R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 305
June 30, 2015
The Briefing 06-30-15
1) Oklahoma execution method upheld by Supreme Court, despite severe questioning of death penalty
Supreme Court upholds use of controversial execution drug, Oklahoman Daily (AP)
2) Supreme Court stay against Texas abortion restrictions mean more infants will die
Supreme Court blocks enforcement of Texas anti-abortion law, USA Today (Richard Wolf)
3) Christians cannot shirk responsibility to speak biblicly about gay marriage
How gay marriage ruling affects local churches, Louisville Courier-Journal (Andrew Wolfson)
With Same-Sex Decision, Evangelical Churches Address New Reality, New York Times (Michael Paulson)
Supreme Court Gay Marriage Ruling Creates a New Reality, Wall Street Journal (Zusha Elinson)
4) Individualized use of religion in weddings effort to escape morality-binding authority
Couples Personalizing Role of Religion in Wedding Ceremonies, New York Times (Samuel Freedman)
5) Celebration of chimps as relatives key test of worldview division of America
Belated Protection for Some Close Relatives, New York Times (Editorial Board)
June 29, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 06-29-15
The Briefing
June 26, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Monday, June 29, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Ending of New York prison break reminder sin is never as beautiful as it promises
The story pretty much ended where we knew it had to end. The story ended yesterday with the apprehension of David Sweat, one of two hardened murderers who would escape from one of most high-security prisons in America, the Clinton correctional institution in Dannemora, New York. They had been on the loose for approximately 3 weeks.
The stories that captivate our attention say a great deal about us and until Friday’s Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, the story of these two escaped murderers had led most news accounts for most of the days that they had been missing from that correctional institution. We’re talking about David Sweat and Richard Matt, two hardened criminals, two murderers convicted of absolutely heinous crimes who had plotted for some time a very intricate and sophisticated breakout from prison. We now know that at least two employees of the prison were implicated in the plot and have now been arrested and they themselves are being held on charges of assisting the two murderers to escape. But America was fascinated with these two murderers who seemed to escape into thin air after breaking out of what had been considered one of the most high-security prisons in the entire nation.
On Friday, Richard Matt, age 49 was killed by law enforcement. Just two days later, David Sweat was apprehended and also shot but not killed as he was evidently attempting to cross America’s border with Canada. At the end of the day, the two hardened criminals had not gotten very far, escaping into the thickly wooded area around the Dannemora facility, they had gotten less than 60 miles. It was speculated early on that the sophistication of the plan might have indicated that the two had a way to get far beyond the prison once they made their escape. And we now know that that was probably the case because a woman who been working with them inside the prison didn’t go along with the plan to provide them with a vehicle after they had escaped from the prison facility.
From a Christian worldview perspective there are a couple of key insights here. In the first place, you will note the absolute absence of moral relativism in the press coverage concerning these two criminals. No one was at the time suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about the fact that two convicted criminals were on the loose in New York. People throughout upstate New York into Canada and in neighboring states were living in fear and they were understanding that the police were very serious as was the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo in arguing that these two men were inherently dangerous and were considered to be a threat to anyone who might encounter them after their escape from the prison. You will note that just about everyone commenting on this case agreed with the fact that these were two very evil men who simply could not be allowed to escape from this maximum-security prison.
The second insight from the Christian worldview here has to do with the nature of sin. Sin is itself a form of irrationality, it is never beautiful and it is never as sophisticated as it appears to be. In this case you’re talking about two men who had committed absolutely horrifying murders, in the case of one of them a series of brutal murders, in the case of the other the murder of a law enforcement officer. They also undeniably had a very sophisticated plan to escape from prison. But it wasn’t sophisticated in the end. The final picture for these two had nothing to do with sophistication and had everything to do with the brutal reality of sin. One of them is now dead, the other was shot twice by a police officer. Both of them were believed to have been ill and acting at least partly irrationally because of the effects of deprivation during the time they were running away from the police. Americans may be adopting moral relativism on an entire spectrum of sin, but when it comes to murder, it turns out that Americans aren’t really embracing moral relativism at all. It finally also comes to show us that when you have two men who think they have nothing to lose they act like it and sometimes they die like it.
2) Outrage directed at social conservatives, not terrorist attacks, exposes priorities
Also as we went into the weekend, a horrifying story from three different continents tied together by the threat of terrorism. As Ben Hubbard of the New York Times reported,
“In a matter of hours and on three different continents, militants carried out attacks on Friday that killed scores of civilians, horrified populations and raised thorny questions about the evolving nature of international terrorism and what can be done to fight it.”
Hubbard went on to say,
“On the surface, the attacks appeared to be linked only by timing.
“In France, a man stormed an American-owned chemical plant, decapitated one person and apparently tried to blow up the facility. In Tunisia, a gunman drew an assault rifle from a beach umbrella and killed at least 38 people at a seaside resort. And in Kuwait, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque during communal prayers, killing at least 25 Shiite worshipers.”
As the front page story Saturday, the New York Times make clear, international observers of terrorism are now looking at the events that took place in this one day on three continents and are coming to a new and humbling realization that we’re not winning the war on terror. We are actually falling further and further behind. And this leads to the importance of an opinion piece that ran in Saturday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal by Bari Weiss entitled,
“Love Among the Ruins.”
It ties together so many of the stories that have rightly captivated our attention in recent days. But Bari Weiss finds some very deep lessons here that ought to interest us as well. She writes,
“On Friday my phone was blowing up with messages, asking if I’d seen the news. Some expressed disbelief at the headlines. Many said they were crying.
“None of them were talking about the dozens of people gunned down in Sousse, Tunisia, by a man who, dressed as a tourist, had hidden his Kalashnikov inside a beach umbrella. Not one was crying over the beheading in a terrorist attack at a chemical factory near Lyon, France. The victim’s head was found on a pike near the factory, his body covered with Arabic inscriptions. And no Facebook friends mentioned the first suicide bombing in Kuwait in more than two decades, in which 27 people were murdered in one of the oldest Shiite mosques in the country.
“They were talking about the only news that mattered: gay marriage.”
Now, very interestingly, Bari Weiss says that she herself is a long-term supporter of the legalization of same-sex marriage, but she writes about this quandary demonstrated in America’s attention to the one rather than to the other, and she writes,
“Moral relativism has become its own, perverse form of nativism among those who stake their identity on being universalist and progressive.”
She writes about the fact that the outrage that was offered by so many on Friday by so many Americans was expressed not toward those who had killed so many in three different continents on that very day, but rather as she says on anyone who dared to have any problem with the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage that was handed down on Friday. She points to the fact that on so many sexual issues, America has genuinely sought to embrace an ethic of moral relativism that centralizes the issues on which Americans have become increasingly relativistic in terms of morality. That’s not just a recent development but it has recently accelerated, culminating in Friday’s decision at the U.S. Supreme Court. But she writes about something that’s also very important. Every single culture expresses outrage and she finds it even as a defender of same-sex marriage, she finds it very telling that the supporters of same-sex marriage directed their outrage, not at terrorism, but rather at the defenders of traditional marriage.
She writes this very perceptively,
“The barbarians are at our gates. But inside our offices, schools, churches, synagogues and homes, we are posting photos of rainbows on Twitter. It’s easier to Photoshop images of Justice Scalia as Voldemort than it is to stare evil in the face.
“You can’t get married if you’re dead.”
3) Religious liberty immediately denigrated, questioned following Supreme Court decision
And make no mistake; the floodgates are now open for outrage towards any defender of traditional marriage, of marriage as defined in Scripture and in millennia of human experience in virtually every civilization throughout history as exclusively the union of a man and a woman. This moral revolution is taking no prisoners and it is moving with breathtaking velocity. Evidence of this came just hours after the Supreme Court decision on Friday. Evidence of this comes in a series of opinion pieces and news analyses that came in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision handed down on Friday. For example, in the New York Times on Saturday, Evan Wolfson, one of the most eager advocates for same-sex marriage from the very beginning, wrote an article entitled,
“Gay rights, what comes next?”
Now remember, this is just the day after the Supreme Court decision on Friday. He writes,
“Securing protections from discrimination for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans needs to be our priority.”
Wolfson has identified, even in this article, as the founder and president of a group entitled Freedom to Marry. As he himself has acknowledged, that group has now met its immediate goal, but not his long-range goals. And those long-range goals are no longer long-range. They are now focused on the immediate future. When he writes about securing protections as he says from discrimination for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans, he’s talking about pressing forward, especially at the federal level with something like ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and also going to the Civil Rights Act and including gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered person as protected classes. And make no mistake; those who are pressing for this kind of legislation understand that the religious liberty of millions of Americans is directly at the center of their concern. Wolfson wrote,
“The classic pattern in our history is that when opponents fail to block civil rights gains, they try to subvert them, often abusing the banner of religion. But the American people know that religious freedom is protected in the Constitution and is fully compatible with civil rights.”
But Evan Wolfson makes that statement without acknowledging with any specificity at all how he would respect the religious liberty of Americans who disagree with them on the issue of sexuality and same-sex marriage. But in reality, it’s not just this article we have from Evan Wolfson, we have an entire library of materials he’s written for the past several years and that gives us ample evidence to know that when he writes about religious liberty being enshrined within the U.S. Constitution, he means basically and essentially what New York Times columnist Frank Bruni called,
“The freedom to believe virtually anything on the basis of religion so long as you keep it in your home, your heart or in your congregation.”
No public significance whatsoever. This puts all religious institutions, all Christian colleges, schools, adoption agencies; it puts the entire world of those who are committed to a traditional understanding of marriage on warning that religious liberty is now to be considered a private issue with no public significance. This goes back to the fact that the decision that was handed down on Friday with the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, limited religious freedom as it was even mentioned within the majority opinion to what is taught and advocated by churches. What disappears is the Constitution’s assurance of the free exercise of religion. The free exercise clause is not even mentioned in Justice Kennedy’s opinion. But it’s clear that Wolfson believes and he has every reason to believe this that momentum is on his side. He writes,
“Happily, the freedom to marry will be a gift that keeps on giving.”
Similarly, Sunday’s edition of the New York Times had a front page story by Erik Eckholm entitled,
“Next Fight for Gay Rights: Bias in Jobs and Housing.”
The subhead,
“Focus turns to new protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.”
It basically tells us the very same thing. That the advocates for same-sex marriage are now going to be translating that energy into efforts to achieve in law and mandatory nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. What’s really interesting about this New York Times article is how it acknowledges in its own way the religious liberty implications. Here’s the second paragraph by Eckholm,
“The proposals pit advocates against many of the same religious conservatives who opposed legalizing same-sex marriage, and who now see the protection of what they call religious liberty as their most urgent task.”
Well let’s just pause there for moment. Here you have an expression on the front page of the New York Times in which Eckholm speaks of those who are opposed to same-sex marriage and speaking “what they call religious liberty.” That’s very telling in itself. He goes on to write,
“These opponents argue that antidiscrimination laws will inevitably be used to force religious people and institutions to violate their beliefs, whether by providing services for same-sex weddings or by employing gay men and lesbians in church-related jobs.”
What’s really important about that is that Eckholm raises the issue. He articulates it rather clearly. He doesn’t answer it by saying in any way that it will not happen. But Eckholm’s article takes an even more ominous turn later when he writes,
“What outrages social conservatives is not only the narrow issue of same-sex marriage rights, but also what they see as a violation of religious liberties that they believe are intrinsic to the country.”
Well, here you have religious liberty that is by any historical measure intrinsic to the country. There’s a great deal more to the religious liberty front that will demand our attention.
4) Presentation of tax exemption as government subsidy threatens separation of church and state
But an article that appeared on Sunday at the website of Time magazine is most urgent. It’s by Mark Oppenheimer, the headline is this,
“Now’s the Time to End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions.”
As I said, it turned out it was only a matter of hours after Friday’s decision that this article appears and that it appears with that headline. While the headline is an accurate representation of Mark Oppenheimer’s argument, his argument is actually broader than the headline itself. Oppenheimer writes a biweekly beliefs column for the New York Times. He’s also identified as editor at large for The Tablet, he reports for The Atlantic, The Nation, This American Life and elsewhere. He’s one of the most insightful reporters in the secular media when it comes to religious life in America today and that’s why this article is actually so important. Mark Oppenheimer’s not writing from some kind of secular fringe, he’s writing from the secular mainstream, from the very heart of the mainstream media. The magazines heading under the headline says,
“The Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage makes it clearer than ever that the government shouldn’t be subsidizing religion and non-profits.”
That gets to the larger issue of Mark Oppenheimer’s column. In much of the column, he criticizes the fact that not only religious institutions and churches are given a tax exemption, but also nonprofits in general. But by the time he comes to the end of his article, he’s allowing for exemptions to continue for a number of nonprofits. As he writes,
“I can see keeping some exemptions; hospitals, in particular, are an indispensable, and noncontroversial, public good.”
Let’s just point out that when it comes to many issues of biomedical ethics, Catholic hospitals and abortion for example, hospitals are anything but noncontroversial. But it’s really interesting that even as he’s arguing in general for removing tax exemption from nonprofits and religious institutions, there are a significant number of nonprofits that would continue to be tax exempt under his theory. He even expands it when he writes,
“And localities could always carve out sensible property-tax exceptions for nonprofits their communities need. But it’s time for most nonprofits, like those of us who faithfully cut checks to them, to pay their fair share.”
He actually begins his article by citing Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who introduced what’s called the First Amendment Defense Act. Oppenheimer writes,
“Which ensures that religious institutions won’t lose their tax exemptions if they don’t support same-sex marriage. Liberals tend to think Senator Lee’s fears are unwarranted, and they can even point to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Friday’s case, which promises “that religious organizations and persons [will be] given proper protection.”
But then Oppenheimer writes very honestly,
“But I don’t think Sen. Lee is crazy.”
He goes on to write,
“I’m a gay-rights supporter who was elated by Friday’s Supreme Court decision — but I honor Senator Lee’s fears.”
Then his article takes a very crucial turn. He writes,
“I don’t, however, like his solution. And he’s not going to like mine. Rather than try to rescue tax-exempt status for organizations that dissent from settled public policy on matters of race or sexuality, we need to take a more radical step. It’s time to abolish, or greatly diminish, their tax-exempt statuses.”
Now we need to note really carefully that in that paragraph he says,
“It’s time to abolish, or greatly diminish, their tax-exempt statuses,” organizations he defines as those “that dissent from settled public policy on matters of race or sexuality.”
That’s his argument and then he writes,
“This system of tax exemptions and deductions took shape partly during World War I, when it was feared that the new income tax, with top rates as high as 77%, might choke off charitable giving. But whatever its intentions, today it’s a mess, for several reasons.”
Well, indeed, it is a mess because America’s total tax system is a mess. But even as he’s right, historically to point in 1909, 1913 and 1917, a tax exemption for religious institutions, churches, synagogues and temples in particular, actually goes back to ancient history and in terms of American law; it is directly settled upon precedents that come from England. The first reason Oppenheimer cites for eliminating the exemption is what he says is the difficulty of requiring the IRS to decide what is a religion. Next he goes on to argue that many nonprofits and here he doesn’t limit his case to religious institutions are actually quite wealthy. Oppenheimer writes,
“Defenders of tax exemptions and deductions argues that if we got rid of them charitable giving would drop. It surely would, although how much, we can’t say. But of course government revenue would go up, and that money could be used to, say, house the homeless and feed the hungry. We’d have fewer church soup kitchens — but countries that truly care about poverty don’t rely on churches to run soup kitchens.”
In the next paragraph he writes,
“Exemption advocates also point out that churches would be squeezed out of high-property-value areas. But if it’s important to the people of Fifth Avenue to have a synagogue like Emanu-El or an Episcopal church like St. Thomas in their midst, they should pay full freight for it. They can afford to, more than millions of poorer New Yorkers whose tax bills the synagogue and church exemptions are currently inflating.”
Earlier in the article he says,
“In a real sense, you and I are subsidizing Mormon temples, Muslims mosques, Methodist churches.”
That’s a very important issue. He uses the word subsidizing and that is exactly what the tax exemption is not doing. The key statement on these issues was made by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1970, in the case Walz versus Tax Commission of the City of New York; it was a stunning 8-1 decision. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger made very clear that a tax exemption is not a subsidy that was affirmed by other justices in concurring opinions. A subsidy would be the transfer of tax money to institutions. That’s not what’s going on here that would be a completely separate issue. Rather, the tax exemption is granted with respect to institutions the government does not feel that it has the right to tax on the one hand and on the other hand, institutions that it believes are essential to the Commonwealth and to the commonweal, the well-functioning of society.
One the most basic principles that is deeply embedded in American jurisprudence is the fact that the government cannot do everything. This gets to the fact that mediating institutions including churches, synagogues, temples and other religious institutions fulfill a function the government actually cannot fulfill so well. Again, in his majority opinion Chief Justice Burger wrote,
“The grant of a tax exemption is not sponsorship since the government does not transfer part of its revenue to churches but simply abstains from demanding that the church support the state.”
That is extremely important language. Here Chief Justice Burger was affirming that the most basic fundamental and important reason that the government does not tax churches is that by taxation the church will be required to support the state. Members of synagogues, temples and churches are already taxpaying citizens. It would be a different thing altogether to require the synagogue, the temple or the church actually to fund and support the state. Those who supposedly believe in a separation of church and state have to recognize the dangers inherent in the proposal that the government tax the church. Furthermore, as Justice William Brennan said in that same case in 1970 in a concurring opinion,
“It cannot realistically be said that termination of religious tax exemptions would quantitatively lessen the extent of state involvement with religion.”
He also warns that taxing religious institutions would require investigations “in the church operations and finances.” Chief Justice Burger and Justice Brennan in writing their opinions in this case understood that taxing churches and religious institutions would inevitably put those churches and institutions in the position of funding the government and would put the state in the position of entangling itself in religious organizations and churches. There is so much more to talk about on this issue and we will, but we need to recall the fourth Chief Justice of the United States, the longest-serving chief Justice in American history, Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote famously
“The power to tax involves the power to destroy.”
In a twitter exchange with Mark Oppenheimer on Sunday, he indicated to me that he did not base his argument on the decision that was handed down Friday by the Supreme Court. I take that statement at face value. He does cite the case in the opening paragraph, but whether it was his intention or not, Time magazine ran his article with the headline I quote again in full,
“Now’s the Time to End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions.”
And again the subhead, placed no doubt by an editor at Time magazine who wrote,
“The Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage makes it clearer than ever that the government shouldn’t be subsidizing religion and nonprofits.”
As always, Mark Oppenheimer’s article demands a carefully reasoned response. We better be up to that challenge. But what’s perhaps even more telling is that this article appeared at time.com, with the headline and the subhead the magazine attached, hardly two days after the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Friday. Again it is just a matter of time. We just didn’t know it was this short of a matter of time.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember that on Friday, we issued a special unannounced edition of The Briefing just on Friday’s Supreme Court decision. For information, go to my website AlbertMohler.com where you will find a major article I posted late on Friday entitled, “Everything Has Changed and Nothing Has Changed — The Supreme Court Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage.”
You can also follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
The Briefing 06-29-15
1) Ending of New York prison break reminder sin is never as beautiful as it promises
David Sweat shot and captured alive after New York manhunt, CNN (Deborah Feyerick, Alexandra Field and Dana Ford)
2) Outrage directed at social conservatives, not terrorist attacks, exposes priorities
Terrorist Attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait Kill Dozens, New York Times (Ben Hubbard)
Love Among the Ruins, Wall Street Journal (Bari Weiss)
3) Religious liberty immediately denigrated, questioned following Supreme Court decision
What’s Next in the Fight for Gay Equality, New York Times (Evan Wolfson)
Next Fight for Gay Rights: Bias in Jobs and Housing, New York Times (Erik Eckholm)
4) Presentation of tax exemption as government subsidy threatens separation of church and state
Now’s the Time To End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions, TIME (Mark Oppenheimer)
June 26, 2015
Everything Has Changed and Nothing Has Changed — The Supreme Court Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage
Everything has changed and nothing has changed. The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday is a central assault upon marriage as the conjugal union of a man and a woman and in a five to four decision the nation’s highest court has now imposed its mandate redefining marriage on all fifty states.
As Chief Justice Roberts said in his dissent, “The majority’s decision is an act of will, not a legal judgment.”
The majority’s argument, expressed by Justice Kennedy, is that the right of same-sex couples to marry is based in individual autonomy as related to sexuality, in marriage as a fundamental right, in marriage as a privileged context for raising children, and in upholding marriage as central to civilization. But at every one of these points, the majority had to reinvent marriage in order to make its case. The Court has not merely ordered that same-sex couples be allowed to marry – it has fundamentally redefined marriage itself.
The inventive legal argument set forth by the majority is clearly traceable in Justice Kennedy’s previous decisions including Lawrence (2003) and Windsor (2013), and he cites his own decisions as legal precedent. As the Chief Justice makes clear, Justice Kennedy and his fellow justices in the majority wanted to legalize same-sex marriage and they invented a constitutional theory to achieve their purpose. It was indeed an act of will disguised as a legal judgment.
Justice Kennedy declared that “the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex cannot be deprived of that right and that liberty.” But marriage is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. As the Chief Justice asserted in his dissent, the majority opinion did not really make any serious constitutional argument at all. It was, as the Chief Justice insisted, an argument based in philosophy rather than in law.
The Supreme Court’s over-reach in this case is more astounding as the decision is reviewed in full, and as the dissenting justices voiced their own urgent concerns. The Chief Justice accused the majority of “judicial policymaking” that endangers our democratic form of government. “The Court today not only overlooks our country’s entire history and tradition but actively repudiates it, preferring to live only in the heady days of the here and now,” he asserted. Further: “Over and over, the majority exalts the role of the judiciary in delivering social change.”
“The majority,” he made clear, “lays out a tantalizing vision for the future for Members of this Court. If an unvarying social institution enduring over all of recorded history cannot inhibit judicial policymaking, what can?”
That is a haunting question. This Chief Justice’s point is an urgent warning: If the Supreme Court will arrogate to itself the right to redefine marriage, there is no restraint on the judiciary whatsoever.
Justice Antonin Scalia offered a stinging rebuke to the majority. “This is a naked judicial claim to legislative–indeed super-legislative–power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government,” he stated. Justice Scalia then offered these stunning words of judgment: “A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”
The Chief Justice also pointed to another very telling aspect of the majority opinion. The Kennedy opinion opens wide a door that basically invites looming demands for the legalization of polygamy and polyamory. As Chief Justice Roberts observed: “It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.” Striking, indeed. What is perhaps even more striking is that the majority did not even appear concerned about the extension of its logic to polygamy.
As the decision approached, those of us who have warned that the redefinition of marriage will not stop with same-sex unions were told that we were offering a fallacious slippery-slope argument. Now, the Chief Justice of the United States verifies that these concerns were fully valid. You can count on the fact that advocates for legalized polygamy found great encouragement in this decision.
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the land, and its decisions cannot be appealed to a higher court of law. But the Supreme Court, like every human institution and individual, will eventually face two higher courts. The first is the court of history, which will render a judgment that I believe will embarrass this court and reveal its dangerous trajectory. The precedents and arguments set forth in this decision cannot be limited to the right of same-sex couples to marry. If individual autonomy and equal protection mean that same-sex couples cannot be denied what is now defined as a fundamental right of marriage, then others will arrive to make the same argument. This Court will find itself in a trap of its own making, and one that will bring great harm to this nation and its families. The second court we all must face is the court of divine judgment. For centuries, marriage ceremonies in the English-speaking world have included the admonition that what God has put together, no human being – or human court – should tear asunder. That is exactly what the Supreme Court of the United States has now done.
The threat to religious liberty represented by this decision is clear, present, and inevitable. Assurances to the contrary, the majority in this decision has placed every religious institution in legal jeopardy if that institution intends to uphold its theological convictions limiting marriage to the union of a man and a woman. This threat is extended to every religious citizen or congregation that would uphold the convictions held by believers for millennia. Justice Clarence Thomas warned in his dissent of “ruinous consequences for religious liberty.”
One of the most dangerous dimensions of this decision is evident in what can only be described as the majority’s vilification of those who hold to a traditional view of marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman. Justice Samuel Alito stated bluntly that the decision “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” According to the argument offered by the majority, any opposition to same-sex marriage is rooted in moral animus against homosexuals. In offering this argument the majority slanders any defender of traditional marriage and openly rejects and vilifies those who, on the grounds of theological conviction, cannot affirm same-sex marriage.
In a very real sense, everything has now changed. The highest court of the land has redefined marriage. Those who cannot accept this redefinition of marriage as a matter of morality and ultimate truth, must acknowledge that the laws of this nation concerning marriage will indeed be defined against our will. We must acknowledge the authority of the Supreme Court in matters of law. Christians must be committed to be good citizens and good neighbors, even as we cannot accept this redefinition of marriage in our churches and in our lives.
We must contend for marriage as God’s gift to humanity – a gift central and essential to human flourishing and a gift that is limited to the conjugal union of a man and a woman. We must contend for religious liberty for all, and focus our energies on protecting the rights of Christian citizens and Christian institutions to teach and operate on the basis of Christian conviction.
We cannot be silent, and we cannot join the moral revolution that stands in direct opposition to what we believe the Creator has designed, given, and intended for us. We cannot be silent, and we cannot fail to contend for marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
In one sense, everything has changed. And yet, nothing has changed. The cultural and legal landscape has changed, as we believe this will lead to very real harms to our neighbors. But our Christian responsibility has not changed. We are charged to uphold marriage as the union of a man and a woman and to speak the truth in love. We are also commanded to uphold the truth about marriage in our own lives, in our own marriages, in our own families, and in our own churches.
We are called to be the people of the truth, even when the truth is not popular and even when the truth is denied by the culture around us. Christians have found themselves in this position before, and we will again. God’s truth has not changed. The Holy Scriptures have not changed. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has not changed. The church’s mission has not changed. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.
I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler.
The Briefing Special Edition: Supreme Court Ruling on Same Sex Marriage
1) Supreme Court affirms gay marriage as constitutional right, disregards democratic process
Obergefell, et. al., v Hodges, et. al., Supreme Court
Transcript: Obama’s remarks on Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, Washington Post (Pres. Barack Obama)
#LoveWins: Show Your Support for Marriage Equality Everywhere, White House
Our Weddings, Our Worth, New York Times (Frank Bruni)
The Supremes got it right – It’s no longer ‘gay marriage.’ It’s ‘marriage.’ And we’re better for it: Editorial, PennLive (Editorial Board)
Transcript: The Briefing 06-26-15
The Briefing
June 26, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Friday, June 26, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Supreme Court affirms Obamacare, exposing serious responsibility of interpreting texts
Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States handed down one of the most anticipated decisions of this term, not the even more anticipated decision on same-sex marriage. This decision handed down yesterday has to do with the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. In a 6-3 decision, the court allowed the Affordable Care Act to stand basically as written. What didn’t happen in this case is the bigger news. What didn’t happen is that the Supreme Court didn’t strike down the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional and that is the huge story here. Basically this doesn’t change much. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
From a Christian worldview perspective, the most important issue in this case is what it reveals about differences among Americans and even among the justices of the Supreme Court, in this case most particularly on how a text is to be interpreted and that’s of crucial importance when the text in this case is the Constitution of the United States. In the legislation, now known as the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress in 2010, that we need to note passed without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. In that act we find the phrase,
“An exchange established by the state.”
That portion of the law has to do with how Congress authorized the spending of tax money to subsidize individual Americans buying healthcare insurance and the law clearly stated that the subsidies were to be available when a state had established a so-called exchange as defined by the law. But in the case of states that did not establish those exchanges, the federal government was still extending the same subsidy by means of a national exchange. The case was brought against the Obamacare legislation and against the United States government by several people, including some attorneys general in the states who accused the government of acting outside the limitations of the law that Congress had adopted and that the president, in this case President Obama, had signed into law. Again, that was back in 2010. The incontrovertible fact is that the law signed by President Obama and adopted by Congress was a law that included the fact that the subsidies were to be made available to individuals when and only when as the law says an exchange was established by the state. So the question before the Supreme Court of United States is whether or not in the first place, the United States government was acting outside the boundaries of those words.
The clear and unavoidable truth in this case acknowledged by both sides in terms of the argument is that the federal government is acting outside of those specific words found in the legislation. In writing the majority opinion for the court, the Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said,
“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them.”
The Chief Justice acknowledged the problem with the words, but he said that it was the responsibility of the court to try to determine what Congress’s intention was in passing the law and uphold that intention. In a very revealing sentence the Chief Justice said,
“In this instance,” he wrote, “the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”
So here you have the supposedly conservative Chief Justice of the United States saying that there are times when the words have to be ignored in order to get to the intention of Congress. In this case, for the second time the Chief Justice of the United States basically rescued the Obamacare legislation from a constitutional crisis. He did so in the Sebelius case in 2012, he did so again in 2015. In 2012, the Chief joined the majority and wrote the opinion and what he did then was to rescue the Obamacare legislation from the fact that the President of the United States had argued specifically that it was not a tax. And Congress adopted the legislation; while also insisting this is not a tax. But then it left the open question on what constitutional authority did Congress and the government then act to intervene in this way in the American economy? To rescue the Affordable Care Act in 2012, the Chief Justice argued that it was allowable under Congress’s power in the Constitution to tax. So you had the President and Congress saying isn’t a tax, but if it wasn’t a tax it was unconstitutional. The Chief Justice of the United States for the majority back in 2012 rescued the law by saying it is a tax after all, regardless of what the president and Congress said. That was very controversial at the time, but it basically means that the Chief Justice and a majority of his colleagues had decided that they would rescue the law and find a way to do so.
That’s basically what happened again yesterday and that’s why this is actually so important. It’s more important than the Affordable Care Act, it’s more important than any single piece of legislation. Because what you have in the 6-3 split on the United States Supreme Court yesterday is at least two dramatically different ways of reading a text. Reading the text of the legislation and reading the text of the Constitution. Both sides agreed that the government is acting in violation or at least outside the authorization of the law that was adopted in 2010, but it was clear that the majority was willing to separate from the words in order to associate with the intention of the legislation. But in so doing, they also cited the fact that it would’ve led to effects they didn’t want to see. They didn’t want to see millions of people eliminated from the tax subsidy. So what we’re seeing here is what might be called an outcome based understanding of the law. You decide what outcome is appropriate and then you find the legal argument that will support it. That’s not supposed to be the way the Supreme Court of the United States works, but it’s worked that way now for a very long time.
Once again in a scathing dissent, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said of his colleagues in the majority that the ruling was quite absurd. He called it,
“Interpretive jiggery-pokery.”
In this case, Scalia said, the problem with these words is that they mean what they say and they were intended to mean just that. Scalia pointed out that Congress had the opportunity to write the law differently but Congress wrote the law this way. This is the law the President of the United States signed into effect. These are the words, said Justice Scalia, that didn’t matter. This is not some kind of typographical error; indeed it was an error in the law. An error that the administration tried to fix by its own bureaucratic action and an error that requires the law as it is written to be disregarded in favor of the law as those who now support it want it to be.
Now when it comes to this great divide over worldview one of the major proponents for that more liberal interpretation of a text come from, for instance, the editorial board of the New York Times. In their editorial response to the decision yesterday the editors of the New York Times said that it was ridiculous,
“That an ambiguous four-word phrase buried deep in the 900-page law eliminates health insurance for millions of lower-income Americans — was preposterous.”
Now the most interesting aspect of that sentence in this editorial is this – they’re not actually talking about the words of the law at all. They’re talking about what they would see as a negative effect had the decision gone otherwise. Now one footnote to this is the reason why the Supreme Court decision was so important. It’s because the obvious question is this, why wouldn’t Congress and the president fix the law if the law needs to be fixed? And the answer is they could not now get a majority in Congress to fix the law. So what they were looking at is the necessity of being rescued from the law by the Supreme Court of the United States and that’s exactly what did happen. Christians have a particular urgency in understanding why the interpretation of a text is so important. Let’s just take this law or let’s go even beyond it to the Constitution of the United States. Are we to be bound by the words of the Constitution? Well the reality is simply this; if we are not bound to those words then we’re really not bound at all. The Constitution is no longer the governing document of the country, rather the governing power is how nine justices of the Supreme Court, or least a majority of those justices, will interpret the Constitution at any given time. The Constitution then becomes just a document that has some historical meaning but we’re no longer bound to that historical meaning. We’re not even bound to the specific words.
Now it’s one thing when we’re talking about legislation, it’s another more important issue when we’re talking about the Constitution of the United States. But we have to recognize that we as Christians understand the ultimate question in interpreting a text is how we interpret and read the Bible, how we understand Holy Scripture. And when it comes to development such as the moral revolution we’re now experiencing, note how many on the theological left are now saying we don’t have to be bound by the words of Scripture. We can find some inner intention, some trajectory of argument and we can claim that if the apostle Paul were writing now he would agree with us. The ultimate problem with that of course is that our ultimate authority isn’t the apostle Paul, it is the Scripture. It is the Holy Spirit who inspired Paul to write those letters. And as is true of Paul’s letters and for every other word of Scripture, it is exactly what the Holy Spirit intended us not just to have in the past but to have in the present.
Our entire worldview is revealed by how we understand the responsibility of interpreting a text. The key issue for Christians always comes down to this, is the Bible actually God’s word? If it is, and it is, then we are bound to the actual words. What Justice Scalia called “interpretive jiggery-pokery” isn’t limited to the Supreme Court; it’s not limited to constitutional law. To a far greater and more tragic extent, it’s found among some liberal theologians as well. Oddly enough, the Supreme Court of United States handed us that lesson once again yesterday. It’s a lesson we dare not miss.
2) Right to die for depressed clear consequence of secular humanist movement in Belgium
Next, another issue that’s right at the heart of the Christian worldview and its intersection with contemporary culture, the issue of euthanasia continues to be a developing issue before us and in the most frightening and horrifying way. Now we have an article in The New Yorker, one of the most important secular magazines in America entitled,
“The Death Treatment”
It’s by Rachel Aviv, she asked the question,
“When should people with a non-terminal illness be helped to die?”
Her article originates from Belgium where the movement for assisted suicide and then doctor assisted suicide and then euthanasia has developed to the point that even children and teenagers are now considered to be candidates for euthanasia. We talked a few days ago about a similar development in the Netherlands, but this story is datelined from Belgium and it is a most ominous story indeed. Aviv tells us that it is increasingly common there where people who do not have a terminal disease at all to ask for and to receive euthanasia. They are killed by the action of a physician simply because they have decided that now is the time they want to die. As Aviv points out, this is now reaching even the cases in which there is an underlying psychiatric problem not a physical problem at all. When she asked the question, “when should people with a non-terminal illness be helped to die?”, we need to note that in asking the question she has already seemed to accept the fact that there would be some point and there would be some people who should be helped to die.
But one of the fundamental affirmations of the Christian worldview is that we have no right even to ask the question in that way. When we ask when, we are accepting the fact that at some point, it would be acceptable. The Christian worldview tells us that it is an act of creaturely overreach to determine that we will decide when we will die. The Christian worldview points out, we don’t decide to be born, that life is God’s gift and that every single human life is precious from the moment of conception until natural death. To demand control over the timing of our death in this way is actually an act of human hubris. It is an act of human arrogance and overreach and as we have seen once you bind to this logic, you can say you’re going to keep it at some point in society where it would be available only to those who have a supposedly terminal diagnosis and are the end stages of disease.
But as this article in The New Yorker makes clear, even a secular society is asking some basic questions about a country that seems to be so determined to support euthanasia that it is now extending a so-called right of euthanasia to those who have no physical ailment at all, who are merely suffering from something like depression. Every single line in this essay demands and deserves our attention. But for the sake of time I’m going to focus on the most remarkable section of the essay. It’s the section of this essay published in a very influential secular magazine that points to the fact that there is a basic theological issue that is at stake here. Aviv writes and I quote,
“The right to a dignified death is viewed as an accomplishment of secular humanism, one of seven belief systems that are officially recognized by the government. Belgian humanism, which was deeply influenced by the nineteenth-century Freemasonry movement, offered an outlet for those who felt oppressed by the Church, but it has increasingly come to resemble the kind of institution that it once defined itself against. Since 1981, the Belgian government has paid for “humanist counsellors,” the secular equivalent of clergy, to provide moral guidance in hospitals, prisons, and the armed forces. Humanist values are also taught in state schools, in a course called non-confessional ethics, which is taken by secular children from first through twelfth grade, while religious students pursue theological studies. The course emphasizes autonomy, free inquiry, democracy, and an ethics based on reason and science, not on revelation.”
Now to be honest, when I read this article I could hardly believe my eyes. That sentence sounds almost as if it were written by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970s, a major Christian apologist who defined where secular humanism was going and now almost as if Schaeffer’s prophecy has come true, here you have that paragraph in this week’s edition of The New Yorker and it goes on. Aviv cites Jan Bernheim, an emeritus professor of medicine at the Free University of Brussels, who is a specialist in ethics and the quality of life. He told her that euthanasia,
“Part of a philosophy of taking control of one’s own existence and improving the objective conditions for happiness. There is an arrow of evolution that goes toward ever more reducing of suffering and maximizing of enjoyment.”
That is an absolutely stunning statement. Here you have a professor of ethics in an institution that was once committed to the Christian worldview, in which he says that there is an evolution of ethics that is towards enjoyment and life as defined we then understand by enjoyment in which suffering is to be minimized and eventually to be denied to the point of ending one’s life rather than facing the reality of suffering. As we note, we’re not just talking here about the suffering that might come in terms of intractable terminal disease, we’re talking about the suffering that might just be as this article frankly makes clear, coming short of what one defines as happiness.
But what’s more important than anything else in this article and it’s a very long and extremely significant article is how Rachel Aviv gets to the point that worldview is the ultimate issue. The ethic of euthanasia could only have emerged and did emerge in a secular humanist revival that took place in that country. In exchange of the Christian worldview, which would uphold the dignity of every single human life and God’s authority over our circumstances of life to a worldview that says that human beings are autonomous free agents, we can decide the qualities of our own life that are acceptable. And if we do not have a life that meets our acceptable qualities we can ask and demand that a physician end our life. But even as we had noted that the California State Senate just days ago moved forward with an assisted suicide bill, perhaps the most frightening question for us is just how long it will take for this logic in its full force to find its own momentum on American soil, and in American minds, in American hearts.
3) International Yoga Day inaugurated in effort to make clear Indian, Hindu roots of Yoga
Next, when it comes to worldview and the intersection of worldview and culture. One of the key issues actually is yoga. Very interesting development not here in the United States but in India, where just a matter of days ago the Prime Minister of India made a very important point by declaring international yoga day and getting it acknowledged by the United Nations. That’s not so important as the fact that his purpose in doing so was very explicitly according to his own words,
“To recapture yoga for its Indian and essentially Hindu roots and to take it away from the marketplace of Western consumerism.”
The international media reporting on the first international day of yoga pointed out that history is very clear. Yoga began as a Hindu religious practice that was an outgrowth of Hindu doctrine and of the Hindu worldview, a polytheistic worldview that is to say the very least directly at odds with the monotheism of biblical religion and Christianity in particular. Now a similar controversy on yoga emerged some years ago and I was quite clear in articles I wrote at the time, that the Orthodox biblical understanding of Christianity simply doesn’t allow for the syncretism of Hindu religious practice. I also point to the fact that even those who brought yoga to the United States were very, very clear that it was a Hindu religious practice and that the very motions and especially the meditations involved in yoga were tied to essential teachings of the Hindu faith.
Now what was interesting to me at the time is that what I was articulating then was the position that the vast majority of Christians around the world had understood to be patently true, but given the fact that American consumer culture has adopted yoga in so many ways. There were many Americans, including many American Christians who were shocked; absolutely shocked that Hinduism had anything to do with yoga whatsoever. But in The Economist this week, there was an article entitled,
“How far can you stretch?”
The subtitle,
“Christianity, Islam and yoga.”
And in this article, published by a magazine with no theological axe to grind whatsoever, it points out the fact that yoga has been very controversial from the very intersection of yoga with Western Christianity from the very beginning. The Economist writes,
“In Western nations which are historically Christian but increasingly diverse in their approach to things spiritual, the very ambivalence of yoga (call it flexibility if you like) is one of its selling points. Depending on which school of yoga you follow and how far you go, it can be a way of limbering up the body and easing tensions, or it can involve the pursuit of extra-ordinary spiritual experiences, culminating in samadhi, variously described as union with, or absorption into, ultimate reality. It is agreed that yoga has its roots in the Hindu tradition and that it constitutes one of the main schools of Hinduism; but it can of course be practiced as a physical and even mental discipline by people who are ignorant of, or even mildly resistant to the teachings of Hinduism.”
That’s an amazingly accurate sentence. It is actually probably more accurate than the author of the sentence even understood. Going back to what was written here it says, there’s no major problem for many people being involved in yoga so long as those people,
“Are ignorant of,” or listen, “even mildly resistant to the teachings of Hinduism.”
That’s a direct quote from the article and that’s again, very accurate. So long as one is only mildly resistant to the teachings of Hinduism, there is no problem. But that raises the question, how can a Christian committed to the knowledge of the one true and living God be just mildly resistant to Hinduism that has so many thousands of gods, they can’t even offer an official count of the number of deities in the Hindu religion? The article acknowledges that the Catholic Church has distanced itself from yoga and it points to the fact that just a matter of days ago the Greek Orthodox Church condemned it as incompatible with its own theology. The article then turns to evangelical Christians and cites me saying that I have warned Christians,
“To stay away from stretches.”
Actually, my problem is not with Christians stretching their bodies. My problem is with Christians who are stretching Christian theology beyond the breaking point. The Economist writes,
“In his attack on yoga, Mr. Mohler described India as “almost manically syncretistic” in other words, prone to the mixing of religious ideas.”
The Economist then concludes,
“But the fact is that most Western societies, insofar as they think about religion at all, are pretty syncretistic too. That puts traditional Christian or Muslim leaders on the back foot when they try to argue against the asanas.”
Now let’s remind ourselves that syncretism in this context means the mixing of religions and the mixing of theologies, and The Economist is undoubtedly right, that’s exactly what’s going on in secular Western societies. But it’s exactly what must not go on in Christian churches and it must go on in the lives of Christians. Once again here, the problem from a Christian worldview perspective of yoga isn’t in the stretching of the body. It is the acceptance of the larger Hindu worldview that says, by the stretching of the body and by the meditation that can go on with those exercises one can achieve a new spiritual state. The God who said, thou shall have no other gods before me is a God who profoundly excluded syncretism from faithfulness.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.
I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.
The Briefing 06-26-15
1) Supreme Court affirms Obamacare, exposing serious responsibility of interpreting texts
Supreme Court Allows Nationwide Health Care Subsidies, New York Times (Adam Liptak)
The Supreme Court Saves Obamacare, Again, New York Times (Editorial Board)
King et al. v. Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al., Supreme Court
2) Right to die for depressed clear consequence of secular humanist movement in Belgium
The Death Treatment, The New Yorker (Rachel Aviv)
3) International Yoga Day inaugurated in effort to make clear Indian, Hindu roots of Yoga
How far can you stretch?, The Economist
June 25, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 06-25-15
The Briefing
June 25, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Thursday, June 25, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Tsarnaev sentencing stark example of difference between mercy in Christianity and Islam
Once again, an American courtroom became the scene for a major moral drama and one that demands that we look at it closely. And once again, the city was Boston, and again the man at the center was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now convicted of 30 counts including several capital counts of murder for his involvement with his late brother in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. What happened yesterday in Boston was that for the first time Dzhokhar Tsarnaev spoke and it came as his sentence was announced by the judge in the same court room. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said,
“I would like to apologize to the victims and the survivors,” he said. “I did do it”
Later he said,
“I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering that I’ve caused you, for damage that I’ve done.”
He went on also to address the court by saying,
“I am Muslim. My religion is Islam. I pray to Allah to bestow his mercy on those affected in the bombing and their families. I pray for your healing. I ask Allah to have mercy on me, my brother and my family,” he said.
At the end of the hearing, U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Junior looked at Tsarnaev and said,
“I sentence you to the penalty of death by execution.”
Time and again we have found ourselves looking very recently at these moral dramas being played out before our eyes in the nation’s court rooms. What we’re looking at here is a moral drama in which the issues of guilt and innocence of right and wrong are unavoidable. Even in a society that has increasingly decided on a whole host of moral issues to embrace a certain relativism, you’ll notice the absolute lack of moral relativism in that courtroom in Boston and the reason for that is quite straightforward, no one can look at these premeditated murders, the murders that took place along with the grievous wounding of so many in the Boston Marathon, the deliberate murder of a Boston police officer in the days afterwards. So what we’re looking at here is an evidence of moral evil that simply doesn’t allow any sane person to find any kind of refuge in a kind of moral relativism. The announcement of the death penalty yesterday was not a surprise, a federal jury had already found that he was guilty of the crimes and in a separate phase had sentenced him to death. But the official declaration of that sentence is what took place in that Boston federal courtroom yesterday and the sentencing of death by the federal judge was a formal declaration of how the society through its own legal mechanisms had afforded this defendant every right of a legal defense and yet found him guilty.
Of course, we also know that in the course of the trial his own attorney on the very first opportunity pointed to his own defendant and said he did it and then Dzhokhar Tsarnaev yesterday said I did it. To use the exact expression, he said “I did do it.” In recent days and in other court rooms most particularly in Charleston, South Carolina, we have confronted some of the most basic Christian questions of forgiveness and in the case of what took place in Boston yesterday there was a marked distinction in terms of the response that was given to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for those who were the loved ones of those who were his victims.
As the Boston Globe reported yesterday afternoon, Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of eight-year-old Martin Richard who was the youngest victim of the blast denounced Tsarnaev in court for choosing to help his brother Tamerlan wage the attack, which as the Boston Globe says not only killed Martin but inflicted grievous injuries on the rest of the family. The parent said in their statement,
“His attorneys told us the truth of what we already knew. He was guilty. He could have stopped his brother, he could’ve walked away.”
The Richards also pointed to the fact that what we are looking at here is not just the planting of these bombs with the intention to murder and to maim, we’re also looking at the fact that days later, these same two brothers murdered an MIT police officer, a man by the name of Sean Collier, he was murdered in cold blood days after the bombing as the brothers were seeking to evade the police. In an expression of moral clarity, the parents of the dead eight-year-old boy looked to his killer and spoke of him saying,
“He chose to do nothing to prevent all this from happening. He chose hate. He chose destruction. He chose death.”
Jean Rogers, the sister of the murdered MIT police officer said of Tsarnaev,
“He ran his own brother over with a car; he had no issues shooting mine in the head. He spit in the face of the American dream. He is a coward and a liar.”
Now let me go back to the statement that was made by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as he spoke for the first time in any meaningful way in the courtroom in which he was sentenced to death. You’ll recall his words were,
“I would like to apologize to the victims and the survivors. I did do it. I am sorry for the lies I have taken, for the suffering I have caused and for the terrible damage I have done.”
Now we can look at those words and certainly they are morally significant. Here you do have Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to some extent taking some responsibility for what he did. But you’ll notice he spoke in no detail of the rather detailed murders he had undertaken with his brother. He did not speak in terms of taking full moral responsibility. The word apologize here is a very weak moral word. He did not ask for the forgiveness of those who were the loved ones and relatives of those he maimed and murdered. It’s also very, very important for Christians looking at this statement to understand the extension of what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had to say. He said,
“I am Muslim. My religion is Islam. I pray to Allah to bestow his mercy on those affected in the bombing and their families. I pray for your healing.” He then went on, “I ask Allah to have mercy on me, my brother and my family.”
Now Christians looking at that need to remember that there is a massive theological chasm between Christianity and Islam on this very issue. One of the central understandings of Christianity as taught by Christ and revealed in the New Testament is that we have the assurance of the forgiveness of sins that is based upon the atonement that was accomplished by Jesus Christ in his death, burial and resurrection. As a matter of fact, in the New Testament John reminds us if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. You’ll notice that that is a divine promise of the extension of mercy and forgiveness to those who confess their sins and of course that letter was written to Christians. Those who find their identity in Christ, who have confessed Christ as Savior and have repented of their sins, we are promised that if we do confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. These things are written says the New Testament, in order that we may know that we have the gift of everlasting life.
But in contrast and this is central for our Christian understanding, the Muslim understanding of Allah does not promise any mercy or any forgiveness to any specific person. That is very, very important for us to understand. Here Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is praying as an informed Muslim, he is asking that Allah will have mercy on the loved ones of those whom he has killed and hurt and that God will have mercy on himself and his brother and his family. That is a very characteristic Muslim prayer. But there is no doctrine of atonement in Islam, there is no understanding of the personality of God, of his moral character in which he will extend mercy to any sinner at any specific time. In contrast, according to Muslim theology Allah is a force of sheer will. He is not obligated to extend mercy or forgiveness to anyone, at any time, under any circumstances. As he wills, he wills. So as we see that moral drama that was played out in that Boston courtroom yesterday, it was also a theological drama and it’s very important that Christians understanding the gospel of Jesus Christ understand the difference, the difference that was displayed in that courtroom yesterday.
2) Time limit on religious liberty for education institutions evident cause of culture shift
While we’re talking about court rooms next, as we know, the big decision still remaining before the United States Supreme court are to be handed down today, tomorrow or Monday or Tuesday of next week at the latest. These include decisions related to ObamaCare and most centrally and certainly central to our concern, the looming decision of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Late yesterday, the New York Times moved a story by Laurie Goodstein and Adam Liptak entitled,
“Schools Fear Gay Marriage Ruling Could End Tax Exemptions.”
This gets right to the heart of what we’ve been discussing on this program and I’ve written about in terms of the threat to religious liberty. It will be represented by a decision that legalizes same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Something very important we need to notice here, we who have been talking about this for some time had been told repeatedly from the secular left that it is alarmism to raise these issues. But now you have the New York Times raising the very issue with the very same arguments coming just days, perhaps even hours before the Supreme Court rules. Goodstein and Liptak write,
“Conservative religious schools all over the country forbid same-sex relationships, from dating to couples’ living in married-student housing, and they fear they will soon be forced to make a wrenching choice.”
Here is exactly how these two reporters phrase that choice,
“If the Supreme Court this month finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the schools say they will have to abandon their policies that prohibit gay relationships or eventually risk losing their tax-exempt status.”
Well, indeed, that’s what we have been saying for a matter of not just weeks and months, but years now. But as the decision looms before us, these issues are becoming far more acute and we need to remember that back in April when oral arguments were held in this case before the very court, the Supreme Court of United States, one associate justice, Samuel Alito and the Chief Justice of the United States, John G Roberts Jr., both address these very issues as they were asking questions of the attorneys pressing for the legalization of same-sex marriage.
In the most important of these exchanges the Chief Justice turned to the solicitor general of the United States, representing the Obama Administration for same-sex marriage in that court, the Chief Justice asking pointedly if a religious institution tries to operate by its religious principles in terms of married student housing will they be forced to choose between their tax-exempt status and that married student housing on their convictions? And you’ll recall the solicitor general said it will be an issue. The reporters for the New York Times yesterday get to the other issues that are involved,
“Married housing is one concern identified in the letter. Dating policies prohibiting same-sex contact are another, along with questions about whether religious institutions would have to extend benefits to same-sex spouses of employees.”
This article is pointing to a letter signed by 70 Christian college, university and seminary presidents, I am among them, registering these very concerns about the impact of this kind of decision on the religious liberty of our own institutions. To put the matter bluntly, the liberty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to reflect and operate by and to teach the convictions of Southern Baptist Churches drawn from Scripture in agreement with the church and its definition of marriage throughout thousands of years. That is exactly what is at stake.
You recall as I said, the solicitor general of the United States said in response to the Chief Justice, it will be an issue. The New York Times quotes Douglas Laycock, a very respected law Professor at the University of Virginia who said the solicitor general’s response to Justice Alito was ill considered,
“Church leaders are worried about this because there is a certain obvious logic to Justice Alito’s question.”
Well, of course there. But then the reporters write this,
“He”, meaning Mr. Laycock, “added that it was unimaginable that any administration of either party would try to deny a tax exemption anytime soon to a religious institution based on its views on homosexuality. “When gay rights looks like race does today, where you have a handful of crackpots still resisting,” he said, “you might see an administration picking a fight.”
Well that’s extremely revealing, far more revealing than Professor Laycock certainly understood or intended himself to be. First of all he says here that no administration of either party would politically pay the price of denying a tax exemption, then look at the words “anytime soon.” Those words “anytime soon” are extremely important. How soon is anytime soon? How long does anytime soon last? Given the moral revolution we’re experiencing, I can imagine anytime soon might expire before this year does, before it reaches the month of December.
Another law professor, this one Richard Garnett at the University of Notre Dame’s Law School, said that sort of analysis doesn’t do much. That is, Professor Laycock’s analysis doesn’t do much to calm religious schools concerns. Professor Garnett said,
“Although many people insist that this will not happen,” he said, “they tend to rely on political predictions — which are probably accurate, in the short term — and not on in-principle arguments or distinctions.”
Well, notice again. Here you have another law professor saying this probably isn’t going to happen “in the short term.” Again, I ask how long is the short term? Or how short is the short term? In the final analysis, these words of assurance from these two law professors turn out to be anything but. They turn out to be an announcement that there is a time limit on religious liberty for Christian institutions. They will not bend the knee to Caesar on this issue and at least some secular observers get it. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles, is one of the most respected constitutional scholars in this country, said that religious schools are concerned for good reason. He said,
“If I were a conservative Christian (which I most certainly am not),” he added, “I would be very reasonably fearful, not just as to tax exemptions but as to a wide range of other programs — fearful that within a generation or so, my religious beliefs would be treated the same way as racist religious beliefs are.”
That is the logic we are seeing. But my response to Professor Volokh is this; it will not take a generation, not even close. I don’t even think it will take a decade. I don’t think will take a half a decade. There is every realistic expectation that those who are pushing this revolution will push it fast and faster still. As a matter of fact, many of the legal architects of these arguments have been telling us all along that this is precisely what they will do. I’m going to keep this article on file and I’m going to keep it close at hand, just to remind those who wrote it and those who are quoted in the article of just how short the short-term turns out to be.
3) Marijuana stigma declines as actual danger of marijuana consumption increases
Next, we need to talk for a moment about how societies work and how moral issues begin to shape or to reshape a society. Every single society includes a moral judgment that is rightly described as stigma. Every society decides that certain acts, certain behaviors are outside the bounds and if they are outside the bounds, then they are stigmatized. To do such a thing is to bring about the moral judgment, the negative moral judgment of the society. It’s easy to look around us and see some of the things that society stigmatizes right now. Just to take one obvious example, society stigmatizes any abuse of an animal or a child and rightly so. And that is the kind of stigma that is required for a society to operate on any kind of consistent or sane moral principles. You can’t have a culture; you certainly can’t have a civilization without an understanding of what kind behaviors are to be stigmatized. What kind of behaviors are to bring a negative moral judgment as a consensus of the entire society?
But one of the things we need to note is that in this great moral revolution we are experiencing, one of the shifts is a shift in stigma and is not only related to sexual behaviors and romantic issues, it’s also related to the issue of marijuana. That’s an issue that came quite clearly to the fore, in an article in the Los Angeles Times written by William J. Bennett and Seth Leibsohn. Williams J. Bennett is the former United States Secretary of Education and he was the first drug Czar, the first director of national drug policy in the United States. Leibsohn is chairman of Arizonans for responsible drug policy. Secretary Bennett served as Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush appointed in the nation’s first national drug control officer, the so-called drug czar. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Bennett writing along with Leibsohn gets right to the question of stigma. He says this,
“Twenty years ago, drug dealers were seen for what they were — criminal and dangerous elements in our society. People who sold marijuana were considered losers, in the business of harming our children. Parents warned their kids to stay away from those known to use drugs.
“But thanks to the marijuana lobby, what was once scorned is hyped and celebrated — even as the drug has become more potent, with THC, the intoxicating chemical, present at much higher levels than in the 1990s. Dealers run state-sanctioned dispensaries, lobby to further legalize their product and receive positive media coverage when doing so. The dangers have gone up and the stigma has gone down.”
That is a very, very interesting moral statement. That’s one of those statements that leads us to think for a moment. How is it that in a sane society you can have the moral danger go up at the same time that the stigma goes down? Bennett and Leibsohn point back that if you go back a generation there is bipartisan support for intentionally stigmatizing drug use, in this case including marijuana. As a matter of fact, marijuana has been well-documented as the so-called entry drug, whereby people who go on to even more dangerous drugs will trace their original use of drugs back to marijuana. And as Bennett and Leibsohn point out, the marijuana that is being celebrated and sold today is considerably more potent even than the marijuana that was stigmatized in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, until more recently.
Tracing some of the effects of this aspect of the moral revolution, the authors point to the fact that in Colorado, where marijuana became legal in 2012, adolescent use is 56% higher than the national average. They go on to write furthermore, the science is overwhelmingly clear that marijuana use is harmful to human health, particularly among children and young adults. They go to a study publicly released by the American Medical Association in 2013, let’s just note that’s not ancient history, when it came out against the legalization of marijuana with the AMA writing,
“Current evidence supports, at minimum, a strong association of cannabis use with the onset of psychiatric disorders. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to harm.”
It is so interesting that at this moment in the moral revolution two of the most interesting fronts two of the most important fronts are marriage and marijuana. Who would’ve expected this just a generation ago? But the key question is the one raised by Bennett and Leibsohn in this article, how can it be in a sane society that the danger is going up in the moral stigma is going down? That’s a question that every American should face and face clearly.
4) Anne Gaylor’s death sad comparison to Christian hope in death
Today I close with yet another obituary, this for Anne Gaylor, who died at age 88. The headline in the obituary by Sam Roberts,
“Anne Gaylor, Battler for freedom from religion.”
It turns out that Anne Gaylor, who almost reached the age of 90, was a very prominent nonbeliever. She became a principal founder in the 1970s of the group known as the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which as Roberts says,
“Bills itself as the nation’s largest group of atheists and agnostics.”
Roberts goes on to say, and from a worldview perspective and from a Christian understanding, this is really important. He writes,
“Even in death, she held to her principles. Having already arranged to be cremated, she left a handwritten list of instructions with her family that explicitly ordered “No memorial,” and specified that a small tombstone be inscribed “Feminist — Activist — Freethinker.”
Roberts says,
“No one could dispute those characterizations, not even the adversaries whose vitriolic passions she provoked, first by advocating abortion rights and raising money for poor women unable to afford to terminate their pregnancies, and then by singling out religion as “the root cause of women’s oppression.”
Roberts writes about Anne Gaylor that she,
“Never minced words, beginning with the provocative name of her group.”
She said,
“I’ve never liked euphemisms. If you have something to say, say it.”
And she did say what was on her mind. She said,
“More people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other reason,” Ms. Gaylor said. She branded the Bible “a grim fairy tale” and preached that “nothing fails like prayer.” She wrote a book titled “Abortion Is a Blessing” and declared unabashedly that “in the kind of world I want to live in, all children would be wanted.”
Let’s just point out in the world she said she wanted to live in, and by the way that’s the world we now live in, millions of these children are aborted, murdered in the womb, even before they are born.
In forming this organization the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Roberts says that,
“The group invoked the 19th-century term freethinker to describe someone who forms an opinion about religion on the basis of reason, rather than faith, tradition or authority. The Gaylors formally described the organization’s goals as educating the public about “nontheism” and protecting the constitutional principle of separation of church and state. The foundation now claims more than 20,000 members.”
But listen to the sadness in the last paragraph of this obituary,
“Ms. Gaylor’s final instructions to her family were far more personal. After dictating the text of her tombstone, she wrote, “Please plant something flowering when weather permits.” Then she told them: “Take care of each other.”
There’s something horrifyingly sad about those words, there’s something horrifyingly sad about this entire obituary. Here you have a woman who hated the Bible by her own words and loved abortion so much she called abortion a blessing. But at the end of her life after she had ordered her own cremation and that simple and very straightforward tombstone, she says to her family “take care of each other.”
Just a couple of days ago I made reference on The Briefing to the New York Times obituary of Elizabeth Elliott, the widow of the missionary martyr, Jim Elliott and of the story of her life that was so saturated by the gospel. In a span of just a few days, her obituary appeared and this obituary appeared. Now I’m not the only person who reads the obituaries in the New York Times. I can only wonder how many people reading those obituaries, those two in particular, understood the difference, the infinite and eternal difference between the obituaries written about these two women who died at almost the same age, at almost the same time.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
The Briefing 06-25-15
1) Tsarnaev sentencing stark example of difference between mercy in Christianity and Islam
Tsarnaev apologizes for Boston Marathon bombing, Boston Globe (Patricia Wen, Kevin Cullen, Milton J. Valencia, John R. Ellement and Martin Finucane)
Boston Marathon Bomber Says He’s Sorry for the First Time, New York Times (AP)
2) Time limit on religious liberty for education institutions evident cause of culture shift
Schools Fear Impact of Gay Marriage Ruling on Tax Status, New York Times (Laurie Goodstein and Adam Liptak)
3) Marijuana stigma declines as actual danger of marijuana consumption increases
What happened to the marijuana stigma?, Los Angeles Times (William J. Bennett and Seth Leibsohn)
4) Anne Gaylor’s death sad parallel to Christian hope in death
Anne Gaylor, 88, Dies; Guarded Wall Between Church and State, New York Times (Sam Roberts)
June 24, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 06-24-15
The Briefing
June 24, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Wednesday, June 24, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Supreme Court’s leftward trend under Roberts shaped by kinds of questions Court faces
The Supreme Court is as we all know, one of three constitutionally coequal branches of government. And yet that phrase coequal points to the fact that there is a genuine division of powers between the executive branch represented by the President and his administration, by Congress, the legislative branch represented by the house and the Senate and the judicial branch represented at the very top by the Supreme Court of the United States. It is constitutionally proper to speak of these three coequal branches of government. But it’s also true that at particular moments they are really not coequal, because on one issue or another, at one historical moment or another, one of these branches actually holds the key to what will happen for the nation’s future.
On a day by day basis that is most often the presidency, especially given the vast administrative expansion of the presidency since the Second World War. At other times it’s Congress, it can actually be one of the two houses of Congress which is why sometimes the nations waiting to see how the House or the Senate individually will vote on an important issue. But at other times we are simply waiting to see how nine singular individuals seated on the United States Supreme Court will rule. As we find ourselves as the court comes to the end of its term that historically in by the last business day of June. Looming before us are huge decisions yet to be announced including most importantly the decision on same-sex marriage, another very important decision on the Obamacare legislation and there are other issues still hanging as well. But it’s particularly at this time of the year, also at times like January when the court tends to hand down some important decisions that the nation begins to focus attention on the judicial branch in a way it otherwise simply does not.
Now there are a couple of things that Christians need to note here. For one thing, the division of powers is intentionally designed to limit the effects of sin and the concentration of power that sin would lead to and that would cause an occasion for even greater sin. In other words, it is opposition to the idea of an autocracy, especially in the executive branch that leads to the separation of powers. It’s also the understanding that a direct democracy which would amount to a mob rule is ameliorated or limited by the very existence of the United States Senate. We also know that when it comes to the judicial branch, one of the ways our constitutional framers sought to make very clear the independence of the judiciary was by creating for the federal courts at large and especially with reference now to the Supreme Court life terms without any specific term of years.
Ever since the 1950s and a constitutional amendment then, the United States president has been limited to two full terms. There is no limitation upon the number of terms a member of the House or the Senate may serve but they do have to face the voters with regularity, in the house every two years, in the Senate every six years. But those who are appointed to the United States Supreme Court and the other federal courts and those who are eventually confirmed by the United States Senate, they sit on that court until they either die or retire and thus there can be extraordinarily long tenures on the nation’s highest court. And yet at the same time, most Americans even though they can name the president and feel they know something about him, even though they may be able to name their Congressman and their senators, we can certainly hope so, many of them are in no position whatsoever to answer even the most basic questions about one of the three coequal branches of the United States government, in this case the Supreme Court of the United States.
In more recent decades this is a particular issue because the court has been growing in influence and importance. There are several reasons for this – one of them is the kinds of questions that are being asked, if they are inherently constitutional questions as so many of them now are, they will inevitably arrive before the nation’s highest court. But there’s another reason as well. And that is the fact that where Congress and the executive branch often do not or cannot settle issues, it eventually arrives at the Supreme Court as the last Court of Appeal where the issue will in one way or another be decided.
One of the things we need to note there is that that is not the way a democracy, a representative republic should work. But nonetheless, that’s what we find ourselves as the 2014-15 term of the Supreme Court of the United States comes to a conclusion. As early as today but certainly by Tuesday of next week, we are likely to know how the court is going to rule on all the remaining cases and most assuredly the case having to do with the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. But the nature of the court, the influence of the court is underlined by an article that appeared yesterday in the New York Times. The article is by Alicia Parlapiano, Adam Liptak and Jeremy Bowers. The headline,
“The Roberts Court’s Surprising Move Leftward.”
The courts are generally referred to by the last name of the Chief Justice of the time. Thus, we talk about the Roberts court because of the tenure of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who took office in 2005. The headline here tells us that according to the analysis presented here this court has been moving left in particular in this term. The reporters write,
“The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been a conservative court. But even conservative courts have liberal terms – and the current term is leaning left as it enters its final two weeks.”
The reporters went on to say,
“The court has issued liberal decisions in 54 percent of the cases in which it had announced decisions as of June 22.”
They cited research undertaken by a very respected group known as the Supreme Court database. It’s generally considered to be fairly objective in making these determinations and according to that database using its own standard,
“If that trend holds, the final percentage could rival the highest since the era of the notably liberal court of the 1950s and 1960s led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.”
This is a really important article because it points to the fact that the Supreme Court is not just a court, it is made up of individuals, it is not a machine and these individuals like all individuals are susceptible to intellectual change over time. And also it’s interesting because this reflects to some degree the cases that arrive at the Supreme Court. But the court has to agree in most cases to take the case in the first place so this issue is doubly revealing. Whether it is the point of these reporters or not the importance of this article is to point to the fact that liberal change in the United States, in legal and political terms and in moral terms, has been led far more by the United States Supreme Court than by either of the other two branches of government. And looking at this particular analysis the reporters say,
“The court’s leftward movement is modest, and it remains well to the right of where it was in the Warren court years, when the percentage of liberal decisions routinely topped 70 percent. Yet the recent numbers do seem suggestive of a shift.”
Now that again is really interesting because it points back to those crucial decades of the 1950s and 60s and identifies quite explicitly the Supreme Court of the United States as the liberalizing force in American society at that time. Later in the article the reporters say,
“The court moved left in the early 1950s, remained there for almost two decades and has generally leaned right for the past 40 years.”
There’s also something really important to note there. When it points to the last 40 years and says that the court has increasingly during that time leaned right, or generally leaned right, that doesn’t mean that it goes back to a starting point before the war in court in say the late 1940s and then moved right, it means only that it moved right in comparison to the leftward shift they were undertaken by the Warren court that so reshaped American society in the second half of the 20th century. What’s also clear in this article is that there are those who are looking at this trend, and hoping that it extends to the issue of the same-sex marriage decision and the likelihood is indeed that it will and that will rank this court as even more liberal than it stood on Monday.
2) Kennedy’s gay marriage rulings result of long-term concern for the ‘right side of history’
But as I want to remind us when we talk about the court, once again it’s not a machine, it is nine human beings who listen to the cases, decide which cases they’re going to take in the first place and eventually discuss the cases and make their decisions, eventually releasing their decisions.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg in Monday’s edition of the New York Times had a front-page article entitled,
“Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Tolerance Is Seen in His Sacramento Roots.”
This has to do with Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has been the key vote on most gay right cases of the last generation. He is expected again to be the crucial vote in the current case before the court on same-sex marriage. Stolberg goes back to Sacramento, which was the home place of Justice Kennedy, pointing out that it was experiences there and it was also ideas he expressed in Sacramento and as a federal court judge before being appointed to the United States Supreme Court to give an indication of why he has become such a champion for gay rights on the nation’s Highest Court. Stolberg writes,
“Now, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether to grant a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy, a onetime altar boy, has emerged as an unlikely gay rights icon. At 78, he has advanced legal equality for gays more than any other American jurist.”
And as Stolberg also explains,
“Those who know him well cite a mix of factors in explaining his thinking: his views on privacy and liberty, his belief in marriage as a stabilizing force, his concern for the children of same-sex couples and his custom — in the words of one good friend, Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — of “stepping into the skin” of those his decisions affect.”
Judge Kozinski said about Justice Kennedy,
“I think it’s been an evolution. Maybe what happened is the world around him changed, and the evolution has not been so much in his own thinking, as in the world we live in.”
One of the things this article reveals by the way is how people outside the court, even those who are fairly close friends of the justices who sit on the court, spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how the justices think as well as what they think. Stolberg’s article also makes a comparison between Anthony Kennedy and Earl Warren when she writes,
“Today, legal scholars see parallels in Justice Kennedy’s record on gay rights and Chief Justice Warren’s record on civil rights, notably his landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools.”
In a section of the article that should ring in our ears and make us think, Lou Cannon, the biographer of President Ronald Reagan who appointed Justice Kennedy to the court said that Kennedy stated,
“Warren was a good chief justice and a good lawyer, as well as being on the right side of history.”
That’s a most revealing phrase as we now know. It’s a phrase we are hearing over and over again and here it is being used by a very respected biographer of President Ronald Reagan as applied to someone else he has watched very carefully, Justice Anthony Kennedy appointed by Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court. So here we have an advance word that what Anthony Kennedy wants in a very real way is to be seen as being on the right side of history. That’s the kind of political argument that has been used over and over again by those who are pushing the issue of the legalization of same-sex marriage. It is not, we need to note, however, the kind of argument that the framers of the United States Constitution considered to be a compelling argument when it comes to determining what the Constitution says and requires. Nowhere in our nation’s founding documents is there a hint that one of the roles of the United States Supreme Court is to make certain that the court finds the nation on the right side of history. The court has had spectacular moments in which it did exactly the right things such as in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It has also ruled in other cases disastrously only to be reversed by a successive court in a later time.
In another section of this article, the specific issue of gay rights as related to Justice Kennedy comes into view as Stolberg writes,
“But the 1980 case, Beller v. Middendorf, contained an important caveat. In dense legal language, Judge Kennedy noted “substantial academic comment which argues that the choice to engage in homosexual conduct is a personal decision entitled, at least in some instances, to recognition as a fundamental right and to full protection as an aspect of the individual’s right to privacy.”
Now what’s really important there is that that decision was written not as Justice Kennedy was a justice of the United States Supreme Court, but rather as he was a federal appeals court judge. In other words, those who appointed him to the court had access to that argument by Justice Kennedy and so did others. One of the most interesting investigative issues in this article by Stolberg on Justice Kennedy is that Lawrence tried a very liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard law school and those who are advocating for the gay-rights movement had indicated support for the nomination of Anthony Kennedy, believing that he was uniquely open to their arguments even before he was appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Looking at some of his appellate decisions including the one I just cited, Professor Tribe at Harvard law school said,
“‘I think this guy is terrific.”
So if Justice Kennedy, as he did in 2003 in the Lawrence decision and in 2013 in the Windsor decision, becomes the crucial justice in deciding the issue of the legalization of same-sex marriage and he rules for the legalization of same-sex marriage, you can draw a direct line not only back to 2013, not only back to 2003, but all the way back to 1980, even before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.
3) Legacy of Allen Weinstein reminder the truth will out eventually
Next covering the same issue at this very important historical moment, the Weekly Standard, Robert F. Nagel writes an article entitled,
“Predicting Justice Kennedy.”
The subtitle of the article is of extreme importance,
“The status of same-sex marriage shouldn’t come down to one man’s opinion.”
Now here’s what’s really crucial, Professor Nagel who is a professor of law at University of Colorado is not arguing that it shouldn’t come down to one justice’s decision. Inevitably in many cases it’s going to happen that way. What he says, quite specifically is that it shouldn’t come down to one man’s opinion. That points to one of the great divides in America today, the divide between those on the left who believe that what the justices of the Supreme Court should do is to apply their opinions about what is right and defined in the Constitution some basis, however abstract for those opinions, and those who believe as constitutional conservatives that the actual text of the Constitution should decide the issues in the context of the original intention of the framers and founders of the nation. Conservatives do not argue that the Constitution should never change. They just argue that the courts shouldn’t unilaterally change the Constitution. Rather, it should be changed through the amendment process that protects the rights and the stability, not to mention the separation of powers of our constitutional republic.
Professor Nagel looks at the fact that there is the likelihood, given his two previous major decisions as a Supreme Court Justice on this, that Justice Kennedy is going to be if not the decisive vote, then a major vote in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage and the reason for it is going to come down to Justice Kennedy’s opinion. This is what professor Nagel writes,
“The cynical—but perhaps realistic—response is that, despite the importance of state sovereignty and the unique place of marriage in human history, Justice Kennedy will vote to strike down traditional marriage laws because he has simply chosen sides in the culture wars. If true, this means that he will vote to impose his political and moral preferences—that is, one lawyer’s personal opinions will masquerade as law.”
In one of the most important parts of Professor Nagel’s article he goes back to the year 1992 and to a decision, not on same-sex marriage, but on abortion. It was in the case Planned Parenthood versus Casey in which Justice Kennedy then wrote the opinion and was the deciding vote to uphold the Roe v. Wade decision. Now to put the matter plainly, the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand is one of the worst decisions in the history of United States Supreme Court and as a direct result there has been the abortion of over 50 million babies in American wombs. What Professor Nagel is pointing to and Justice Kennedy’s opinion there is where he defended Roe v. Wade because of the reputation of the court and the rule of law as represented by the Supreme Court. In other words, Justice Kennedy supported Roe v. Wade, largely because he said the Supreme Court would lose respect if it reversed itself on such an important issue. Putting Justice Kennedy in the context of his tenure on the court, Nagel then writes,
“These considerations suggest that Justice Kennedy must be finding the same-sex marriage issue deeply vexing. Having been accused by Justice Antonin Scalia, among others, of abandoning law to take sides in the culture wars, Kennedy presumably understands that his previous opinions in favor of gay rights are, like the initial abortion ruling, vulnerable to charges of illegitimate overreach. Perversely, however, this intellectual tenuousness might well produce in Kennedy a sense that national unity is being dangerously undermined by those who disagree with his pronouncements on gay rights, not to mention by those who are battling the many lower federal court rulings invalidating traditional marriage laws.”
In the end all this comes back to the argument that we are to be found and should seek to be found and if necessary moved to be found on the so-called right side of history. One of the points made in this article is that Justice Kennedy has been on the court long enough that he has himself represented by his decisions on the Supreme Court what he considers to be the right side of history. That points to the likelihood that in this case, he will seek to extend the trajectory he began not just in 2003 in Lawrence, not just in 2013 in Windsor, but back in 1980 in that decision that he had already made long before he was nominated to the Supreme Court.
Christians need to remember that we are not called upon to be found on the right side of history. We’re called upon, to put the matter bluntly, to be found on the right side of eschatology. We have to believe the truth and stand by the truth and seek faithfully to live under the authority of Scripture, believing that God and God alone will vindicate the truth because after all, it is his truth because he is true. On The Briefing today, it seemed important given the issues at stake and given the central role likely to be played in this entire issue by Justice Anthony Kennedy to give particular attention as the nation at large is getting particular attention to how he is likely to rule and why. And all these articles arguments and analyses put together point to the fact that there seems to be a central focus here on seeking to be found on the right side of history.
Finally, I want to make reference to an obituary that appeared over the weekend in the New York Times, I’ll admit I just can’t pass up a good obituary because the worldview lessons are often so rich when it comes to being determined to be on the right side of history. Sometimes history has some interesting twists and turns but in reality there’s a good reason for this, the truth eventually comes out. The headline of the obituary is,
“Allen Weinstein, Historian of Alger Hiss Case, Dies at 77.”
The accusations made in the aftermath of World War II, especially during the 1960s. The State Department official Alger Hiss was in reality a Soviet spy, it was one of the great moral tales of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Alger Hiss was the icon of the Eastern establishment and yet charges were made by Whittaker Chambers, a former editor for Time magazine, who was himself a confessed Soviet spy, that his colleague spy had been none other than Alger Hiss, one of the highest-ranking officials of the United States State Department.
William Grimes is actually here writing the obituary of Allen Weinstein, a former archivist of the United States and Weinstein is chiefly remembered for proving long after Alger Hiss was dead and his defenders were largely dead as well, that as the Soviet archives were opened after the fall the Soviet Union, indeed, there was irrefutable proof that Alger Hiss was a spy. William Grimes writes,
“Accused by Whittaker Chambers, an editor and writer at Time and a former Communist, of passing government documents to the Soviet Union when he worked for the State Department in the 1930s, Hiss was regarded as a traitor by most Americans but many liberals and leftists saw him as an innocent victim of anti-Communist paranoia. He was convicted of perjury in 1950, and Mr. Weinstein said he had started out writing the book to prove him innocent, only to reverse his judgment in the face of the evidence.”
That’s an interesting statement in itself because it tells us that Mr. Weinstein, a very capable and competent historian, set out to write a book in order to prove Alger Hiss innocent only to come across the evidence that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was indeed the Soviet spy he was accused of being all the way back to the 1950s. We now know that Alger Hiss and any number of other spies and supporters of the Soviet Union supported that evil regime because they believe that it was to use this phrase again, on the right side of history. Not even close. That evil regime fell and fell apart in 1989 and its archives fell open and when those archives fell open. It was revealed that Alger Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy.
The great moral lesson for this obituary is one to which we return, those who are most determined to be found on the right side of history, may be most frustrated when the history is written.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog
- R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s profile
- 412 followers
