R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 354

The Briefing 08-15-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Explosive growth of Islam in US indicator of vast change in Christian mission field

A New Mosque Rises—in Alaska, Wall Street Journal (Tamara Audi)

Imam Shortage Crimps U.S. Mosques, Wall Street Journal (Tamara Audi)

2) Closure of massive Atlantic City casino parable of the empty promises of gambling

Revel, Atlantic City’s Newest and Largest Casino, Is Closing, New York Times (Charles V. Bagli)

Albany Doubling Down as Casino Boom Fades, New York Times (Jessica McKinley and Charles V. Bagli)

A Good Way to Wreck a Local Economy: Build Casinos, The Atlantic (David Frum)

3) Secularism clearly linked with normalization of same sex marriage

LGBT Americans are less likely to be religious, Washington Post (Ryan Weber)

Tracking Christian Sexual Morality in a Same-Sex Marriage Future, The Public Discourse (Mark Regnerus)

 

The Briefing 08-14-14

1) Tennessee judge breaks trend by upholding state’s same sex marriage ban

Tennessee judge breaks gay marriage’s streak, The Hill (Mario Trujillo)

Court Upholds Same-Sex Marriage Ban as Constitutional in Startling Reversal of Pro-Gay Trend, Slate (Mark Joseph Stern)

2) Arizona court recognizes transgender marriage, implicitly recognizes same sex marriage

Court: ‘Pregnant Man’ can get a divorce, USA Today (Michael Kiefer)

Arizona Appeals Court: ‘Pregnant Man’ can get a divorce, Arizona Republic (Michael Kiefer)

3) Acceptance of transgenderism total rejection of pattern of humanity – now in DC public school

Back to School: When Mr. Reuter Becomes ‘Ms. Reuter’, The Federalist (Mary Hasson)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 08-13-14

The Briefing

 

August 13, 2014

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Wednesday, August 13, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Where is outrage in the Muslim world over atrocities in Iraq?

What do the Muslims around the world think of all the atrocities being done in Iraq, in Syria, and all over the Arab world at Muslim hands?  What do Muslims around the world think of the attempted genocide of the Yazidis by Isis in Iraq?  What they think about the fact that Muslim regimes are largely eradicating Christianity from the Arab world?  That issue took on a new clarity yesterday when the Vatican released a diplomatic statement asking the Muslim world: Where is the outrage? As The Guardian in Great Britain reports in the statement released yesterday the department in charge of interreligious dialogue of the Vatican said:

“The dramatic situation of the Christians, the Yazidis, and other minority religious and ethnic communities in Iraq demands that religious leaders, and above all Muslim religious leaders, people engaged in inter-religious dialogue and all people of good will take a clear and courageous stance. All must be unanimous in their unambiguous condemnation of these crimes and denounce the invoking of religion to justify them.”

Evangelicals should be rightly concerned that the Vatican is recognized as a nation state and thus exercises a diplomacy.  That issue aside for the moment, what the Vatican said on Tuesday is urgently important, and that raises the big question.  We ask it again. Where is the outrage in the Muslim world?  As The Guardian continues to report, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue said

Isis had committed “and was continuing to commit unspeakable criminal acts”. To reinforce the point, it listed some of the atrocities for which Isis is reported to have been responsible. They included “the massacre of people solely for reasons of their religious adherence”; “the execrable practice[s] of decapitation, crucifixion and hanging of corpses in public places”; “the choice imposed on Christians and Yazidis between conversion to Islam, payment of a tax (jizya) and exodus [or death]“; “the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of people, including children, old people, pregnant women and the sick”; “the abduction of women and girls belonging to the Yazidi and Christian communities as war booty (sabaya)”

Similarly from the United States, the Editorial Board of The Washington Times, in the nation’s capital, asked the very same question: Where is the Muslim outrage?  They pointed to a statement made recently by the Defense Minister of Australia.  He said that what’s going on in Iraq is the gruesome work of lunatics who represent what he called “a shocking misrepresentation of Islam.”  That raises a very obvious question.  If it is the misrepresentation of Islam, where are the Islamic leaders around the world who were saying so?  Indeed, the editorial makes the point that most of those who appear to be defending Islam over against these atrocities are not Muslims, but rather leaders of western liberal democracies.  They ask again, where is the Muslim outrage?  The editors then wrote:

This is an organized army, not a band of lunatics. They boast they will one day raise their black flag over the White House, and they’re attracting support from jihadist Muslims not just from Australia, but from all over the world. The ISIS boasting demonstrates intent, if not a likely prospect, of flag-raising on Pennsylvania Avenue, and extremist recruiting in places like Australia goes well, because responsible Muslims, whether through fear or indifference, remain silent. Muslims who don’t want their religion tarred with the brush of barbarians must speak up now. Raising a loud voice would be a good project for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is always eager to complain of American slights to Muslims.

Their final sentence:

If good Muslims think the crazies are misrepresenting the words and instructions of the Prophet Muhammad, they should say so, loud enough for all to hear. By their silence, they enable the perversion of their faith.

One of the major structural features of Islam is the fact that all branches of Islam separate the world into two different spheres: the world Islam and what is called the world of war.  Faithful Muslims are under an obligation to try to bring the rest of the world under the subjugation to Islamic rule, and that means, the world of war will continue until, according to the Muslim vision, the entire globe as part of the world of Islam.  It is certainly true that the vast majority of Muslims around the world are not active jihadists, but the big question is that raised by this editorial and by the Vatican. Where is the outrage?  Where’s the condemnation of jihad us on the part of other major Muslim leaders, not just the leaders of Western democracies trying to apologize for Islam, but where is the Islamic outrage and where the clear statements of, as the Vatican said, unambiguous condemnation of these atrocities?  That’s a question that needed to be asked, and it needs to be asked over and over again.

2) Abortion continues to be central issue, as efforts to adjust language reveals

Shifting to the United States, The New York Times ran two very important but seemingly unrelated articles on how opposing sides on the abortion issue are struggling with language.  The more interesting article is by Jackie Calmes.  It’s entitled “Advocate Shunned ‘Pro-Choice’ to Expand Message.”  She writes that the pro-choice, pro-abortion movement has been struggling with how to change the language since the pro-choice rhetoric doesn’t appear to have the traction in the contemporary cultural and political context that it once had.  She quotes Susan Staggenborg, a professor at University of Pittsburgh who researchers social movements, who explained it this way.

“‘Choice’ has been extraordinarily successful as a frame for the abortion-rights side because a lot of Americans may not like the idea of abortion but they definitely agree with the idea of choice,”

She continued:

“And they agree that it should be a woman’s choice in consultation with her doctor.”

Historians of the abortion rights movement point out that the movement shifted to the language of choice, rather than language of abortion very early, shortly before the Roe V Wade decision 1973, and they did so for an obvious reason.   The word abortion has inherently negative connotations, perhaps, even more now than was true 1973.   The moment had to move off of the language of abortion.  They had to stop using the word and the word choice seem to be the perfect marketing tool for trying to move public opinion.  And, as this professor said, it has been in that sense extraordinarily successful, and yet, as Jackie Calmes writes:

But by 2010 some abortion-rights activists began to sense in their outreach to young women, whose support was needed

that the word choice, the entire language of choice, was not so effective anymore.  The article cites Janet Colm, the President of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Central North Carolina, who said

“The labels we’ve always used about pro-choice and pro-life — they’re outdated and they don’t mean anything,”

In an almost stunning admission within the article, Calmes writes:

Among the findings, according to several people familiar with them [that is the findings of those who are trying to suggest new marketing language quote]: Many young women, when asked whether they were pro-choice or pro-life, said pro-life. Yet they supported the Roe ruling.

Calmes reports that research undertaken by pro-abortion activists indicated that the choice language just didn’t have the traction that it had before.  As she writes

Results also showed the weakness of the pro-choice label… Planned Parenthood took the lead, conducting research on public attitudes throughout 2011 and then presenting the findings to allies in various meetings.

One leader Planned Parenthood said “It definitely was a bit destabilizing when we started.” Some of the older activists in the pro-abortion movement consider the question of language now to be infuriating.  One older activist said “I’m pro-choice and I won’t be bullied into saying anything different. This is nothing but a retreat and a shame!”

According to the article, the new plan to come up with a new form of language for the pro-abortion movement is to concentrate not so much now on choice but on “women’s health,” using that term to encapsulate an entire array of issues they hope will gain the attention, and the support of women.  This tactic and new language has indeed had some electoral success, especially in the last two cycles of elections, but the big issue is reflected in this article comes down to the fact that abortion still continues to be the central issue, and the pro-abortion movement has one huge challenge: it can’t get around the fact that its major impetus and concern is the legalization of abortion.

The other article, that appears to be relatively unconnected to the first, is by Jeremy Peters, and he writes about the fact that the pro-life movement is also struggling with language, not so much what words to use, but how much to say in explaining its position.   The point of his article is that when you look at recent election cycles many pro-life candidates had been trapped by the media in to talking about things that actually aren’t central to the abortion argument, and the advice of these political consultants is very easy to understand: keep it simple, and keep it short.  One of the interesting features of this report in The New York Times, a paper that is avowedly and aggressively pro-abortion, is the fact, and I quote

Polling also shows that large majorities think second-trimester abortions should be illegal.

There is tremendous popular support across the nation for a measure that would ban abortion after the 20 week point of gestation.   The bottom line in the political reality is the bottom line in the moral reality.  The issue is abortion, the sanctity of human life; the issue is the killing of unborn human life, and the fact that there is no way to disguise the agenda of killing with the language of choice.  It’s highly telling that the pro-abortion movement is running into its own exhaustion with the word choice.  It just isn’t functioning as an adequate linguistic fig leaf any longer.

3) Despite federal ruling abortion is not a right ‘like any other’

Over the last several weeks there been some very important abortion cases that reach the federal courts. One of the most important of these reached a federal district court in Alabama, a challenge to Alabama’s law that requires doctors performing abortions to have credentials from a local hospital, along with other considerations.  The federal judge in this case, Myron H. Thompson, declared the states Women’s Health and Safety Act unconstitutional because the law would’ve shut down three of Alabama’s five remaining abortion clinics.  The news coverage about this is itself very revealing.  Just the fact that there are so few abortion clinics in these states is itself of very interesting feature the reality, and it’s extremely telling.  It’s telling because it reveals the moral verdict on abortion that is nearly unanimous on the part of those who actually perform medicine.  The untold story, unrecognized by so many, is that most medical doctors don’t want anything to do with abortion, and that’s why as was pleaded in the case by pro-abortion activists in Alabama, if you require doctors performing abortions to have the kind of credentials that are required by a local hospital, there aren’t going to be any abortionist, and is because the hospitals don’t want to extend those privileges to abortion doctors.

It’s very interesting that virtually all the nation’s leading newspapers The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, almost all of them pointed to this reality.  The fact that those who are arguing that this law must be struck down argued on the basis of the fact that it was unrealistic or wrong to require doctors performing abortions to be credentialed by a local hospital.  But that also points to an even more important moral issue, and that is this, the fact that most doctors don’t want anything to do with abortion or abortionist tells us a great deal about the stigma that remains on abortion in the medical community.  Of course upon consideration, it’s easy to understand why.  The vast majority of doctors going to their profession, they enter their calling, in order to save lives not to take them, in order to heal not to kill. The very reality of abortion is something that can’t be hidden to medical professionals or the hospitals.

Another issue related to the Alabama decision deserves our very close attention.  In an op-ed piece written for The New York Times and published on August 6, that newspaper’s veteran reporter covering the Supreme Court, Linda Greenhouse, wrote a piece entitled “A Right Like Any Other.”  She pointed to Judge Thompson’s decision striking down Alabama’s Women’s Health and Safety Act, and she wrote:

There is so much to say about this remarkable 172-page opinion that it’s hard to know where to begin.

She celebrated the judge’s sweeping decision, and she celebrated especially, the reasoning that he used in his decision.  She concluded her article with these words:

Judges’ willingness to step outside the abortion frame and to weigh, from that broad perspective, whether the abortion right has become unduly burdened is something new and potentially of great value in the struggle to preserve women’s reproductive freedom. Even in the face of cynical and unrelenting political attack, the right to abortion can become stronger the more tightly it is stitched into the constitutional fabric, the more that smart and gutsy judges are willing to treat it as what it is, a right like any other.

Those last words are the words of her title, “A right like any other.”  Her arguments clear.  She’s saying that the right to abortion is a right just like any other, just like the rights that are enumerated, in for instance, the Bill of Rights, but of course abortion is no such thing, and it never has been such a thing, and the Supreme Court did not even rule that it was a right just like any other in the infamous 1973 Roe decision that is the very basis for this kind of argumentation.  As a matter of fact, in the Roe decision the court did find, by a divided vote, the fact that a woman according to the majority’s logic, had what they defined as a constitutional right to an abortion, but not a right just like any other.  Even that pro-abortion decision, the decision that made legal abortion on demand across this country, didn’t make abortion on demand legal at every stage of the pregnancy.  Instead Justice Blackmun, even in his artificial argument he tried to come up with in order to justify his pro-abortion position, in dividing pregnancy into three trimesters and arguing that the state had no right to intervene in the first three months, some right to intervene in the middle three months, and an almost unfettered right to intervene on behalf of the unborn child in the last three months.  One of the reasons that so many recent legislative efforts to curb abortions has been successful is the fact that the Roe v. Wade decision, murderous and atrocious as it is, did not find the declare and unfettered right for a woman to abortion at any time.  It wasn’t, as the court declared, a right just like any other.  The fight to preserve the dignity and sanctity of life will not be over until Roe is reversed, and frankly, not even then.  It won’t be reversed until the moral argument is so pervasive and convincing that women no longer seek an abortion.  But in the meantime, even as pro-abortion is continued to trumpet that Roe is the law of the land, perhaps they ought to read it.  It doesn’t say what they claim.

4) Over-parenting can hinder child’s education

Finally, as millions of American school children head back to the classroom, Amy Joyce wrote a very interesting piece for The Washington Post entitled the “One Thing You Must Do for Your Young Student,” and when she says young student she means very young: elementary school-age children and kindergarten students.  What did she say that parents must do?  Stop doing everything is what she says.  American parents are simply doing so much for their children that previous generations of children learn to do for themselves.  Children are now arriving at school and many of them, of course, are tragically under-parented, but the article by Amy Joyce points to the fact that there are many children who actually over-parented.  Their parents clean their rooms, put everything away, pack all of their things, unpack all of their things, tie their shoes, buckle will them in the car, and do just about everything for them.  It’s an interesting and insightful point about the way many children are being raised in America today by parents who are very committed to their children and very involved in their lives.  The point is very simple and profoundly important to understand.  Sometimes we can harm our children by doing too much for them.

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 08-13-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Where is outrage in the Muslim world over atrocities in Iraq?

Vatican calls on Muslim leaders to condemn Christian persecution in Iraq, The Guardian (John Hooper)

Where is Muslim outrage?, Washington Times (Editorial Board)

2) Abortion continues to be central issue, as efforts to adjust language reveals

Advocates Shun ‘Pro-Choice’ to Expand Message, New York Times (Jackie Calmes)

Conservatives Hone Script to Light a Fire Over Abortion, New York Times (Jeremy W. Peters)

3) Despite federal ruling abortion is not a right ‘like any other’

Federal judge rules Alabama abortion law unconstitutional, Los Angeles Times (Alana Semuels)

Alabama’s Requirement for Abortion Clinic Doctors Is Ruled Unconstitutional, New York Times (Erik Eckholm)

Federal Judge Finds Alabama Abortion Law Unconstitutional, Wall Street Journal (Cameron McWhirter)

Federal judge: Alabama can’t enforce its new abortion law, Washington Post (Abby Ohlheiser)

A Right Like Any Other, New York Times (Linda Greenhouse)

4) Over-parenting can hinder child’s education

The one thing you must do for your young student Washington Post (Amy Joyce)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-12-14

The Briefing

 

August 12, 2014

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Tuesday, August 12, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Response to Robin Williams’s death reveals how closely Americans identify with entertainers

The entire nation last night seemed to be talking about the death suspected to be by suicide of comedian and actor Robin Williams. He was found dead in his home in Marin County, California at age 63. And immediately as news broke across the nation, it became abundantly clear that the death of Robin Williams came especially suspected as a suicide to be a tremendous shock to the American people. Several things come immediately to mind in terms of this tragedy. First of all the announcement of any suicide comes as a great human tragedy. The suicide of any individual, young or old, famous or unknown to the public, it’s still an enormous tragedy, and one that immediately affects our hearts as well as our moral instincts.

The second thing we need to note is that the fact that Robin Williams’s death skyrocketed across the nation’s media, social media, and attention, tells us something about the role of popular culture in American life. When it comes to the role of the media Hollywood entertainment, the entire complex of popular culture it becomes increasingly clear that Americans in this digital age are perhaps even more associated with those they watch on television and the big screen — more identified with those who are the major figures, producers, and entertainers in popular culture than ever before. We have virtually constant 24/7 access to entertainment and that means also the personalities involved in that entertainment. And that breeds a sense of intimacy of immediacy that is actually false but nonetheless is a very powerful cultural phenomenon. When we think about the role of popular culture we think about Robin Williams as an enormously gifted actor and comedian. He is one of those whose talents seem to be almost protean, able to transform itself into different forms of talent such that Robin Williams could be considered simultaneously both a comedian and a very serious actor. He became a major figure in American pop culture and entertainment in the 1970s with the sitcom Mork and Mindy in which he played a benign alien. He also had made one appearance on the Happy Days sitcom and later he starred in very serious movies as well as many popular forms of entertainment. Many movies that were issued by companies such as the Disney Corporation. He was the voice of the genie in Disney’s Aladdin but he also starred in movies including Goodwill Hunting, The Fisher King, Dead Poets Society and Good Morning Vietnam.

As the Los Angeles Times reported last night:

At certain points during his career Robin Williams had to fight to be seen by the public as something more than just a funny guy.

Back in 1991 he told the Los Angeles Times:

It’s hard because people want to know you are a certain thing. They still say “that’s the little manic guy — he’s a little adrenaline guy.”

But also as the Los Angeles Times notes:

Robin Williams’ talent for ad libing functions both a gift and a shield.

Several people in the entertainment industry quoted in the LA Times coverage indicated that Robin Williams was on camera and off, always in character. Jenny Masada, Founder and Chief Executive of The Laugh Factory said:

He was always in character. You never saw the real Robin. I knew him 35 years and I never knew him.

Jenny Masada also said:

The Robin Williams, along with many others in Hollywood, “sold their privacy to the public.”

Masada went on to say:

They could be in the middle the street talking and someone would come up for an autograph. Robin didn’t realize how much he sold his privacy to people.

A final thought comes immediately to mind when thinking about the death of Robin Williams. This tragedy reminds us of the fact that comedy isn’t the same thing as happiness. Being funny does not necessarily translate into being happy. Robin Williams acknowledged that he fought with substance abuse problems including treatment this summer and no one knows exactly what took place in his mind and in his heart that led to the suicide that eventually took his life yesterday. And even as a recent biography of comedian Johnny Carson made very clear; the difference between being funny and being happy can be infinite.

And that’s an important thing for Christians to remember.

2) St Louis erupts in race conflict over death of teenager Michael Brown

Another American city erupted in racial tension in recent days as The Chicago Tribune reports. Hundreds of protesters gathered at a suburban St. Louis police station Monday night demanding murder charges against an officer who shot to death an unarmed black teenager over the weekend. The paper went on to say the largely peaceful protests monitored by about 50 police officers in riot gear took place after a night of rioting when demonstrations took place over the death of Michael Brown, age 18, when those demonstrations turned violent.

Ferguson Police Chief, Tom Jackson told reporters on Monday:

It breaks my heart. Last night was the worst night of my life.

As many Americans know by now there are conflicting accounts and there is a great deal of confusion about what actually happened but somehow an 18-year-old young man, an African-American young man, was killed by police in an altercation that at least some police claim was originating in the fact that they were struggling over a gun in a police car. But at the end of the day the 18-year-old young man was dead and police officials acknowledged he died of multiple gunshot wounds, even though he was unarmed.

This kind of situation immediately prompts the kinds of demonstrations that are now expected and it also leads many Americans, regardless of their knowledge or lack of knowledge of the situation, immediately to jump to conclusions. But this is one of those situations that as the Attorney General of the United States made clear:

Requires virtually everyone to stand back and let law enforcement do its work.

And in this case, it is not just the law enforcement agency and officials who were involved in the situation locally, but yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that it was also launching an investigation. As US Attorney General Eric Holder said:

Aggressively pursuing investigations such as this is critical for preserving trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

And at this point we just need to follow the Attorney General’s advice and stand back and let the law enforcement officials, especially now at the federal level do their job.

3) Voting trends reveal fertility has everything to do with worldview

Back in July of 2005, James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal ran a very important article entitled “The Roe Effect.” The subtitle of the article, “The right to abortion has diminished the number of Democratic voters.” With that language he meant voters of the Democratic Party. As he made clear in the assessment, the ratio of abortions amongst those who vote Republican and vote Democrat is not equal. And the fact that there is a market increase in the number of those who vote Democratic seeking in supporting abortion, there should be no surprise that those babies who were not born will not vote Democratic. “The Roe Effect” became a shorthand in political science for the fact that when it comes to an issue like abortion it turns out that even as liberal voters tend to have fewer children they also tend to have more abortions. And that has reduced the transference of their own pro-abortion commitments to the successive generation to follow. As Taranto made clear his article, in this assessment he wasn’t even making a moral judgment, just a statement of fact. And the fact is that there is a decreasing number in every generation of those who might vote Democratic and thus also pro-abortion, simply because after Roe v. Wade in 1973, access to abortion is meant that many of those future voters aren’t born. Taranto dealt with the fact that not only are there more children born to those who are pro-life —  that’s a no-brainer  – but also that pro-life parents tend to be rather successful in communicating those pro-life values and commitments to their own children. Backing up Taranto’s assessment is the fact that successive generations after Roe, generation by generation, have been generally more pro-life than the generation before. A remarkable contrary trend to other moral trajectories in the same period.

Now almost a decade later in the paper to be released on the 14th of this month, two professors at Northwestern University, Alex Kevern and Jeremy Freese, have published research entitled, “Differential Fertility as a Determinative of Trends in Public Opinion About Abortion in the United States.” That academic title betrays a very interesting moral assessment and these two sociologists have pointed out that the so-called “Roe Effect” mentioned by James Taranto back in 2005 can now be substantiated in terms of sociological analysis. In their very large academic paper, they come to conclude, and I quote:

Abortion attitudes serve as a useful candidate for studying the possible effects of fertility on an attitudinal outcome due to their strong correlation with fertility and they’re fairly high parent-child correlation. Based on the evidence we present, we argue that the fertility difference between pro-choice and pro-life individuals has caused a more conservative trend in abortion attitudes over the last 34 years of data.

In other words this massive study indicates that the “Roe Effect” is real.

But there is another interesting twist to this report. In the conclusion they also point out that they measured gay rights support in terms of the same generational analysis and they wrote:

The rapid increase in supportive attitudes toward gay rights has been reflected both in adults changing their mind on issues and a large generational divide in which younger Americans are substantially more supportive on gay rights issues than older Americans.

They conclude:

As a result the upward movement in support for gay rights is occurring much more quickly than what countervailing affects differential fertility may have.

To translate that from the academic jargon what they’re saying is this: When it comes to issues of support for gay rights, what you’re looking at is not a “Roe Effect.” When it comes to a massive society wide moral change such as the normalization of homosexuality, the differentials and abortion rates between conservatives and liberals or Republicans and Democrats really doesn’t come into effect.

Furthermore, these researchers ask a very important question: If pro-life parents have been relatively effective in communicating and continuing those pro-life commitments in her own children it seems to be a very different picture when it comes to convictions on the normalization of homosexuality. And so we now end up with a very interesting and sometimes baffling situation. A generational survey in which younger Americans are more pro-life than their parents but also more pro-gay rights. That’s an interesting conundrum and one that reveals the fact that the worldview of many Americans is profoundly conflicted and often confused.

By the way, while we were talking about so-called differential fertility rates, we also need to keep a couple of other issues in mind. One of them is that more religious Americans, and in particular, more Christian or more Jewishly committed Americans, conservatives on that religious theological polarity, have a much higher fertility rate or birth rate than those on the more progressive or liberal ends of the same spectrum. And also when you look back to the 2012 election, fertility rates amongst more conservative and more liberal Americans are also markedly different.

As a matter fact, one study released after the 2012 election indicated that one of the surest predictors of how a state would vote in the election, whether we would vote read and that is for the Republican candidate Mitt Romney or blue for the Democratic candidate Barack Obama, was the fertility rate. As Lauren Sandler wrote at New York Magazine:

Tell me a state’s fertility rate and I’ll tell you how it voted.

The 10 states with the lowest fertility rates went for Barack Obama. The states with the highest fertility rates voted for Mitt Romney. That also tells us something. It tells us something that we should already know — that fertility indeed has everything to do with worldview.

4) China announcement warning of danger of Christianity being co-opted by political regime

A very interesting and ominous story has appeared over the weekend from the BBC with continuing coverage this week. As the BBC reports:

The nation of China and its Communist Party plan to develop its own Christian theology.

As the BBC reports:

China says it may try to create a theology based on Christianity that integrates the religion with Chinese culture and is compatible with the country’s socialist beliefs.

Wayne Zuan, a senior official for religious affairs told the BBC that:

China supports the development of Christianity within the country but with a very important reservation: the Christianity that the country supports is “the construction of Chinese Christian theology that should adapt to China’s national condition.”

In other words to the aims and worldview of China’s Communist Party. This was also reported by the state-backed China Daily website there in Beijing. And a similar report in Hindustan Times said that China’s government and Central committee will “continue to promote correct Christian theology with a range of publications, exchanges, discussions and evangelism.”

Throughout the 2000+ years of the Christian church, Christians have always had to be on guard lest they be co-opted by a political regime. But rarely, if ever, do you have a political regime announced quite this candidly and crudely that it intends to co-opt Christian theology for its own purposes. This comes also after the Chinese government has been cracking down on churches in China, even on the state registered churches. As The Washington Post correctly observed in an editorial published on July 29:

From repressing Muslims to bulldozing churches and tearing down crosses, Chinese officials have been denying the internationally guaranteed right to believe or not believe. The simple proposition the editors wrote the individuals have the right to live out their beliefs openly and peacefully without fear or intimidation clearly frightens Chinese authorities as evidenced by the repressive persecution of numerous faith communities.

On the world scene, China is one of the most abusive countries. One of the most repressive when it comes to religious liberty. That’s what prompted the editorial in The Washington Post. As the editors noted:

In one province where Christianity has grown dramatically, the government has targeted more than 100 churches; it has demolished dozens of them and forced others to make major alterations including the removal of steeples and crosses.

In April of this year, Chinese government authorities bulldozed one major church which housed a congregation numbering in the thousands, and that was a registered church. The newsmagazine The Week reported that at least some Chinese Christian authorities suggested what the government is going to try to do with it state-sponsored hybrid theology is take moral teachings out of Christianity, leaving all the rest. Which is to say, leaving all the supernatural elements, the theological heart of Christianity, the gospel.

It is thought that there now between 25 and 40 million Protestant Christians in the nation of China. And the number in terms of nonregistered churches, so-called house churches, is likely to be additional millions. Perhaps even hundreds of millions. The fact is that the Chinese government rightly fears Christianity and it’s now explosive growth in the nation. And you have to give the Chinese authorities credit. Rarely do you have a government so audacious as to announce that it intends to co-opt Christianity. In that sense, the announcement coming to the Chinese press should serve as ample warning. But a warning not only to Christians in China, but to Christians everywhere. A warning about the perpetual danger of Christianity being co-opted by a political regime any regime.

5) Controversial California textbook reminder that sexual revolutionaries are aiming at children

Finally, even in an age in which it’s difficult to be shocked, a report published this morning in The Los Angeles Times should shock us all. According to the news report by Veronica Rocha:

Fremont Unified School District Superintendent has temporarily shelved the controversial ninth-grade health textbook after roughly 2,200 parents and residents took issue with its sexual bondage topics and other material and demanded to be kept out of the classroom. Superintendent of Schools, Jim Morris, said that he will ask all board members on Wednesday of this week to place the book entitled, Your Health Today on hold until it’s fully vetted, following concerns from the community, that it would expose teenagers in this case ninth graders to a range a sexual topics that is too explicit for me to mention on The Briefing. Even after the controversy that brought out at least 2,200 parents and complaint, even after the acknowledgment of the sexually explicit material that goes far beyond what any kind of sex education should ever envisioned for teenagers of any age, the school Superintendent said:

Our administration and staff believes this textbook will be an asset to our health curriculum in that it provides current, accurate, factual, and relevant information our students need to make responsible decisions about their health.

We can only shudder to imagine the teenagers that are making decisions about the kinds of things that are mentioned very explicitly in this textbook. Keep in mind that the Superintendent has agreed only to shelve this book temporarily while it’s on hold to be fully vetted, even though they’re confident it will be of use to students in the classroom. This makes clear that in all too many school districts, it is not just a book like this the might be on hold, its sanity that’s clearly on hold. Just in case you needed a reminder, the moral revolutionaries are coming for your children.

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 08-12-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Response to Robin Williams’s death reveals how closely Americans identify with entertainers

Robin Williams dies in apparent suicide; actor, comic was 63, Los Angeles Times (Ryan Parker, Steven Zeitchik, and Lauren Raab)

2) St Louis erupts in race conflict over death of teenager Michael Brown

Riot erupts near St. Louis over police shooting of teen, Chicago Tribune

3) Voting trends reveal fertility has everything to do with worldview

Big pro-life families are shifting the abortion debate, Boston Globe (Kevin Lewis)

Differential Fertility as a Determinant of Trends in Public Opinion about Abortion in the United States, (J. Alex Kevern and Jeremy Freese)

The Roe Effect, Wall Street Journal (James Taranto)

Tell Me a State’s Fertility Rate, and I’ll Tell You How It Voted, New York Magazine (Lauren Sandler)

4) China announcement warning of danger of Christianity being co-opted by political regime

China plans its own ‘Christian theology’, BBC News

China plans establishment of Christian theology, China Daily

China’s grim religious freedom problem, Washington Post (Katrina Lantos Swett And M. Zuhdi Jasser)

5) Controversial California textbook reminder that sexual revolutionaries are aiming at children

Textbook shelved after sex toy, bondage topics spark protest, Los Angeles Times (Veronica Rocha)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-11-14

The Briefing

 

August 11, 2014

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

It’s Monday, August 11, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Centrality of US to world politics a temporary stewardship

Even as the situation around the world seems to turn more complex and more deadly virtually every day, a very interesting article has appeared in The Telegraph in London, written by Dan Hodges.  The headline is this: “We May Not Like it, but Isis and Iraq Remind Us That We Need America to Be the World’s Policeman.”  Dan Hodges writes from a very interesting perspective.  He also writes as a British citizen, and looking at the present in the context of the recent history of the 20th century, he says it’s become increasingly clear that someone needs to take charge on the world stage. Someone needs to be a policeman in a world of increasing danger, mayhem, and lawlessness.  As he looks around the world, only one nation can fulfill that role, if imperfectly and inadequately, and that is the United States of America. When we consider the fact that the United States is often maligned either for acting or for not acting, we recognize that at any one of these critical turns, the United States seems to be the actor that the people, either hope will act or hope will not act, but no other nation comes even close to the centrality of purpose in history currently played by the United States of America.  To have this now argued by someone like Dan Hodges, in the pages of The Telegraph in London, should tell us something.  But his argument is particularly potent. In perhaps the most important sentence of his essay, he writes this:

There is only one thing worse than the United States acting as the world’s policeman. And that’s the United States not acting as the world’s policeman.

He looks back to last week’s centennial anniversary, the beginning of the First World War, and he writes this:

The League of Nations, established at the Paris peace conference, was supposed to be the guardian of that everlasting peace.

That was the peace that was supposed to come after the war to end all wars. World War I which was concluded only after the United States, very reluctantly entered that world conflagration. He then wrote:

But the League of Nations collapsed. The world was again plunged into war. And the US was again forced to come to the world’s aid. “The US cannot act as our policeman,” the world said in gratitude, once that conflagration was over. So the United Nations was established.

He continues:

And today the United Nations is now as effective at enforcing peace and the rule of law as the old, defunct League. We spend a huge amount of time in this country (that means Britain) debating the failings of the European Union. But compared to the UN, the EU is a model of excellence in international governance.

He points to the face that the current leadership of the United Nations, General Secretary Ban Ki-moon, is basically not a real factor in terms of world affairs, especially in places appoints of crisis.  He issue statements but no one’s listening.   Dan Hodges then goes on to write:

The UN is no longer fit for purpose. In fact, the UN quite clearly no longer has any idea what its purpose is. The best that can be said for that benighted organization is that it’s morphed into an extension of the Red Cross.

Looking back to the United States, Dan Hodges argues that when Europeans and others around the world say they don’t want America to be the world’s policeman, he says what they really mean is: I don’t want America to be the world’s policeman and the world’s prosecutor judge and jury, as well.  Hodges says that’s a fair argument, but at the moment, he writes:

With the implosion of the authority of the UN, there is no effective prosecutor, judge or jury.

He points to the fact that:

Earlier this week the UN patted itself on the back for the successful conviction of Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan.

They were guilty of horrifying genocides in the nation of Cambodia in the 1970s.  He continues:

They are 88 and 83 respectively. Their victims – an estimated two million of them – died 40 years before. Pol Pot (the dictator who was at the heart of that genocide) himself never faced justice.

In other words Dan Hodges, says even United Nations claims a major victory, it comes 40 years too late to be, in anyway morally or legally meaningful.  He writes this:

If we want a world based on laws then someone ultimately has to enforce them. And there is only one state on the planet with the means and inclination to do so. That state is the United States. Like it or not America is the world’s policeman. It may occasionally prove to be an inefficient, ineffective and even irresponsible policeman. But if we want any semblance of international order, it’s the only the policeman we have got. For that reason alone we – and God – should indeed bless America.

The late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, speaking of America as the indispensable nation, made very clear that the United States was indeed sometimes a clumsy leader and actor on the world stage. But as Churchill made very clear, you simply can’t look at the 20th century and explain why the world escaped so many despotisms in disasters without the intervention of the United States.  If indeed the United States and not been instrumental in winning the First and Second World Wars for the Allies, you can hardly imagine the darkness and despotism that much of the world would be in even today. The same we now know is also true, of the third great world war of the 20th century, we now know as the Cold War against Communism.  Americans reading an essay like this, published in a major British newspaper, by a rather liberal British columnist can feel justifiably proud and indeed somewhat relieved that at least someone in the world understands the American predicament.  But in this country it’s clear that many Americans, indeed perhaps even most Americans, are unsure exactly how the United States should play this kind of role in very confused and confusing times.

 

Furthermore, even as the United States is now in somewhat of a retreat from this role as the world’s policeman, the necessary intervention on humanitarian grounds in Iraq in recent days has proved that once again, America simply cannot escape history, we cannot escape the world situation, and we cannot escape our own national role in the international order.  But this is understood best is the stewardship. A stewardship the demands a great deal of the United States, and a stewardship that sometimes, if not continually, frustrates the United States.  A stewardship that isn’t answered by any simple formula of the application of foreign-policy, and a stewardship that we must understand is for a period of time that is granted to the United States that will not endure forever.

The Bible makes clear that the pattern of history in a fallen world is of the rising and falling of nations.  There are no permanent empires. There are no enduring kingdoms.  The only permanent and enduring, indeed eternal kingdom, is that which would to be brought in full at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.  In the meantime, all of these multilateral efforts, such as either the League of Nations or United Nations, though undoubtedly well intended, simply become parables of the fact the human beings are incapable of governing ourselves, certainly in terms of global order. In a Genesis 3 world,  sin so affects every part of the geopolitical system that our only hope for an effective government and rule of law is that which begins in the smallest unit, where that law is observed and enforced and then moves out to the larger context.  Lawlessness and the rest of the world cannot be corrected by any unilateral action of the United States, or as Mr. Hodges makes abundantly and wisely clear, by the multilateral efforts of anything like the United Nations.  As with any stewardship in a biblical context, our responsibility is to do our best, knowing that we will give an answer for our performance in our stewardship and understanding that at our very best we’re woefully inadequate. What we need is not a new multilateral organization. What we need is a reign of peace, and that is why we pray as the Lord taught us, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

2) James  Brady’s death ruled homicide as consequences of sin unfold over 30 years later

It’s very hard to imagine how in the world one can construct a worldview without the Christian understanding of sin. That becomes clear in some headline news that appeared over the weekend.  For example, in the state of Virginia, a coroner has ruled that the death of James Brady, the former Press Secretary to President Ronald Reagan, who was horribly injured in the attempted assassination on the President by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981, was a homicide.  James Brady died on Monday in Alexandria, Virginia.  That’s Monday of this past week.  He was 73 years of age. On March 30, 1981 he was standing outside a hotel with President Reagan, after Reagan had given an address, when he, along with the President and a District of Columbia police officer and a Secret Service agent, were wounded by John Hinckley, in his attempt to assassinate the President of the United States.  As is well-known, President Reagan recovered rather miraculously from a very serious injury from the bullet that struck him, after ricocheting off the presidential limousine.  It was James Brady, the Press Secretary, who took a direct hit, by a bullet to his brain.  From that point in 1981 until his death last week, James Brady bore devastating consequences of that brain injury.  He became a prominent spokesman for gun control, along with his wife, but his death last week presented the coroner, there in that county in Virginia, with a very serious question what characterized his death.  In the end, the verdict was that the death was a homicide due to complications from that attempted assassination attempt that took place over 30 years ago.  It’s a very interesting legal question.  There are those who are now debating whether or not John Hinckley will face additional charges due to the fact that the death of James Brady was ruled to be a homicide.  There are others who think that is actually unlikely.

In any event, this points from the Christian worldview perspective to a very important understanding about sin.  The consequences of sin sometimes are far in the future.  The Scriptures speaks about the sins of the father being visited on future generations; the teeth of their children being set on edge by the sins of the fathers.  We understand that sin can have consequences beyond our own finite human lives, but in the case of that shooting that took place on March 30, 1981, a shooting that made world headlines and continue to hold those headlines for a very long time, a case that was made most famous of course because the would-be assassin was determined to kill no one other than the President of the United States.  This is a reminder to us all of the long-term consequences of sin.  Sin has immediate consequences, of course, but perhaps the most devastating consequences are those that are visited far into the future, sometimes delayed, not only in terms of one lifetime, but successive lifetimes.  Over 30 years ago, John Hinckley pulled the trigger on that cheap handgun and gravely, almost mortally wounded the President of the United States, a police officer, a Secret Service agent, and led to devastating consequences in the bullet that entered the brain of James Brady.  Whether legal authorities will decide to act on this coroner’s inquest determination remains to be seen, but this much Christians know, there is no escaping the final court of judgment.  That is certainly true for John Hinckley, but it’s also true for every single one of us, and that’s why the gospel is such good news.

3) Nixon’s resignation reminder that sin often made worse by coverup

We spoke on Friday about the 40th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon as President of the United States. We spoke about the moral meaning of that anniversary, and of the fact, that if anything the resignation of Richard Nixon, back in the year 1974, pointed to the fact that no citizen of the United States is above the law even, the President of the United States. But now there’s also a good deal of information flooding into us that wasn’t known to Americans in 1974.  Just in recent months, almost 4,000,000 words of additional transcripts from the Nixon administration have been released by the national archives and made public, and in those 4 million words is a treasure trove of moral and historical information.  One of the things becomes clear is the fact that President Nixon did not consider the break-in at the Democratic headquarters during the course of his campaign in 1972 to be a major issue. On June 21 of 1972, that’s four days after the break-in, President Nixon, in the Oval Office, told his aide, H.R. Haldeman, that he didn’t think the country cared much about the break-in and the controversy in the news.  He said:

“Most people around the country probably think this is routine, that everybody’s trying to bug everybody else, its politics.”

President Nixon agreed with his personal secretary’s declaration that the break-in of the Democratic headquarters was a third-rate burglary.  A third-rate burglary it might’ve been, and what becomes clear from the perspective of 40 years of history, is that President Nixon did not fall from power.  He did not resign from his office as President of the United States because members of his campaign broke in the Democratic headquarters.  No, he resigned because of the massive cover-up that followed that break-in.  It was during the cover up that the President undoubtedly committed those high crimes and misdemeanors that would’ve led the House of Representatives to impeach him and the United States Senate to convict him of those crimes.  That’s why he resigned from office.  As Richard Leiby of the Washington Post wrote just recently:

Perhaps he was right. But you know what people have been saying since Watergate. It’s not the third-rate attempted burglary that matters — it’s the monumental cover-up.

And there is a crucial issue for the Christian worldview, as well.  Sin is bad enough, and sin can’t be discounted in terms of the very essence of the sinfulness of sin, but what makes in often worse, is the fact that the cover-up that follows is far worse than the sin that originated the cover-up.  Had President Nixon simply told the country the truth in 1972, he almost surely would have remained in office until the end of his second term. That third-rate attempted burglary likely would have become a footnote in history, but it didn’t, and it didn’t because the President entered into a conspiracy to obstruct justice, to hide from the truth, to lie to the American people, and to commit crimes far beyond that burglary that led to his downfall.  As the 40th anniversary of his resignation continues to be a part of the American conversation, we need to keep this in mind.  Even the secular world understands that it was the cover-up, not the original crime that led to the downfall.  That has deep Christian meaning because on the other side of Genesis 3, the sin is bad enough; the lies about it just make it far worse.

4) European Human Rights Court denies a universal right to same sex marriage

On the same-sex marriage front really important news from Europe and the European human rights court which ruled, just a few days ago, that in Europe there is no absolute right to same-sex marriage. Keep that in mind when you consider that American liberals pushing for the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage keep pointing to Europe as the form and shape of the future. But in this case, the European human rights court, a very liberal and progressive court, ruled on a case that originated in Finland that there was no continent wide right to same-sex marriage.  The case did originate in Finland where there was a man who was married and had a child, who decided that he wanted be a woman.  The problem is that Finland doesn’t have same-sex marriage, and so, if he was indeed declared to be a woman, as the law in Finland allowed, he couldn’t be married to the woman who is currently his wife. But, the woman who was currently his wife said that she wanted to be married to him even if he transitioned to supposedly become a woman.  In an incredibly odd twist, the couple claimed that gaining a divorce because of the husbands sex transition, would be “against their religious convictions,” and so the couple, that has religious convictions about divorce but not about the stability of gender, went to the European human rights court, and the court declared just days ago:

“It cannot be said that there exists in any European consensus on allowing same-sex marriage.”

The court also pointed out

That same-sex marriage is allowed in only 10 of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe.

As a matter of fact, same-sex marriage is legal in only 18 countries, or as in the United States, parts of 18 countries out of the more than 200 listed in the CIA World Factbook, or the 192 member states of the United Nations.  Keep that in mind as we’re continually told that the legalization of same-sex marriage is a worldwide phenomenon that is simply unstoppable.  Most people in the world, and in most places in the world, there is no notion of any so-called same-sex marriage.

5) Parents often ones calling driving teens

Finally, here’s an odd twist for you.  American parents are very concerned about their teenagers driving, and for good reason, and they’re very concerned about their teenagers talking on cell phones while driving, a very documented risk.  And yet, as USA Today reported over the weekend, when it comes to who’s calling their teens on the phone while they’re driving, well, it turns out the many of the parents that don’t want their teens talking on the phone when they’re calling, are indeed calling their kids while they are driving the car.  A large percentage of the teenagers said that the parents had the rule that when the parent calls on the cell phone, the teenager has to answer the phone right away, even, as it turns out, if the teenager is driving a car.  Well, there’s another quandary about life in a fallen world. I’m not sure exactly what parents should do with that.  Perhaps, even as parents decided, they better talk with their teenagers about this issue, maybe we all better way until the teenagers come home

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 08-11-14

1) Centrality of US to world politics a temporary stewardship

We may not like it, but Isis and Iraq remind us that we need America to be the world’s policeman, The Telegraph (Dan Hodges)

2) James  Brady’s death ruled homicide as consequences of sin unfold over 30 years later

Coroner Is Said to Rule James Brady’s Death a Homicide, 33 Years After a Shooting, New York Times (Nick Corasaniti)

3) Nixon’s resignation reminder that sin often made worse by coverup

John Dean, sex machine? And other new revelations from the Nixon tapes., Washington Post (Richard Leiby)

4) European Human Rights Court denies a universal right to same sex marriage

European Human Right Court: No to Same-Sex Marriage, Breitbart (Austin Ruse)

5) Parents often ones calling driving teens

Parents drive kids to distraction, really, they do, USA Today (Sharon Jayson)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 08-08-14

The Briefing

 

August 8, 2014

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Friday, August 8, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Genocide and persecution in Iraq rightly causes Pres. Obama to authorize air strikes

Last night, speaking to the American people, President Barack Obama announced that he had authorized limited airstrikes and humanitarian assistance in Iraq. That coming as a major reversal of his administration’s policy coming less than three years after American military forces left that beleaguered country. But of course now the situation is far different than it was when American troops withdrew. Now Iraq is basically dividing into three warring nations: a Sunni nation, a Shiite nation, and a Kurdish nation. But most ominous of all, there is a new Islamic terrorist group that is taking over much of Iraq, gaining not only territory but confiscating American weapons left behind, and now constituting a massive army and a massive threat to the entire stability of the nation and to the larger world. The group known as ISIS, the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria, is now threatening to take over virtually all of Iraq, and in its wake is creating not only terror and a humanitarian crisis but also the potential of genocide. This is what President Obama said “moved him to act over against his political and military instincts” and to announce the United States was ready for limited airstrikes, if necessary.

 

As of early this morning, the Pentagon said that none of the airstrikes had yet taken place. However, American cargo planes, assisted by United States fighter planes, had indeed made major drops of humanitarian assistance to beleaguered minorities fearing for their lives and indeed in danger of genocide at the hands of ISIS. As Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported last night, President Obama said that the strikes, if needed, would be used to protect US personnel and a group known as the Yazidis, a minority sect concentrated in northern Iraq who have been targeted by the ISIS militants and are stranded on a mountain. The President said that even as American military planes are dropping food and water for thousands of Yazidis, the United States could not turn a blind eye to the real potential for genocide. As he said, the extremists “have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute a genocide.”

 

Bloomberg BusinessWeek then summarized the escalation in US involvement in Iraq comes as the Islamic State, the extremist group that has conquered swathes of northern Iraq since June, extended its advance by seizing the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest. Bloomberg also reported that the Sunni militants offensive and their threats to kill religious minorities has panicked tens of thousands of people and empty towns that for centuries had been home to Yazidi and Christian communities.

 

It is no small thing for a President of the United States to authorize these kinds of airstrikes, especially given the fact that the United States under President Obama’s leadership very clearly and publicly withdrew from Iraq. President Obama had stated that he was entirely unwilling to revisit any kind of military intervention in that country, and yet the situation of the Yazidis and other religious minorities in Iraq, the fact that thousands were now stranded on a mountain with a very real threat of starvation or dying for lack of hydration if not active genocide, the President decided he had to act. And this is the kind of action that deserves wide and immediate bipartisan support in the United States government.

 

Indeed the President is acting because he has to act. The United States is intervening because it has to intervene. In situations like this it is very important for us to remember that the Christian worldview understands that the use of violent force is the worst thing possible, unless it is intended to prevent the worst thing possible, which is the unrestrained killing by those who take advantage of an opportunity. Those with murderous intent must be stopped. Otherwise evil itself will destroy the entire world. The Christian understanding of just war theory, of what makes military action ethical and moral and necessary, is based in the fact that sometimes the use of force is the least worst thing possible. That is an important thing for us all to remember. There are things worse than taking an action that might cost lives that might involve American or other military personnel that would indeed use lethal force. But just like police forces are necessary and we draw comfort from the fact that police officers are armed, we understand that in the larger world the restraint of evil is something that requires not only diligence, but periodic urgency,

 

The history of American considerations of these kinds of questions remind us that sometimes we have acted when later we wished we had not. And we also know that our history is replete with instances in which we now wish we had acted when we had the opportunity. Wisdom sometimes comes through the sad experience of history and of making decisions and seeing those decisions go one way and sometimes the other.

 

In the moral calculus, the ethical and political calculus that led President Obama to make that announcement last night, we need to recognize that this comes only after the Islamic State there in Iraq has proved its propensity and determination to commit genocide. We also need to keep in mind that Christians in Iraq, one of the first nations to include Christian communities in the history the Christian church, that Christians have largely been eradicated from much of northern Iraq and their presence in any of Iraq is now very tenuous and seemingly increasingly impossible. Just in recent weeks Christians had to evacuate the town of Mosul after ISIS took over the city, one of Iraq’s largest, and ordered the Christians there to either flee or convert pay attacks that was impossible to pay or face death.

 

As the month of July came to an end just days ago, authorities in the United States government indicated that there were decreasing numbers of Christians to be found anywhere in Iraq and that given just a short amount of time it was likely that no Christians would be left in the nation at all. As Sophie Cousins of USA Today reported on the 30th of July, in terms of Christians “Iraq is gone.” The evacuation, indeed the expulsion of Christians from Mosul led the editors of the Wall Street Journal to write a major editorial that appeared on the 22nd of July entitled, “The Christian Purge from Mosul.” The editors wrote:

 

That such violent bigotry in the name of religion, that is Islam in this case, can exist in the 21st century is hard for many in the Christian world to believe, but that is part of the West’s problem.

 

The editors continued:

 

Jews know all too well that anti-Semitism can inspire murderous behavior. But Christians or post-Christian secularists who are content in their modern prosperity often prefer to turn their heads or blame all religions as equally intolerant.

 

We should note here that this is true in so far as the editors are talking about the mainline moral liberal Protestant denominations and the post-Christian secularists identified by the editors. They went on to say:

 

Today’s religious extremism is almost entirely Islamic. While ISIS’s purge may be the most brutal, Islamist and Egypt have driven thousands of Coptic Christians from homes they occupied for centuries. The same is true across the Muslim parts of Africa. This does not mean, said the editors, that all Muslims are extremist but it does mean that all Muslims have an obligation to denounce and resist the extremist who murder or subjugate in the name of Allah. Too few imams living in the tolerant West will speak up against it.

 

That is a massively important paragraph in a very strategically important editorial –  one that deserves our very close attention. But the final word to the editorial are even more explosive. The editors wrote:

 

As for the post-Christian West, most elites may now be nonbelievers, but a culture that fails to protect believers may eventually find that it lacks the self belief to protect itself.

 

Very honest, very true, and very urgent words from the editors of the Wall Street Journal.

 

2) Courts, not democracy, continues to play major role in normalization of same-sex marriage

 

Here in the United States, the issue of same-sex marriage is back on the front pages of America’s newspapers, and once again it’s leading in many of the discussions in terms of the media and popular culture around the nation. Amanda Holpuch writing for The Guardian in Great Britain about the situation in the United States says that those who are the defenders of traditional marriage are now clearly in retreat virtually everywhere in the United States. She points back to 2008 when California voters approved Proposition Eight – that constitutional amendment to define marriage in that state is exclusively between a man and a woman – as the high watermark of that effort to defend traditional marriage. She says:

 

Six years later, the decision is set to be remembered as one of the last major successes for groups that oppose same-sex marriage.

 

Later in her article she explains:

 

Researchers are still trying to figure out all the pieces that made for the shift. Though some said factors could be the increasing younger voters, who tend to have more liberal beliefs. Alongside the decrease in older voters that Americans are becoming less religious and the more gay people are living their lives openly.

 

One person quoted in the article said:

 

It is really the kind of change you don’t see very often in American politics and one I really think has surprised even the people most optimistic on the same-sex marriage side.

 

One of the interesting aspects of this article is the fact that she cites quite openly the fact that the secularization of American culture is at least understood to be a major contributing factor to this massive moral shift that has produced the momentum toward the legalization of same-sex marriage. She also points to something else that is of great interest. She says that the defenders of traditional marriage are blaming the fact that activist judges are actually replacing the Democratic process in furthering this effort to legalize same-sex marriage. She refers to some who refer to ‘Orwellian judges and elites’ who want people to support same-sex marriage. She writes as if this is a ridiculous claim and yet even in the course of her article she makes very clear that in case after case it has mostly been judges who have reversed the Democratic process, overturning and ruling as unconstitutional amendments and pieces of legislation supported by and voted for democratic majorities in the states.

 

And that leads us to an even more interesting article that appeared just two days ago in the pages of the Washington Post. Robert Barnes, reporting for the Courts and Law column of the post, says that the federal appeals courts hearings that took place in Cincinnati, Ohio this week at the Sixth Circuit may, in his words, “be the roadblock to gay marriage cases in at least four states.” As we have discussed there is a flood of these cases now arriving at the United States circuits, that is the appellate courts. And as we discussed on Wednesday of this week, oral arguments were held in challenges to constitutional amendments or legislation preventing same-sex marriage in the state of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee.

 

Then Barnes writes:

 

It became clear after three hours of arguments that the panel could become the first roadblock for proponents of same-sex marriage who have had an extraordinary winning streak in knocking down state restrictions following a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 2013.

 

He is pointing back of course to the Windsor decision handed down in June of 2013 and the knowledge that ever since then the defenders of traditional marriage have won not one case in the federal courts. He warned that the oral arguments on Wednesday indicated, if the oral arguments reveal anything, that all that might change with the six circuit panel. Specifically, he reported about judge Jeffrey S. Sutton who is he said repeatedly ask attorneys representing the same-sex couples why they didn’t think it better to win marriage rights systematically through the Democratic process capturing, as he said, the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens instead of depending on “five votes of the Supreme Court.” Furthermore, it’s very important to go back to the actual opinions handed down in the Windsor decision back in 2013 and remember that in his dissent Chief Justice John Roberts made very clear that he did not believe that the majority opinion in the Windsor case obligated the court to rule that there was a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, coast-to-coast. Of course, in his scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said that the opinion of the majority written by Anthony Kennedy effectively tipped a hat to the fact that that is the eventual outcome.

 

In any event, as Barnes writes for the Washington Post:

 

A loss might not be the worst thing for proponents of same-sex marriage who are eager to get the case to the High Court. Even in those states where courts have struck down bans, Supreme Court Justices, have blocked marriages until the appeals courts or the High Court itself decides the issue.

 

Barnes is certainly right in that observation. It appears that the question is once again rocketing towards the United States Supreme Court, but the really interesting thing in terms of the Sixth Circuit panels’ consideration was that question asked by Judge Sutton: “Would it not have been better, would it still not be better for this to be settled through the democratic process and not in the courts?”

 

3) Marital infidelity not rising in US because marriage on decline

 

This week’s issue of the magazine The Week includes a very interesting article by Damon Linker. He raises the question: “Is monogamy on the way out?”

 

Linker writes about what he calls a spate of recent articles arguing for the moral acceptance and the legal acceptance of polygamy or so-called polyamory. We will consider those articles and arguments in the future. But Damon Linker’s article is very interesting for the turn he takes.  He writes about those articles supporting polyamory and polygamy and then writes that:

 

A social conservative might say that these essays are perfectly congruent with and even seems to follow of necessity from, the sexual ethic currently sweeping the Western world. One in which the only valid moral consideration in a sexual relationship is individual consent. In such a moral universe, he writes, there’s no reason not to embrace a polyamorous lifestyle and since most human beings find themselves emotionally and physically attracted to multiple people in the course of their lives, monogamywould seem to be doomed.

 

But then he comes back and says:

 

There is just one problem. There is not one shred of evidence to support that prediction.

 

It’s a very interesting claim that is no evidence to support that prediction. And that leads us to ask the question: what is he calling and considering evidence? He points to a poll conducted last year with the Gallup organization found that 91% of Americans disapprove of marital infidelity. He writes:

 

That’s right. In a highly sexualized age, awash in technological temptations and dominated by a nonjudgmental sexual ethic that increasingly encourages men and women to do whatever feels good, nine out of ten Americans judge cheating to be wrong.

 

He goes on to say:

 

That’s higher than the rate of disapproval for human cloning and suicide.

 

He asked what to make of this disjunction. He says:

 

One possibility is the people’s attitudes haven’t caught up to the implications of their moral ideals.

 

As he suggests, once they do the rate of disapproval will fall far and fast to use his words. He says it might happen, but he goes on to say there’s no evidence for it. He suggests that the proponents of polyamory are simply too optimistic that their permissive side is going to win the moral argument without Americans feeling overly guilty. As he writes, with some perception:

 

On the contrary I would say that America’s peculiar mix of unfettered sexuality and stern disapproval is much more likely to produce a culture marked by moral confusion, anxiety, and self-loathing. It certainly won’t, he says, be the free loving happy-go-lucky hippie-commune culture that the polyamorous crave and that social conservatives dread.

 

But again the problem is the evidence to which he points. The fact that the vast majority of Americans say that adultery is wrong or to use the phrase preferred by Linker, “that marital infidelity is wrong,” that evidence is actually not too strong when you consider the fact that so many Americans simply aren’t getting married.

 

As we recently discussed, the rates of cohabitation are skyrocketing in this country, becoming the normative first relationship for many couples, and increasingly the only sexual relationship, with marriage not even on the horizon. Furthermore, the decoupling of sex and marriage in terms of the larger culture means that the opportunity for adultery is significantly reduced by the reduction of marriage. The bare fact is this: you can’t commit marital infidelity if you’re not married and that more than anything else turns the question back to the importance of marriage and the centrality of marriage, and the fact that if you remove marriage from the equation, you’re left with nothing but moral anarchy.

 

4) 40th anniversary of Nixon’s departure from White House reminder that even President is not above the law

 

Finally, we need to note that the tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of that Marine One helicopter arriving on the lawn of the White House to evacuate Richard Nixon from his position and from his residence as President of the United States. As an eighth grader in 1972, I wore a “We Need Nixon Now” button to school proudly, and I certainly hoped for the reelection of Richard Nixon as president. I knew enough, even as an eighth grader, to know that the worldview distinctions between Richard Nixon and George McGovern were so monumental that I certainly hoped and prayed for the election of Richard Nixon even though I was a long way from having a vote. And so it was the just days before I entered the 10th grade, the President of the United States resigned. Richard Nixon became the first, and to this point only, United States president to resign his office. And he did so in the face of an almost certain impeachment and then a conviction on the floor the United States Senate. The President was almost sure to be found guilty of having committed ‘high crimes and misdemeanor’ – the constitutional designation for the responsibility of impeachment and conviction for removal from office. And he did so mostly associated with crimes that were undertaken not just in the 1972 campaign but in what appeared almost certain to have been an organized cover-up with instruction of justice in the aftermath of his spectacular victory in that election.

 

Looking back after 40 years it almost appears that Richard Nixon is one of those tragic figures of history. Not tragic in that history happened to him, but tragic because his legacy is so tragic in terms of the American political context. On the other hand, it is certainly easy to look back to August 9, 1974 and see one of the lowest moments of American democracy. But from the perspective of 40 years, perhaps we should look back and see it as something other than that. As a victory for democracy as in this nation it was proved that not even the President of the United States is above the grasp of justice. That not even the President of the United States can commit high crimes and misdemeanors and remain in office. In the most tragic way, the resignation of Richard Nixon pointed to the vitality and endurance of the American Democratic experiment of our Constitution and our commitment to ordered liberty I still have that “We Need Nixon Now” button but it exists now as a reminder not to put too much trust, not to put too much confidence in any elected official, or for that matter in any human being. That’s a bad moral lesson, not a bad worldview observation to keep in mind as we look back tomorrow to the 40th year anniversary of Richard Nixon’s final way from the White House lawn.

 

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 08-08-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Genocide and persecution in Iraq rightly causes Pres. Obama to authorize air strikes

Obama Authorizes Iraq Air Strikes Amid Genocide Threat, Bloomberg Businessweek (Margaret Talev, Terry Atlas, and Toy Capaccio)

Christians flee Mosul amid threats to convert or die, USA Today (Sophie Cousins)

The Christian Purge From Mosul, Wall Street Journal (Editorial Board)

2) Courts, not democracy, continues to play major role in normalization of same-sex marriage

Foes of same-sex marriage fight on as courts and opinion turn against them, The Guardian (Amanda Holpuch)

Federal appeals court may be roadblock to gay marriage cases in four states, Washington Post (Robert Barnes)

3) Marital infidelity not rising in US because marriage on decline

Is monogamy on the way out?, The Week (Damon Linker)

4) 40th anniversary of Nixon’s departure from White House reminder that even President is not above the law

Richard Nixon’s long shadow, Washington Post (George F. Will)