, my Dad was from Wyoming and I grew up as an Air Force brat, an Air Force that had been desegregated by Harry Truman, a Democrat, seven years before I was born. Most of my memories as a child come from Pennsylvania and California. I now live in Wisconsin. So I am basically a northern Republican and do not view the Civil War as a lost cause or a war of Northern aggression. After all, the South started it by firing on Fort Sumter. I view the Civil War as two things: A Victory, and Over.
    Something common among the military, but not always understood by civilians, is the way that true warriors can fight so hard during a war, but then see those on “the other side” as fellow warriors after the war is over, even getting together to commemorate those fallen in battle. Thus, I can read a book like Rod Gragg’s “Covered with Glory: the 26th North Carolina Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg” and not be rooting for my side to win and them to lose, but instead seeking an understanding of what they went through and suffered.
    Towards the end of the first day of fighting, a federal solder, Corporal Charles H McConnell of the 24th Michigan was falling back. He took his last bullet, and aiming at a large man in gray 30 yards away, pulled the trigger. The large man was Colonel John R Lane, of the 26th North Carolina. The bullet hit Lane in the back of the neck exiting out through his teeth. It was a horrendous wound that nearly killed him. Yet 40 years later, at the anniversary of battle, Lane and McConnell met again and became friends. How is this possible?
    Ultimately, it is because warriors realize, better than most, that in war those on both sides are caught up in something larger than themselves. Once the conflict is settled, it is time to move on and turn swords into plowshares. I can admire as tragic figures “those on the other side” like Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I can get a glimpse of the internal struggle that some faced as they came up against good friends in battle like Armistead and Harrison at Gettysburg. In short, I see them as people who suffered, and not part of an issue to be fought over.
    In this light, when it comes to monuments in cemeteries or places like Gettysburg, I would be very strongly opposed to their removal. As for the others, I see them as much more problematic. I do believe that some of these celebrate the military tradition of the South, something that is much stronger than it is in the North, and it is a part of who they are, or at least were. Note that what is often called the Confederate flag was not actually the flag of the confederacy but a battle flag. Like it or not it is their history. But I can also understand the difficulty in separating this from the reason for which the war was fought, the preservation of the evil of slavery.
    The love of history in me would hate to see their blanket removal as something akin to how Islamic radicals seek to purge the areas they conquer of any vestige of the things they oppose. Ultimately, I wish those involved would learn to be more like Lane and McConnell and I wish we could look back on the Civil War as a tragedy which engulfed the nation, caused by our compromise with the evil of slavery.
    Frankly it should be much easier for us than it was for Lane and McConnell, after all no one alive today actually fought in the Civil War. Maybe a solution is that, rather than remove the Civil War monuments, we should focus on the positive endeavor of building more monuments to those who fought so hard to end the legacy of segregation in the Civil Rights movement.
    Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., Engineer, teacher, Christian apologist, and author of Preserving Democracy, What is Wrong with Social Justice?, A Short Critique of Climate Change, Christianity and Secularism, and Evidence for the Bible.
     
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  • Steve Kindle: A Vote for Hillary is a Vote for the GOP

    by Rev. Steve Kindle, pastor2pew.org, progressive author: I’m Right and You’re Wrong, Stewardship: God’s Way of Recreating the World, and If You’re Child is Gay.

    Editor’s note: On August 27, 2016, conservative author, Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. wrote a post, The Least Bad Choice. We encourage you to read both of these posts today.

    election-2016-pictureThis election cycle may be the most important of my lifetime. It’s the equivalent of 1860 when the future direction of the nation is at stake. The party of Lincoln emerged then as one of the two great parties of the American political scene. We are on the threshold of losing it forever.
    Although the Founders did not see or encourage a two-party electoral system, it has emerged as one of the great bulwarks of American democracy. This election may very well determine if the Republican Party will continue in any form we would recognize. This would be a great loss, and I say this as a registered Democrat.
    The demise of the GOP began with the election of Barak Obama in 2008. It became the obstructionist party, the “just say no” party, that blocked anything POTUS put forward. It operated under the strategy of the Senate Majority Leader who famously said he would do all he could to make Obama a one-term president. He may have failed on that score, but he may have succeeded in taking down his own party in the process. How?
    The glue that holds our democracy together is compromise. Wise pols know that. They know that they cannot get everything they want, that they do not hold the only good ideas, that working together to solve problems leads to the best solutions. But Republicans have lately elected ideologues to the House and Senate, people who regard compromise as weakness and can’t bend without breaking. They refuse to entertain anything that suggests acceptance of what they consider less than the only true way. This has led to two of the least productive Congresses ever, and the emergence of Donald Trump. And, ironically, he will destroy the Republican Party.
    The professional Republicans know this. Sure, call them the establishment, if you will, but they are those who put nation above party. Just Google “Republicans for Hillary” and you will see a stellar list. People like Steve Schmidt, McCain’s presidential campaign manager; David Frum, Bush 43’s speech writer; Colin Powell; Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush; Meg Whitman, Former Va. Sen. John Warner; Michael Chertoff, former United States Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. Add to this the growing number of Republicans who announced they won’t vote for Trump (without saying who they will vote for) including Mitt Romney, George Will, Sens. Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham, the Log Cabin Republicans, and 95% of the state legislators. This list is huge and growing.
    The so-called Republican “autopsy report” that detailed the Republican failures of 2012 named ideological rigidity, its preference for the rich over workers, its alienation of minorities, reactionary social policies, and institutionalized repression of dissent and innovation as its major liabilities that needed to be addressed if the party would ever again be a factor in upcoming presidential elections. This comes from Republicans!!! Or should I say, this comes from Republicans who understand their failures and want to do something about them. The emergence of Donald Trump is the most reactionary candidate possible for thwarting any hope that the Republican Party will self-correct. The result is the end of the GOP as an effective partner in the support of American democracy.
    So, when I vote for Hillary Clinton this Tuesday, I will be voting for a renewed GOP as well as for someone who is a proven compromiser, a person who is no ideologue, who effectively reaches across the aisle for the better good. Sure, she has her flaws, and as a Bernie supporter, she falls far short of what I would prefer. But I want a strong Republican Party and someone who embraces all Americans. Donald Trump brings neither.
    The loss, once again, of the White House, just might be the impetus for Republican reform and a return to political integrity. Come on back, Republicans—We need you!
     
     
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  • Elgin Hushbeck, Jr.: The Least Bad Choice

    by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., Engineer, Christian apologist, and author of Christianity and Secularism, Preserving Democracy: What the Founding Fathers Knew, What We Have Forgotten, and How It Threatens Democracy  and What is Wrong with Social Justice?
    Many people have complained in the past about having undesirable choices when going to the ballot box, but never has the nation faced a choice between two less desirable candidates than this year. When asked, I portray the election as between two unelectable candidates except that they are running against each other.
    If you are Republican in a reliably blue state, or a Democrat in a reliably red state, you are blessedly freed from having to worry, for your vote will not affect the outcome. However those who live in swing states face a very difficult choice.
    9781893729827There are only 3 options: vote for Trump, Clinton, or sit this one out. Some will argue they will vote for a 3rd party candidate or write someone’s name in. Ok, but that has the same net effect as sitting it out, and to believe otherwise is to delude yourself. It may make you feel better, but it will have no effect on the outcome except possibly as a spoiler.
    For Trump, the problem is that he is a bombastic reality TV show star with a thin skin. Perhaps the best synopsis of Trump I have heard was from Hugh Hewitt, who likened him to the Roman leader Sulla whose epitaph was, “No friend ever served me, and no enemy every wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.” Trump often seems more interested in settling scores than running for office.
    He has no discernable ideology and has been on both sides of many issues, allowing him to claim he was on whatever side seems best for him at the moment. Even now his positions often changes. While there is clearly an honesty problem here, it is one common to most politicians, akin to Kerry’s statement that he was for the bill before he was against it. The bigger issue is that he seems to have little knowledge of the position he is running for. Even when warned that a question about the nuclear triad might come up in the debates, he was still caught off guard and did not know what it was. In short he is completely unsuited for the job.
    This would seem to make Clinton an easy choice. Yet, up against Trump’s possible future incompetence we have Clinton’s track record of incompetence. On her watch as Secretary of State we have disaster after disaster that has left the world in a much worse state: the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; the war and its aftermath in Libya; the Russian reset and the invasion of the Crimea, and now troops massing on the new boarder threatening another war; the failure to get a Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq that lead to the rise of ISIS; and the terrible mishandling of Syria, to name just a few.
    The real problem is that her issues with truth go far beyond the normal political aim of trying to present oneself in the best light. She is corrupt, and corruption is much harder to address than incompetence, particularly given the modern Democratic Party, as an arm of the Clinton machine which works feverishly to protect her and her husband and has done so for some time now.
    At least with Trump, I can point to the fact that there were 17 candidates who divided up the vote, a media who gave him an estimated $2 billion in free media coverage, party in-fighting that could not settle on an alternative, and open primaries that allowed non-Republicans to help pick the Republican nominee. I do not like it but I can at least see how he became the nominee.
    For Democrats, Clinton’s hold over the party was such that she was basically the only choice that was allowed. The only other semi-real candidate was Sanders, but the DNC rigged the game to make sure he could not win and this was clear to me even before the leak of DNC emails.
    The pattern is clear going back decades. When they are caught, the Clintons just lie. When it is shown that they are lying they simply change to new lies. When those are shown to be false, they change to yet more lies. At some point they begin to claim they have already fully answered all the questions and anyone who continues to pointing out their lies is simply playing politics, while the Clintons just want to move on and get back to the business of the American people. Yet many Democrats are either in denial or simply do not care that she is corrupt, and are immune to any evidence to the contrary.
    The most recent example of this was the discovery that she had a secret email server. As usual she told lie after lie after lie in an attempt to get around the issue. When the FBI director testified before Congress that she had lied repeatedly in her testimony, which is perjury, she even lied about that and claimed the FBI director had said she had been completely truthful.
    Even now, Democrats in the know are holding their breath. Not that her server was hacked by foreign powers, that is a given that has already seriously damaged the country and very likely led to at least one death, probably many more. No, they are afraid that the missing 33,000 emails will be released before the election. The handful that have already come out show, not wedding plans and yoga classes as she claimed, but a pattern of collusion between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation that have already raised serious questions about selling the foreign policy of the United States.
    The fact is the Clintons not only operate outside the laws the rest of us have to follow, but they consistently put their own interest ahead of the country. Nowhere was this clearer than while the fire fight in Benghazi was still raging and the lives of Doherty and Woods hung in the balance. The Action Points of a meeting held to deal with the situation showed that instead of focusing on getting them help, Clinton was focused on fabricating a cover story to protect herself and the administration. As for Doherty and Woods, help was never sent and hours later they were killed. At the arrival of the caskets, Clinton, being Clinton, lied to the families to further the false cover story.
    Based on the FBI investigation, there is now no doubt that she broke the law and endangered national security with her server. But it is also pretty clear that the fix was in, and she was never going to be prosecuted for her crime. The FBI, like the Justice Department, IRS, EPA, and many other branches of government have been corrupted into just another arm of the Democratic party, which is now little more than part of the Clinton machine, protecting and bestowing favors on friends and going after enemies.
    At least if Trump causes problems there is no doubt that Republicans will quickly join Democrats to block him. After all they are having trouble supporting him even now with an election in the balance. So the choice for me is easy and I will vote for Trump. Trump can and probably will cause problems, but the country will survive, and one can at least hope he will only be a 1-term President.
    The country cannot survive the corruption Clinton will bring, at least not in the democratic form of government where the people have a real say in who runs their government. She will bring to the country what she brought to the Democratic Party nomination process, a system where opposition is allowed to run, but the fix will be in and they will not be allowed to win.
    I don’t like it, and I wish I had a better choice, but wishing does not make it so and this is the choice I have.
     
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  • Ronald Higdon: There's Always Something I Can Do

    by Dr. Ronald Higdon, author of In Changing Times: A Guide for Reflection and Contemplation and Surviving a Son’s Suicide

    pose casualIt immediately caught my attention because I felt it spoke so clearly to the predicament many feel has taken over their lives. It was the account of a conference for pastors that was being held in New York City; a number of pastors from Africa were in attendance. One group arrived early enough to make a walking tour of the city. When they started back to the conference center they realized they had no idea how to find it. One of them called the center announcing that they were lost. He was told to go the nearest corner and relay the two street names he found there. After a brief pause, the African pastor announced, “We’re at the corner of ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t Walk.’
    My immediate response to the story was, “I know how that feels.” There are more graphic ways to express the idea but this certainly provides a visualization of the idea of being between a rock and a hard place with inactivity appearing to be the only present alternative. I don’t believe that is ever the case. There is always something I can do and most of the time it is some simple thing.
    As a consultant, I worked with conflicted congregations where my challenging role was to be a “non-anxious presence.” My first responsibility was to “turn down the heat” that differences and misunderstandings had generated. My second task was to listen and encourage people to listen to one another. I don’t want you to think I’m saying I was ever one-hundred percent successful in my endeavor. Occasionally, I found the challenge a little overwhelming: I had to battle my own anxiety and the anger that was churning in me. There are always a few persons in every congregation who seem to have a monkey wrench handy. And they know how to use it. The motto in all my interims: “Perfection is not possible but perseverance is.”
    In our present culture of anxiety, I find my role in retirement as an “ordinary citizen” has not changed. The responsibility to turn down the heat is now entirely focused on my daily personal relationships on all levels. A bumper sticker once proclaimed: “Change is good. You go first.” I know who ought to go first. Since it is impossible to change others and I can only change myself, it is obvious where to begin. The kind of change I’m talking about begins with common courtesy and civility in the small things in my small world. Most of us don’t have a big stage but we all have a stage on which we are living out our lives. That is where I’m called to play my part to the best of my ability.
    Inflammatory rhetoric has literally set the atmosphere ablaze. I don’t know where it all began, but it seems many took the 1976 movie Network literally and have thrown open the windows to shout out to all the world their anger and frustration. I thought it was a joke when one writer mentioned a website – justrage.com. I checked it out and discovered it is no joke (in every sense of that word.) It ought to come with a Iabel: “Warning: This site may be hazardous to whatever level of civility you may have left.” It is termed an “internet anger sponge,” but it appears to me to be more like a venom scattergun.
    Martin Seligman in Authentic Happiness discusses the concept of “emotional hydraulics” that maintains we need to ventilate negative emotions, otherwise their repression will cause mental problems. Seligman states what I have found to be true: just the reverse is correct. I have read from multiple sources that the most recent studies reveal this venting is not nearly as therapeutic as once thought. The toxic pollution it has created has reached alarming saturation.
    Many researchers believe the tag “Angry American” can be placed on more than half of the population. My goal as a consultant was to bring people to the place where they could sit across from those with whom they differed, listen in order to understand where the other person was coming from, calmly and non-judgmentally share their own ideas and then begin genuine dialogue and negotiation. This did not come easily or happen quickly.
    My disappointment with the current political and cultural confrontations is how little real conversation is taking place. Loaded adjectives with their demonizing and dehumanizing implications make calm discourse almost unthinkable. I have no quick fix slogan or bumper sticker campaign to offer for a sound-bite resolution. I only know that I have a daily calling not to fight fire with fire and to determine to be “on the listen” to everyone with whom I come into contact – no exceptions. That much I owe to my community, my nation, and my responsibility as one who hopes to be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem.
    I’m not at the corner of “Walk” and “Don’t Walk.” This is something I can do.

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  • Bruce Epperly: The Book of Ruth, Gleaning, and the Social Safety Net

    by Dr. Bruce Epperly
    Leviticus 19:9-10 proclaims:

    When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.

    The God of Israel recognized the reality of poverty. God was well aware that poverty is more often the result of accident and misfortune than laziness. As the Hebraic scriptures, or Old Testament, constantly asserts, God hears the cries of the poor. Abraham Joshua Heschel described God’s relationship to the world in terms of “pathos,” God’s passionate care for the vulnerable, grounded in God’s experience of their pain.
    God is not aloof, but our companion every step of the way. Passionate for justice, the details of life matter to God, as can be seen from Hebraic laws and prophetic critiques. God is concerned that the scales for weighing be exact, that farms be maintained by owners and not foreclosed, that lending be a matter of ethics and not profit, and that every child be fed.
    Gleaning, or what we would describe as the “social safety net,” was not optional nor was it a matter of generosity. It was law! God’s law, and it was required of landowners and institutions. The divine passion inspired prophets to cry out against the injustice of economic inequality and the dissonance of poverty in the midst of plenty. Everything is personal to God, and this means business and government as well as individual relationships.
    Ruth and Esther CoverThe Book of Ruth is more than a pretty love story. Now, I must confess that I like the happy endings of Hallmark movies. I delight in performing weddings and celebrating at wedding receptions. The Book of Ruth is often invoked in weddings and the relationship of Ruth and Boaz is often seen as purely romantic. But, it was also a matter of economic survival and the welcoming of a foreign women into the Jewish community.
    Ruth can be read as immigration story, as a reminder that strangers have a place in our communities because they are God’s children, too! Ruth can also be read as an argument for a strong social net provided by government and business as well as personal generosity. Worried about their survival, Ruth goes to the wheat fields to gather food, the leftovers at the edges, and perhaps to catch the eye Boaz, who will provide economic security for this mixed race family. As scripture notes: “And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, ‘Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.’”
    Ruth had a right to glean in the fields. She was poor and she was a foreigner and God’s law mandated that Boaz provide out of his largesse for the well-being of the power. All’s well that ends well. Ruth marries Boaz, bears a child, and becomes the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest king. Dig deeper, the greatest king was the descendant of a foreigner, an immigrant, and a welfare recipient. Although she was single and childless at the time, Ruth’s experience is similar to today’s single parents, the working poor, doing their best to support a family on a minimum wage job. Ruth’s experiences is also mirrored in the couple, both of whom work in the service industry, perhaps serving our lunches or cleaning our rooms, who barely scrape by, who receive no sick leave from their employers and must go to work or not be paid or lose their job, and who live from paycheck to paycheck and must depend on government services for health care and child care. (For more on Ruth, see Ruth and Esther: Women of Agency and Adventure.)
    In the midst of the election cycle, the Book of Ruth challenges any form of “dog whistle” politics that asserts that the poor are lazy and undeserving, and highlights “welfare queens” (with the implication that these are people of color) while neglecting our nation’s subsidies of corporations, many of whose employees must receive their health care from the government, our tax dollars, because wealthy corporates often fail to give benefits or a living wage to their employees.
    In today’s world, the practice of gleaning was a tax. It was God’s requirement, codified in Hebraic law. Generosity was encouraged in Israel, but generosity is always optional and arbitrary. Law is a requirement. Those who call themselves Christians would do well to look at the principle of gleaning, as well as the sabbatical and jubilee years, as a reminder that we have a social responsibility for the poor and vulnerable and that governmental support for vulnerable people is a necessity and not a luxury in securing the protection and the common good of the nation. This means fair taxes for the wealthy and corporations, who gain the most from our economic and governmental systems. Christians would do well to challenge candidates for whom lower taxes are an idol and who want to “starve the beast” and in so doing, starve our families and children.
    To God, it’s never just business or public policy or profit, its people and their joy and pain. God rejoices when the city streets are safe, children are laughing, everyone has enough to eat, and families are secure. God delights in just such public policies and governments that care for the least of these.

  • To Whom Do We Give Allegiance?

    by Dr. Robert Cornwall

    Allwgiance coverAs a child I had a classmate who remained seated as the rest of us stood to say the “Pledge of Allegiance.” While we pledged our allegiance to the nation symbolized by the flag, thinking nothing of the religious implications of our act, my classmate, who happened to be a Jehovah’s Witness, had been taught that to stand and recite the pledge would break one of the Ten Commandments—the one about having no graven images. At the time I didn’t understand why he refused to stand and say this innocuous statement, but when I think about it now it does give me pause. While his religious community refuses to acknowledge any government besides God’s kingdom (they don’t vote or serve in the military either), most of us live with a Constantinian vision.
    Most Christians don’t see anything wrong with pledging allegiance to the symbol of our national identity. In fact, many American Christians have equated their Christianity with their national loyalty. After all, isn’t the United States a “Christian Nation”? Yes, God and Country go together! The Scouts even have a badge you can earn that celebrates this. Of course, other nations have felt the same way. In fact, they have assumed that God was on their side during serious conflicts. The German Christian movement even reconfigured the Christian faith to fit its ideology. I wonder if we do the same? Do we discount the teachings of Jesus when they come into conflict with our national aspirations?
    Symbols are important. So, if you go into many churches, including my own, you will find an American flag placed somewhere in the sanctuary. I must confess my own unease with the presence of the flag, but thus far I’ve not made an issue of it. Fortunately, our flag sits at the back of the sanctuary and not in the chancel. What I find more puzzling are the churches that choose to fly large American flags out in front of their buildings. More often than not the American flag stands above the “Christian” flag (I’ve always wondered who decided this flag, with its red cross on a blue field in the corner of an otherwise white flag, should represent Christians, or at least Protestants). It seems to me that when we make the flag such a prominent symbol, we give pride of place to nation over the realm of God. I know that my Jehovah’s Witness classmate all those years ago would find all of this befuddling.
    When we say the pledge of allegiance we are expressing our loyalty to the nation in which we hold citizenship. I really don’t have a major problem with this. I’m quite happy with my American citizenship, at least to a point. I think we can have a variety of allegiances. I am, for instance, a life-long San Francisco Giants fan. When it comes to baseball, they have my allegiance. My family has my allegiance as well. I made a covenant with Cheryl some thirty plus years ago to be her husband. But, having said that, none of these allegiances is ultimate.
    For those of us who continue to recite the Lord’s Prayer on a regular basis (my congregation continues to say this prayer each week), I believe this prayer which we believe Jesus gave us is our pledge of ultimate allegiance. With this prayer offered up to God whose name is hallowed, we ask that God’s kingdom would come and God’s will would be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” There is an expectation present in this prayer that God would be engaged in something transformative, and that we’re agreeing to be part of God’s work. Yes, when we offer this prayer, we are making a statement of loyalty to God’s vision and offering ourselves as agents of that vision. It isn’t that we will bring the realm of God into existence, but we make ourselves available to God’s realm.
    I realize that some might find this affirmation of God’s realm a bit disconcerting. They might think that I’m recommending some kind of theocracy. In a way, I am, but not in the usual way of thinking. This isn’t a divine government imposed by an earthly realm. This is instead a recognition that our ultimate loyalty belongs to God, and when loyalties conflict, and they will, we must choose the realm of God. The church is called to be an expression of that realm on earth as a reflection of God’s realm in heaven. So, no I’m not advocating making the United States a Christian nation. I’m advocating that we recognize that God’s realm is present on earth as in heaven!

  • Liberty vs Law

    Liberty vs Law

    by Elgin Hushbeck

    Democracy coverA recent Global Christian Perspectives focused on the subject of rights and during the discussion the claim was made that liberty is not a biblical concept (@ 35:45). Personally I found this to be surprising. I believe liberty, and the nearly synonymous freedom, goes to the very heart of the Bible’s message. God created us with the ability, not just to react, but to make choices, the most important of which is whether or not we choose to love and serve him.
    Then there is the verse that on the Liberty Bell: Leviticus 25:10 “Set aside and consecrate the fiftieth year to declare liberty throughout the land for all of its inhabitants. It is to be a jubilee for you.” Why bother declaring liberty throughout the land if liberty was not important?
    In the New Testament Paul writes in Galatians 5:23 “For you, brothers, were called to freedom. Only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity to gratify your flesh, but through love make it your habit to serve one another.” 2 Cor 3:17 says “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is freedom.”
    The defining event of the Old Testament is the Exodus, where God brought his people out of slavery, and in fact a state of slavery is pretty much the opposite of liberty. The defining event of the New Testament is the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus by which we are set free from the bondage of sin (Romans 6:7), and brought into the liberty spoken of in the verses above.
    Now perhaps some will counter with Roman 6:18 “And since you have been freed from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness.” This is true. The freedom we have in Christ is not a freedom to do whatever we want. As Paul says “Should we go on sinning because we are not under Law but under grace? Of course not!” (Romans 6:15).
    But it would seem that many are uncomfortable with liberty. If people are free to make choices, they might make choices that we disagree with. They might choose to do something other than what we think they should.
    The history of both Judaism and the Church is full of those who have sought to create a whole range of new rules to limit people’s freedoms. Thus, over the years Judaism, surrounded the 613 laws of the OT with thousands of additional laws. Christians down through the ages have also had a tendency to add new rules that Christians should follow such as prohibitions on drinking, smoking and dancing.
    This problem of seeking to limit freedom has afflicted both the right and the left. But in recent years those on the left have begun to push a new form of legalism. Not only do they seek to add a series of religious rules and regulations that we should follow as Christians, now they want to put the power of the government behind their rules and force everyone to follow their new legalism under threat of violence. If any should object to the phrase “threat of violence” here, they are neglecting that this is what government does. If you do not believe this, just say no to the government and see what happens should you resist.
    For me, this is a real problem. Galatians 5:1 says “The Messiah has set us free so that we may enjoy the benefits of freedom.” Liberalism seeks to put us again under a yoke of a law of their making. They justify this claiming that they are only seeking to legislate biblical principles, such as helping the poor, or that the Bible demands 100% of our money and that justifies a high rate of taxation.
    Yet I would argue that there is a significant difference between voluntarily choosing to give to the poor because you seek to follow the teaching of our Lord on the one hand and having the state automatically take money out of my paycheck that I do not see, so they can spend it on programs I am unaware of to help people I do not know.
    The studies on giving and happiness are clear. There is a reason conservative tend to give more of their time and money to charity than liberals. In addition they are as a general rule happier. As Christians do we have an obligation to help the poor? Of course we do. But the fact that we, as followers of Jesus, have an obligation does not mean that we should make this a function of the state, funded by taxes, which at least in the United States are paid by an ever decreasing number of the people. In the United States, for example, for the bottom 40% of those filing income tax returns, the income “tax” is actually a source of income rather than something they pay, as they get more money back in refunds and credits than they actually paid in.
    Then there is the problem that the government makes what would have been a gift of charity and an expression of the love of Christ working through us, into an entitlement that is demanded. These entitlements often build a dependence that is itself a new form of bondage.
    As such I do not believe that our obligations as Christians should be transformed into mandates from the state. To do so makes a mockery of the liberty that God has given us and is often detrimental to all involved.

  • Learning from September 11, 2001

    by Henry Neufeld, Publisher of Energion Publications

    Henry Neufeld
    There are things we must not forget.
    Why is that? Because we need to learn and apply certain lessons. There are changes we make in who we are and how we behave because of those events. Historical events, or more precisely our perception of them, shape us as families, groups, nations, and yes, churches.
    Americans remember the Revolutionary War, the framing of our constitution, the Civil War, December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor), the Vietnam War, and now 9/11. Those events (or periods of time) shaped us. What we were taught about them shaped us, and our perception of them shapes us. Our perception also helps to shape the next generation.
    The first Gulf War shaped my life in a major way. I didn’t slog through the sand as soldiers and marines do. I was in the U. S. Air Force, and I did my job in the back of an airplane. My experience in the service, and in various conflicts also shape me. I hear the news differently. Occasionally my wife and I will see a news story and I’ll comment that in the old days, I would have gone and packed my bag, waiting for the inevitable phone call that would tell me I was deploying.
    I want to emphasize that I don’t regard my time in the Air Force as some sort of hardship or trial. I enjoyed what I did. I had the opportunity to avoid that first gulf war. I had just returned from deployment, and was asked whether I’d like to volunteer. Most people didn’t have that choice!
    My perspective on 9/11 and following events grows out of those experiences. As an American, that is.
    But I have a different set of formative experiences as well. Those experiences center around a man dying on a cross outside Jerusalem about 33 CE. I understand that event not only through my own experiences (none of us can avoid our own experience!), but also through other stories of the faith: the creation, the exodus from Egypt, Israel’s exile and return, shaped by and shaping so much of the message of the prophets, and the Maccabean Revolt. (It is unfortunate, in my view, that the books of Maccabees are not part of the protestant canon.)
    Those events form my view of what happens as a Christian, or even better as a follower of Jesus Christ. That latter distinction is important. I can see the cross as the horrible moment when the Romans, aided and encouraged by Jewish collaborators, killed Jesus. That hateful and fearful view has shaped the behavior of many who have called themselves Christians. They have, in turn hated and feared Jews. The result of that hatred was killing and the building of further hatred.
    It is important to note that our perception of an event sets the way we are formed by it. In the gospel According to John Jesus tells us that we are to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34). That sets a perspective on the cross. We are to be shaped by it as an act of love, performed on our behalf by Jesus, and thus be set on a path of love for others. And not just any sort of love, but love that makes us willing to sacrifice our very lives.
    It was that sort of love that said, “Father forgive them,” regarding people who were in the process of crucifying the One who spoke.
    How we remember the event impacts how we act because of it.
    This is illustrated in the Passover Seder where actions are taken to remember with sadness what happened to the Egyptians. (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-daniel-brenner/does-passover-celebrate-the-death-of-innocent-egyptians_b_2821971.html as an example.)
    I think the intersection of these two sets of formative stories, the “myths” (in the most positive sense of that word) of our country and our faith community, illustrate a number of things. Most importantly, they show us that the two foundations are not identical. As an American I am drawn to restoration of power, to the accomplishment of justice (I hope) through means of power, and yes, even to revenge. As a Christian, shaped by the story of One who died on the cross, I am called to be different.
    I wrote about the word “revenge” back in 2003 just before we invaded Iraq a second time, in the second gulf war. I titled my piece Revenge! Some have objected that their support of the war in Iraq was not based on revenge. But any time you talk about how a group of people, especially one as large as a nation, comes to a decision there are many factors.
    I know that there was an element of revenge. Why? Because there was an element of revenge for me. It took me some time in thinking of the war to get past it. At the end of the first gulf war many of us had that feeling that we really hadn’t accomplished the mission because Saddam Hussein was still there and still being obnoxious and dangerous (perhaps) as ever. The thought of seeing Saddam Hussein removed was a joyful one to me.
    Until I asked this question: How are things going to be better when we’re done?
    As I re-read my piece from 2003 and saw my suggestion of a power vacuum opening up to more problems with Iran, I thought about our current news. Are we better off now because Iraq was invaded in 2003?
    But then there is a second question that comes from that second set of formative stories: Are they better off because we invaded in 2003?
    This discussion should not be seen as one about our veterans. In a democracy we need a military that obeys civilian authority. There are many ways in which civilian authority can misuse the military, but I believe those are as nothing compared to the way in which a military not under civilian control might abuse its own power. The young men and women who carry out our political will should always be honored, however we feel about the orders they are given. In fact, one of the greatest moral failures of our country, in my opinion, is that we expect this service and then fail these people as veterans. Complete care for those injured or killed in a war should be considered a basic part of the cost of that war by any nation that wants to claim moral high ground.
    Yet that second set of stories tells me that I need to be caring about every Iraqi killed, and now about those killed in the current wars there, wars which resulted in part from our changing the political and military calculus of an entire region, a region few of us understand.
    I cannot tie all the loose ends in a blog post, but even more importantly, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to do so.
    What I’d like you to do is ask yourself about these defining events (and many more; your list may be different), and how they have shaped you. The two lists conflict and overlap. I would suggest that one shaped by both may need to resolve conflicts. It is hard to both love one’s enemies and also bomb them into oblivion. It is also hard not to respond with force when innocent people are slaughtered.
    While I believe that our ultimate allegiance belongs to God and his kingdom, I do believe that allegiance calls us to take positive action in this world and at this time. At the same time, my allegiance to God’s kingdom means that the way I respond will be controlled not by anger, fear, hate, or the desire for revenge, but rather by the desire to make life better for others.
    God’s love is not diminished because a person lives in another country, belongs to another faith community, or even because that person is a terrorist.
    What about mine?

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