R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 355

Transcript: The Briefing 06-13-14

The Briefing

 

June 13, 2014

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

 

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

 

A view of the future after the homosexual revolution is made clear in the metro section of last Friday’s edition of The Washington Post. There in that story we’re introduced to David Catania, who’s one of the candidates for the mayoralty race here in the DC later this year. And the article also introduces us to Jake Hudson. He’s a man in a same-sex marriage here in the District of Columbia, and he did not participate in last weekend’s gay pride parade here in Washington, DC. That parade did draw an approximately 150,000 participants to the nation’s capital last weekend, but Jake Hudson didn’t go because he says it isn’t necessary anymore. “I hate to say it, but we have just about everything we could want.” He said, “In DC, we live life and there’s nothing really stopping that. We’re post-whatever—post gay strife. It’s just not an issue here anymore.”

 

What makes this interesting to The Washington Post is the fact that David Catania, an independent candidate for the office of mayor here in the District of Columbia, is an openly gay man, and yet he might not even receive the preponderance of openly gay votes. That’s a very interesting development. It caught the attention of The Washington Post and for a reason that should have our attention as well. After the moral revolution normalizing homosexuality here in the District of Columbia, being an openly gay candidate might not be even that remarkable anymore. As Aaron Davis of The Washington Post reports, what it means if the District is indeed “post gay” remains unclear in the race between Catania—he’s an independent at-large member of the DC Council. He’s running against another member of the DC Council, Muriel Bowser, and she is the Democratic nominee. But, as Davis writes, one thing remains clear. Catania’s openness about his sexual orientation may no longer guarantee the votes of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender residents here in Washington, DC.

 

Interestingly, Davis also reports that the District of Columbia’s LGBT community might account for as many as 10% of all voters this coming November. That’s one out of ten voters in the District. Commenting on the upcoming mayor’s race, one resident, Bob Summersgill said, “I’m not going to vote for David because he’s gay or Bowser because she’s black or a woman.” He went on to say, “Either one is going to sign any gay-rights legislation that gets to their desk. I’m not worried about any of that.” In other words, right now in the District of Columbia, what’s actually inconceivable is that any viable candidate within the District, running for the office of mayor, will have to do exactly what Summersgill says, and that is sign any gay-rights legislation that gets to their desk.

 

With reference to the gay-rights parade that took place this past weekend, Davis writes that when that District of Columbia event took place (the 39th annual), it took place as same-sex marriage fights are still roiling states from Pennsylvania to Oregon. He says the District looms as the backdrop for a coming series of federal court decisions that could decide the same-sex marriage issue permanently. The next paragraph is crucial:

 

But for parade organizers and aging icons of the District’s gay rights battles, this year’s festival is getting underway amid a growing sense of inevitability that same-sex marriage is coming to all states — and that gay rights are no longer a political driving force.

 

That’s one of the most interesting insights from this particular article. Once homosexuality is normalized and same-sex marriage is legalized, there’s a moral reset for the entire culture on the other side, and the District of Columbia, our nation’s capital district, is a microcosm of the American future in this regard. The kinds of issues and debates that would be highly divisive and controversial in other parts of the country are simply not here. As Davis says:

 

[This is] a city where gays for five years have easily married, robust laws prohibit discrimination and two transgender women sit on the city’s Commission on Human Rights.

 

As he summarizes:

 

The District’s advanced evolution on gay rights can be traced to an early start. The first group to seek anti-discrimination laws formed in 1959.

 

This has led to a very interesting debate in the LGBT community. Once these things have been normalized and legalized, is there any issue that still remains? One person quoted in the article said, “A lot of folks might view same-sex marriage as the quintessential issue, but there are a lot of elements that are important.” But as this article makes clear, it’s not at all evident what those issues might now be.

 

And that leads to another insight from this article. The gay-rights community, summarized in those initials LGBT, will not remain a sexual minority community with just those initials. There are other sexual minorities launching similar efforts to normalize and legalize their behaviors and relationships, and that means that the next battlefront, the next cultural divide in America, once those who are pushing for the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage have their way, is that there will be other lifestyles, other behaviors, other relationships, other sexual minorities, who will be wanting to add their initials to this list. And that is what we have to look for in the future.

 

Shifting to developments in our churches and denominations, this week the Southern Baptist Convention met in Baltimore, Maryland. And in the course of that meeting, the messengers (as they are called) to the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution that has made headline news around the world. That resolution stated a very clear biblical understanding of gender roles and the issue of the transsexual revolution. The resolution, overwhelmingly adopted by those messengers, made very clear that God as Creator has created human beings as male and female and that gender or sex designation is a part of the goodness of God’s creation. That actually goes back, of course, to what the church has affirmed in terms of the gender identity and gender role issue from the very beginning. But it also goes back to the year 2000, when the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a revised confession of faith that stated very clearly that gender is a part of the goodness of God’s creation. In other words, it is not something that is merely biologically imposed upon us. It is a gift of our Creator, who created us male and female for His glory and as a basic pattern of human flourishing.

 

The Southern Baptist Convention voted that way on the resolution in a way that surprised no one. But it came with a clarity that is altogether rare in terms of denominational and church debates on this issue. The Southern Baptist Convention registered a very clear biblical and theological position and, at the same time, called for a gospel-driven, compassionate pastoral ministry to those who are struggling with confusion over gender identity; what is now designated in the psychiatric and psychological world as gender dysphoria. That’s one of those very difficult things for the church to do: to accomplish simultaneously sending a very clear message from the Scriptures that declares the rightness of one understanding and thus the wrongness of any other, and, at the same time, calling for compassion.

 

But that points to one of the most basic affirmations of the Christian worldview, and that is this: that compassion and truth are never at odds, but, rightly understood, are exactly the same. That is to affirm something that is absolutely counterrevolutionary in today’s cultural context. We understand that the truth is itself compassionate; that we know the truth because God loved us so much that, as the late evangelical theologian Carl Henry put it, He loved us so much that He forfeited His own personal privacy to reveal Himself and His ways to us in order that we would know Him. In other words, when you have someone who suggests that compassion should come at the expense of truth, it isn’t genuine compassion. And when someone says that the church should be declared in a way that isn’t compassionate, that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of truth. The gospel itself comes as just this kind of compassionate truth. The gospel is very clear about the reality, indeed, the specificity of human sin, declaring our sin in order that we would know ourselves to be sinners and then to declare the goodness of God, His grace and mercy towards us, in that, as the Scripture says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The gospel is itself the perfect microcosm for the compassion of truth, and Christians must always recognize that whenever we face a controversial issue or a very vexing pastoral situation, the truth, rightly understood and rightly applied, is indeed compassion, and compassion is the truth.

 

Summer is traditionally the season for denominational meetings, and even as the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention have gone home to their churches from Baltimore, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA is going to be meeting in just a few days in Detroit, Michigan. The PCUSA is a liberal Presbyterian denomination and it has been moving steadily left on the issue of homosexuality and same-sex relationships for the last several decades. But now, as Madeleine Mysko reports for the Baltimore Sun, when the assembly of the PCUSA meets in the next few days in Detroit, Michigan—and approximately 5,000 of them, by the way—they’re going to be voting on marriage equality. They’re going to be voting on the normalization of same-sex marriage as a ceremony recognized by their denominations. As she writes:

 

Decisions made at this General Assembly will affect the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) couples in the denomination who want their marriages to be blessed with the same joy and affirmation as the marriages of other couples in the church.

 

Madeleine Mysko is writing a commentary piece for the Baltimore Sun, and she tips her hat when she says that this church, to which she’s belonged for more than 30 years, should change its policies to allow same-sex couples to marry in the church. She says:

 

It is not such big news anymore that marriage equality is up for deliberation. In state after state, in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, courts have been overturning laws against same-sex marriages in rapid succession. At the same time, it is difficult to keep count of all the states — to date, 17 and the District of Columbia — that have legalized same-sex marriage.

 

The next paragraph is very clear:

 

But when religion is often seen as an obstacle to marriage equality, it is big news that a denomination of over 1.8 million members in the U.S. may well say a clear “I do.” And make no mistake: Marriage equality isn’t appearing on the docket at this assembly [which is going to take place in Detroit] merely as an aftershock to the cultural change rolling forward outside the church doors. In fact, Presbyterians have been deliberating over the inclusion of LGBTQ persons for decades.

 

She then says:

 

I would argue that the effects will ripple out from there, and those effects should matter to all of us. What’s happening among Presbyterians this year isn’t as much about defining marriage, or about the marriage rights of same-sex couples, as it is about discerning what is right with respect to human relationships.

 

Now, oddly enough, as someone who’s on exactly the opposite side of the issue, I agree with her about what’s at stake, and that is discerning what is right with respect to human relationships. But it’s clear that Madeleine Mysko is deciding that what is right is what is right in terms of the prevailing cultural moral climate. That’s the problem for the PCUSA. Long ago, it unmoored itself; it unhinged itself from biblical authority. It did so when revising its confession of faith way back in the 1970s. And now, in the year 2014, it is on the threshold of absolutely blessing same-sex unions and revising not only its long-standing policy, but the policy of the Christian Church and the understanding of Christians for two millennia. That is no small matter. So when the PCUSA and its general assembly come together in Detroit, they’re not just going to be contemplating reversing their denomination’s stand, they’re going to be standing over against the consistent teaching of the Christian church for two millennia. And also note this: even when the PCUSA, as is expected, takes this decision, it’s going to be standing over against the vast majority of Christians living on the globe today. That’s something that is often missing in terms of the secular analysis of this issue in the nation’s press, but it’s also something that is altogether missing from the discussion of this issue in many churches and denominations.

 

So in terms of the discussion thus far, no one is surprised when the Southern Baptist Convention, a very clearly conservative evangelical denomination, takes a stand that is established clearly in terms of the teachings of Scripture. And we’re really not surprised that a liberal Protestant denomination, such as the PCUSA, takes the almost exactly opposite approach, not referencing Scripture in this case, but rather the prevailing moral climate. But what’s really interesting in terms of the discussion right now is what might happen in United Methodist Church.

 

As Michelle Boorstein reports for The Washington Post, hundreds of United Methodist pastors have signed a proposal aimed at avoiding a schism over homosexuality in a denomination that has, until recently, largely sat out the gay equality movement. This new proposal, signed by dozens of pastors, indeed, hundreds of United Methodist pastors, is entitled “A Way Forward.” It, according to Boorstein, offers churches and regional bodies the option to make up their own minds on issues as affirming gay clergy and same-sex marriage. But make no mistake, the United Methodist Church’s doctrine clearly says, “The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”

 

That raises the obvious question: How can a denomination say that it officially teaches that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching and then allow what amounts to a local option to defy that very clear teaching? Boorstein reports, the proposal reflects a hope on the part of those who signed the document that the country’s second largest Protestant denomination won’t let itself fall into multimillion dollar litigation over church properties the way other faith groups, including the Episcopal Church—and we might add the PCUSA—have on the issue. One Methodist pastor quoted in the article, Tom Berlin of Florus United Methodist Church in Herndon, Virginia, said, “Like your family, you can disagree but not breakup over it. The issue of homosexuality seems to have an unusual hold over America and, in particular, the church in America.” Boorstein then summarizes:

 

United Methodists, like much of mainline Protestantism, have become increasingly accepting of equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. White mainline Protestants account for the most support of gay equality in any Christian group in the United States, but United Methodists, unlike most other denominations, is global and is seeing its more conservative branches in Africa and Asia quickly growing and becoming more influential.

 

This is a really crucial issue. As I said, the PCUSA, if it votes as expected to normalize same-sex relationships and begin to offer same-sex wedding ceremonies, if it does so, it’s going to set itself over against not only two millennia of Christian teaching, but the position and conviction held by the vast majority of Christians around the world today. But the PCUSA involves only Presbyterian churches, mostly now liberal Presbyterian churches, in the USA. The United Methodist Church is a global church. That was a decision made by Methodists decades ago and it has now put the liberals in that denomination in a very awkward position. It is expected that in 2016, when the next big conference, that is, the general conference of the United Methodist Church is held, non-American delegates will outnumber the delegates from America, and when that happens, there will be virtually no chance that the United Methodist Church will normalize same-sex relationships. This has put the liberals in that denomination in the position of trying to press as fast as possible for some allowance for them to do exactly what they know their church is not going to allow by the time it comes to 2016. But the interesting thing that is going on in the United Methodist Church is that that church held a much-publicized trial of a clergyman for performing a same-sex marriage ceremony and defrocked him last year, and then fast on the heels of that church trial, another United Methodist bishop decided that he would not try yet another Methodist clergyman who had also performed a same-sex marriage ceremony—in this case, the retired dean of the Yale Divinity School. And that has put conservatives in the United Methodist Church into an absolute outrage, and that outrage has changed their disposition towards this controversy.

 

As Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports for Religion News Service:

 

A group of 80 pastors [on the conservative side] is suggesting that the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination is facing an imminent split because of an inability to resolve long-standing theological disputes about sexuality and church doctrine.

 

This represents a revolutionary position on the part of conservatives in United Methodist Church. Just ten years ago, most of these leading conservatives said that they did not want their church to split over the issue, but now, even as the liberals have been pressing so hard for the normalization of homosexuality and are now in outright rebellion against the doctrine and discipline of their denomination, conservative leaders have changed their mind. One of the most significant and respected of these conservative leaders is the Reverend Maxie Dunnam, who is a retired United Methodist pastor and also a retired president of Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. He said, “We can no longer talk about schism as something that might happen in the future. Schism is already taking place in our denomination.” This, as Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports, is a drastic departure from where that same Maxie Dunnam was just ten years ago. In 2004, after that year’s general conference, that same Maxie Dunnam said, “I don’t want us to talk about separation. That’s not a game where our energy needs to be focused.” But, as we might say, that was then and this is now. What’s changed is the fact that liberals and the denomination have declared an outright rebellion against the doctrine and discipline of the church, and in that regard, Maxie Dunnam is profoundly right. When you have liberals in the denomination in outright rebellion against the discipline of the church, and the doctrine of the church clearly stated in its confessional materials, you don’t have the possibility of a schism, you don’t have the potential of schism, you have, as Maxie Dunnam rightly says, a schism. It has already happened. Now it’s a matter of whether or not the denomination is going to declare it to be so.

 

Furthermore, Maxie Dunnam and the other signatories to this statement from conservative pastors also make another profoundly important point:

 

Talk of a middle way or of agreeing to disagree is comforting and sounds Christlike; however, such language only denies the reality we need to admit. Neither side will find agreeing to disagree acceptable.

 

Why is that so profoundly true? It is because what we’re talking about here is not an issue that can be nuanced one way or the other. There is not a middle position. No matter how comforting and compassionate that might be advertised to be. The church will decide whether it will or will not acknowledge and recognize same-sex unions. The denomination will decide whether it will or will not allow pastors to perform same-sex ceremonies. There is no middle way. These conservative pastors worked for the last decade to find a middle way and now they’ve discovered that middle way simply does not exist. In that sense, the United Methodist Church’s gift to the larger Christian world may be the honest acknowledgment that schism is inevitable if you have two positions like this that are directly at odds: one standing on 2,000 years of Christian testimony and clear biblical authority; the other standing in defiance to that tradition and that truth, and standing, instead, in lockstep with the revolution now going on in the culture. Between those two sides, the pastors are exactly right in this statement. Agreeing to disagree will simply to neither side be acceptable.

 

The biblical worldview profoundly affirms the fact that truth unites, but the Bible also makes the opposite clear. When it comes to the infinite difference between what is true and what is false, the truth also inevitably divides.

 

Sunday is Father’s Day in America; a holiday that perhaps more than any other points to the tremendous confusion that is now writ large across our society. Our society seems to know how to celebrate Mother’s Day, but Father’s Day is an altogether different matter. I wish to you and yours a very happy Father’s Day. But we need to be watching very closely as we detect the confusion that is now so pervasive about fatherhood in this society. On Monday, we’ll look back at the lessons learned from our culture’s confusion and celebration of fatherhood on Father’s Day.

 

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. Remember that we’re right now collecting questions for the upcoming new season of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Just call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’m speaking to you from Washington, DC, and I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 06-13-14

Podcast Transcript

1) DC mayoral race a glimpse of future after the homosexual revolution

Series of gay rights victories imbues elements of post-gay politics in race for D.C. mayor, Washington Post (Aaron C. Davis)

2) SBC resolution on transgender issue example of the clear marriage of compassion and truth

Southern Baptists oppose gender reassignment, Washington Post (Adelle M. Banks)

Higher Ground: Love but not acceptance, Washington Times (Meredith Somers)

Southern Baptists Pass Transgender Resolution, Disavow Efforts to Alter ‘Bodily Identity’, Christian Post (Morgan Lee)

3) PCUSA vote on same-sex marriage mere aftershock of cultural change

Presbyterians to vote on marriage equality, Baltimore Sun (Madeleine Mysko)

4) Global United Methodists face split with American liberal minority over same-sex marriage

Trying to avoid split, United Methodist pastors propose new approach to gay rights issues, Washington Post (Michelle Boorstein)

Conservative United Methodists say divide over sexuality is ‘irreconcilable’, Religion News Service (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)

Transcript: The Briefing 06-12-14

The Briefing

 

June 12, 2014

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

 

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

 

Huge news out of California this week when a Los Angeles judge ruled the teacher tenure laws in California are a form of discrimination against the poor—children especially in impoverished situations who are stuck in schools with inferior teachers. The state of California like so many other states actually recognizes a right of children to a quality education. And in the state of California, Judge Rolf Treu of the Los Angeles District Court ruled that California’s teacher tenure law actually makes that kind of education impossible for many impoverished children, especially those in inner-city schools. The decision was somewhat shocking and it is also very sweeping. It strikes down all of California’s tenure laws, setting up an eventual battle that will surely reach the California Supreme Court.

 

And in an odd twist, it was a decision that was celebrated by many on both the cultural and political right and also on the left. There is common cause in California on the right and the left against tenure laws. The state’s teacher tenure laws are so extreme in California that teachers can gain tenure after only between 18 months to 36 months of teaching, and once they have that tenure, they are almost impossible to fire; regardless of whether or not they’re actually able to perform as teachers in the classroom. California’s one of the states that has the last-in, first-out provision, which means that in a time of financial constriction when teachers have to be let go or teaching positions are reduced, the teachers who are let go are the most recently hired, regardless of whether or not they are the better teachers. Theodore Boutrous, who was the attorney for the plaintiffs in this case, said, “This is going to be the beginning of a series of these lawsuits that could fix many of the problems in education systems nationwide.” He went on to say, “We’re going to roll them out to other jurisdictions.” It’s very interesting that in this case Theodore Boutrous had the assistance of former US Solicitor General Ted Olson. He is one of the attorneys that pressed for the legalization of same-sex marriage and won the decision on the Proposition 8 case at the United States Supreme Court just this past June. Lyndsey Layton, the reporter for The Washington Post, summarized the decision in these words:

 

A Los Angeles judge Tuesday struck down teacher tenure and other California laws that offer job security to educators, a decision that is expected to trigger widespread challenges of teacher job protections nationwide.

 

The teacher tenure law in California is just slightly more radical than that which is found in most states, and it’s the kind of law that has been demanded by teacher unions. One spokesman for such a union, Dennis Van Roekel—he’s the president of the National Education Association—he claimed that the “lawsuit was never about helping students, but is yet another attempt by millionaires and corporate special interests to undermine the teaching profession and push their own ideological agenda on public schools and students while working to privatize public education.” That’s the kind of argument the teacher unions have used over and over again, but it’s now falling on deaf ears; in this case, not only on the political right, but also on the political left. This is going to be a particularly stressful issue for the Democratic Party where, in the most recent Democratic National Convention, at least one out of five and perhaps one out of four delegates to the Democratic National Convention were actually members of one or another of the teachers unions.

 

But the common cause between the right and the left on this case have to do with the welfare of students—students trapped in underperforming schools and underperforming neighborhoods and teachers who are also underperforming in the classroom. A very revealing statement was offered in The Washington Post by Randi Weingarten, identified as president of the American Federation of Teachers (one of the teacher’s unions). Weingarten said that the lawsuit “focused on the relatively small pool of grossly ineffective teachers, estimated at 1 to 3% of California’s 275,000 public school teachers,” and Weingarten says it ignores other factors that affect the quality of education, especially for poor children.

 

Now let’s look at the math here. In this case, Randi Weingarten claims that the lawsuit focused on, again, the relatively small pool of grossly ineffective teachers. Now notice the threshold here is not ineffective nor even largely ineffective, but the term Weingarten used was actually “grossly ineffective,” and we can only ponder how ineffective grossly ineffective is. But the percentage that Weingarten gave was that these grossly ineffective teachers are only—he used the word only here—about 1 to 3% of California’s 275,000 teachers. Now 1% would then amount to 2,750 teachers; 3% would represent more than 8,000 California public school teachers. That’s 8,000. And The Wall Street Journal also reports that the actual cost of removing even one grossly ineffective teacher ranges between $250 and $400,000, making it virtually impossible.

 

The Christian worldview affirms that the worker, in the words of the Scripture, is worthy of his hire. A man or a woman hired for a job is worthy of the salary so long as the job is being done. But the Christian worldview does not in any way suggest that anyone is due a salary or income for a job that is not done, much less for a job that is done at such a low level that it is described as grossly ineffective. The protection of those who have these jobs by the teacher unions is an atrocity, and yet it’s been an atrocity that has been routinely politically defended in terms of state legislatures and in other political arenas, but now this single judge in Los Angeles may have turned the tables on this entire equation. At the very least, everyone expects that this case will work its way up to the California Supreme Court. And if nothing else, Judge Rolf Treu of Los Angeles has made very clear what the issues actually are. This is going to make it far more difficult for any other judge or any other court to cavalierly and carelessly rule that teacher tenure has support when the children are clearly suffering.

 

Next shifting to the state of Colorado, The Washington Times reports that a Christian Baker, who was just recently ordered by Colorado Civil Rights Commission to abide by a judge’s order and make cakes for same-sex partners, said, “No, that’s not going to happen.” In this case, Jack Phillips, who is the owner of a company known as Masterpiece Cake Shop, said, “I’m not going to make cakes for same-sex weddings. That violates my First Amendment speech and my duty as a Christian abiding by my Savior.” We’ve given attention to this case before and especially in the earlier event when the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that Mr. Phillips simply had to make cakes for same-sex weddings, but now a judge has affirmed that commission’s decision and this man now finds himself in a very serious situation. He has the choice basically of going out of business or of complying with the commission’s order. Judge Robert Spencer with the Colorado Office of Administrative Courts ruled that he must serve same-sex couples. Similar cases and decisions have been handed down in states like New Mexico and Arizona and Washington State having to do with florists, cake bakers, and wedding photographers. What unites all three of these is that they are involved in expressive professionalism. In other words, they’re using artistry. They’re making a statement. And now these states or state commissions are requiring these companies and the people who work for them to violate their own religious and Christian consciences in order to have to serve same-sex weddings. We’ve been following these cases with great interest, but what makes the case in Colorado so interesting right now is a statement that was made by Mr. Phillips’ attorney Nicolle Martin. Nicolle Martin said that the order that Mr. Phillips is now supposed to abide by not only requires him to serve same-sex couples against his religious convictions, but—note this very carefully—also to take sensitivity and anti-discriminatory training.

 

Now what does that mean? That means that this man, having been found in violation of Colorado’s anti-bias legislation, now being forced by a commission and affirmed by a judge that he must serve same-sex couples and offer professional services to same-sex weddings, he’s now being told that he must also undergo sensitivity and anti-discriminatory training by the thought police. This is a form of ideological control. It’s the kind of thing you might expect from the Soviet Union or from another communist country. It’s not the kind of thing that you would even contemplate would be possible in the United States of America, but now it’s a reality in our state of Colorado. And furthermore, it’s also a reality in many other settings, such as most especially the American college and university setting where students can be required to undergo the same kind of so-called sensitivity or anti-bias or anti-discriminatory training by the thought police.

 

Moral revolutions like the one we are now experiencing progress step-by-step. Some of these steps are small; some of the steps are large. Some are noticed; some are not noticed. This is the kind of step that needs to be noticed very carefully because now this man is not only being told by the commission and now by a judge that he must serve same-sex couples and use his professional artistic expertise to be employed in same-sex weddings, he’s being told that he must agree with and undergo training by the thought police in an effort, a very clear and subversive effort, not only to change his actions, but to change his mind. That’s a very ominous development and one that threatens not only this cake baker in Colorado, but every single American citizen.

 

All too often news articles and headlines pass your view and you have to wonder if the story could possibly be true, but in many cases they actually are. Such is the case with articles that recently ran in USA Today and The Wall Street Journal having to do with how certain countries, especially European countries, are beginning to rethink how they contemplate and calculate their GDP, or gross domestic product. That is the single most important economic indicator. That’s the number that people point to both within and without the nation or the economy in order to point to the basic health. It’s also the basic comparative figure such that when you look at countries in terms of their GDP, you measure growth or constriction by the various levels of the GDP reported overtime. That’s what makes the story so interesting.

 

First of all, for USA Today, reporter Trish Regan tells us that the mafia has long been one of Italy’s biggest businesses and now it’s about to get some credit for it. This is GDP served Italian style. As she writes:

 

Italy is changing how it calculates its gross domestic product, a measurement of the overall economy, to include black market activity — everything from prostitution to illegal drug sales to smuggling and arms trafficking. Economists predict illegal sales will add 1.3 percentage points to GDP this year.

 

So in very plain terms, what Italy proposes to do is to count illegal activity, everything from prostitution to gunrunning, in its GDP because it doesn’t want to lose that economic information. But you could also say it doesn’t want to lose the ability to brag about the additional 1.3 percentage points; something that politicians would look to with tremendous favor. As reporter Trish Regan acknowledges:

 

By including the black market, for which there are no concrete ways to measure and accurately determine value, the Italian government will be able to manipulate its GDP numbers in a way that’s bound to open it to criticism and agitate its Northern [European] neighbors. Simultaneously, investors will learn to dismiss, or at least, discount, Italy’s statistics, since they won’t be regarded as “real.”

 

Well of course they won’t, but as USA Today also reports:

 

The reason Italy is becoming creative with its accounting is because it wants to (and the European Union needs it to) improve its appearance.

 

But just days after that story ran in USA Today, a similar account ran in The Wall Street Journal. Josh Zumbrun reports:

 

New methods of measuring economies sometimes raise eyebrows. Even more so when they involve prostitutes and mounds of cocaine. The U.K., Ireland and Italy are among the nations now moving to include illicit doings when tallying their gross domestic product.

 

Now this story tells us that it’s not just Italy; it’s Britain, Ireland, and other nations as well. Zumbrun tells us:

 

The [United Kingdom] could add as much as $9 billion to the value of its GDP by including prostitution and about $7.4 billion by adding illegal drugs.

 

Those are just by current estimates. Not to be outdone, Italy will include smuggling as well as drugs and prostitution. Both changes will begin, according to The Wall Street Journal, later this year. And not surprisingly, other nations in Europe are also poised to fall in line with the European Union call to standardize and broaden GDP’s. The Wall Street Journal account also gives the political context.

 

Some European countries have extra incentives to inflate the size of their economies. In addition to bragging rights, a higher GDP helps keep a nation’s debt and deficits within the EU’s prescribed targets.

 

Also in the United Kingdom, you have the report that it will estimate consumption of at least six drugs: crack cocaine, powder cocaine, heroin, cannabis, ecstasy and amphetamines. Officials there will first calculate the number of drug users based on crime surveys and then multiplied by an estimate of the average amount of drugs consumed per user.

 

If this sounds like insanity to you, you’re absolutely seeing the situation in right and rational terms. What about prostitution? Zumbrun reports:

 

For prostitutes, the statisticians will begin with an estimated tally of on-street prostitutes from the London Metropolitan Police and an estimate of off-street prostitutes from a nongovernment group that studies violence against women and girls. The number of prostitutes will be assumed to rise or fall along with the male population.

 

I’m not even going to read the rest of this formula. It is simply evidence of insanity.

 

One major economic authority in the United Kingdom, Thomas Costerg, who’s with the bank known as Standard Chartered, says that even as governments try to do this, the effort simply will not work. They’re trying, he says, just to fudge the numbers. The problem, as he points out, “as you can get very theoretical and there could be some side effects, including the rising skepticism of statistics in the general population.” You figure? This rising skepticism is otherwise known as common sense.

 

And there’s another point from the Christian worldview to make very clear here. When a government tries to use this kind of calculation in order to add the economic energy from these kinds of illicit and sinful activities to the gross domestic product, the government then has the incentive to make sure that these numbers continually rise in order to meet further growth and economic expectations. That’s a very perverse picture. It’s a picture, however, of what happens when people begin to try to do anything to fudge the figures, and, in this case, there appears to be an easy way out for these countries: simply include illegal activities from drug sales to gunrunning to just about anything including prostitution. This is a sign of a very sick society and the very fact that this is being taken seriously is evidence that the sicknesses is spreading, not just in Italy but throughout the European Union.

 

Finally, I came across an amazing statement made by Senator John McCain when he was speaking at an event celebrating the life of Henry Kissinger, the former United States Secretary of State. Back when John McCain was a prisoner of war in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, Henry Kissinger came to negotiate the end of the Vietnam War, including the release of those POWs. The North Vietnamese offered the early release of John McCain, and that would’ve been something that would’ve been an enormous propaganda gain for the North Vietnamese since John McCain was well known as a political prisoner and a prisoner of war because his father was a well-known naval admiral. Henry Kissinger refused to allow the release of this one American prisoner of war, John McCain, who had not only been imprisoned, but tortured during his time in that awful North Vietnamese prison. And in his speech for Henry Kissinger, John McCain thanked the former Secretary of State for not allowing his release before the rest of his fellow prisoners of war. It’s an amazing statement. Senator McCain said:

 

For several years, a long time ago, I struggled to preserve my honor in a situation where it was severely tested. The longer you struggle with something, the more you come to cherish it. And after a while, my honor, which in that situation was entirely invested in my relations and the reputation I had with my fellow POWs, became not just my most cherished possession, it was my only possession. I had nothing else left.

 

When Henry came to Hanoi to conclude the agreement that would end America’s war in Vietnam, the Vietnamese told him they would send me home with him. He refused the offer. “Commander McCain will return in the same order as the others,” he told them. He knew my early release would be seen as favoritism to my father and a violation of our code of conduct. By rejecting this last attempt to suborn a dereliction of duty, Henry saved my reputation, my honor, my life, really. And I’ve owed him a debt ever since.

 

So, I salute my friend and benefactor, Henry Kissinger, the classical realist who did so much to make the world safer for his country’s interests, and by so doing safer for the ideals that are its pride and purpose. And who, out of his sense of duty and honor, once saved a man he never met.

 

In a day in which there are all too few testimonies to character and honor, that is one of the most astounding testimonies I’ve ever seen. A man who had been tortured by the North Vietnamese thanks the former American Secretary of State for not facilitating his early release because it would’ve cost him his honor. That remarkable testimony was given this past June 2nd at an event honoring Henry Kissinger on his 90th birthday. That statement was deeply moving to me, and I believe it will be equally moving to you.

 

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. Remember that we’re taking questions right now for the new season of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition that will begin in late summer. Just call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’m speaking to you from Baltimore, Maryland, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 06-12-14

1) California ruling opposes teacher tenure law for sake of children’s education

California court rules teacher tenure creates impermissible unequal conditions, Washington Post (Lindsey Layton)

2) Christian baker required to think ‘correctly’ as well as serve same-sex couples

Christian baker bucks order for gay weddings: ‘I’m not going to make cakes’ for them, Washington Times (Cheryl K. Chumley)

3) European nations to adjust GDP by including  illegal activities for economy’s appearance

Italy to include sex, drugs in GDP, USA Today (Trish Regan)

Sex, Drugs and GDP: the Challenge of Measuring the Shadow Economy, Wall Street Journal (Josh Zumbrun)

4) McCain praises Kissinger for preserving his honor during time as POW

Notable & Quotable: John McCain remembers how Henry Kissinger helped preserve his honor as a prisoner of war, Wall Street Journal (John McCain)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 06-11-14

The Briefing

 

June 11, 2014

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

 

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

 

Returning to a story that made big news just a matter of a few weeks ago, The New York Times ran a headline yesterday that reads, “Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy.” The article is by Michael Paulson and it’s a very fair report on a major dynamic now taking place on many of America’s leading and not-so-leading colleges and universities. It is indeed a collision; a collision between the new bias policies adopted by so many academic institutions and, on the other side, evangelical organizations and the integrity of their own ministry. To his credit, Michael Paulson, the reporter for The New York Times, seems to understand exactly what’s going on. He writes:

 

For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.

 

After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers.

 

In a collision between religious freedom and antidiscrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the college’s demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.

 

Clearly we have a problem. The student Christian organizations are unable to accept the nonbiased policy which would allow non-Christians to participate in leadership positions without either compromising or entirely denying their organization’s Christian identity and their own Christian convictions. As Paulson explains:

 

Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities’ desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.

 

He goes on to report:

 

[From] Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor [of that giant, nation’s largest university system] is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders.

 

You’ll notice this doesn’t even make a direct statement about sexuality. It’s about religious conviction. The groups are now being told that they cannot discriminate even in the leadership of their organization on the basis of religion. Paulson then goes to Nashville, Tennessee; where at Vanderbilt University over a dozen Christian groups have already had to lose their official standing over the very same policy issue. In a key paragraph from The New York Times coverage, we read:

 

The evangelical groups say they, too, welcome anyone to participate in their activities, including gay men and lesbians, as well as nonbelievers, seekers and adherents of other faiths. But they insist that, in choosing leaders who often oversee Bible study and prayer services, it is only reasonable that they be allowed to require some basic Christian faith — in most cases, an explicit agreement that Jesus was divine and rose from the dead, and often an implicit expectation that unmarried student leaders, gay or straight, will abstain from sex.

 

Now, needless to say, that is hardly a very robust definition of Christian identity. At the very least, it is barely minimal, but it’s enough to run into direct conflict with these new bias policies on American college and university campuses.

 

The cost of forfeiting this kind of official university recognition includes the loss of access to university students, to university facilities, and even in some cases to the use of the university’s name. As Paulson also indicates, this is not the case everywhere. There are some institutions, including the University of Florida, the University of Houston, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas, that have decided in their policies to exempt Christian organizations, indeed, religious organizations, from these bias nondiscrimination policies. In an amazing statement, one of the student leaders from Cal State, that’s Austin Weatherby, a 20-year-old, he said, “We’re not willing to water down our beliefs in order to be accepted”. He furthermore said, “Anyone can join, but if you want to lead a Bible study, you need to believe these things.” One of the things he says such a leader should believe—well, it stipulates here: belief in the holy Trinity and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Once again, we’re talking about a very minimal definition of the Christian faith, but, once again, quite enough to run into a direct collision with these antidiscrimination policies.

 

It is interesting, of course, and quite instructive that in their headlong rush into political correctness and so-called nondiscrimination these universities are actually adopting extremely discriminatory policies. They’re making it actually impossible for a Christian organization to remain in any sense legitimately Christian and remain on the campus. But that leads to what is acknowledged even in this article in The New York Times: a direct collision between the idea of toleration and the practice of toleration. Indeed, these universities say that they’ve adopted these new policies precisely in order to tolerate everyone and to be intolerant towards any withdrawal of toleration, but they’re not tolerating Christian groups as Christian, and that’s something that they seem to be unable even to acknowledge. There are some people who are looking at this situation and saying, “It’s a tragedy,” but they seem to be quite unwilling to actually adjust the policies even as they recognize Christian organizations are being required to forfeit their Christian identity if they want to continue to be recognized by the university.

 

A couple of worldview issues come immediately to mind. The first is this: no one, no sane person, is absolutely tolerant of all positions. That was made clear in the 1960s by Herbert Marcuse, a French political philosopher of the far left, who, in a book entitled On Tolerance, suggested that tolerance should be extended to everyone except to anyone who isn’t fully tolerant of everything. But even in the 1960s, this led to a massive political repression on the French university and college campus. Now this same logic has come to the United States and its come here in a big way. The very fact that this new story made the front page of yesterday’s edition of The New York Times tells us that even the secular media has taken note of the fact that this is a major and newsworthy development. But, of course, from a Christian perspective it’s far more than merely newsworthy; it’s deeply troubling. It tells us that religious liberty in this country is being significantly and severely redefined and constricted right before our eyes, and in this case, right before the eyes of the rather secular readers of The New York Times. To the credit of the newspaper, they are acknowledging that this has created a direct collision between the antidiscrimination policies and religious liberty, but as the report in the paper also makes very clear, when this collision takes place, it is the Christian organizations who lose and lose in a big way. And this story, you can mark, will not be limited to the universities and colleges mentioned and documented in this news report. This story is coming very soon to a campus near you.

 

Thinking about the current state of American culture, on yesterday’s front page of The Washington Post was a very important article entitled, “Trial and a New Era.”  We looked at this development before from the vantage point of Vanity Fair magazine, but now the leading newspaper in the nation’s capital points back to the 20th anniversary of that O.J. Simpson incident and the following trial. Kent Babb is the reporter for The Washington Post. He points out that by the time that infamous car chase with O.J. Simpson in that white Ford Bronco had ended, 95 million viewers in America had tuned in to all or part of the broadcast car chase. Now that is a very interesting statistic when you consider the fact that at that time America had slightly less than 300 million citizens. That meant that roughly a third of all Americans watched all or part of that car chase.

 

But that wasn’t the end of the story. As Babb makes very clear in this coverage on the 20th anniversary, there was a major change in the way Americans considered crime, the news, and celebrity. The coverage in Vanity Fair we discussed previously suggested that the O.J. Simpson trial and the constant television coverage of that trial opened the door to the development of the vast new entertainment medium known as reality television, an oxymoron to be sure, but something that is now a staple of American household television entertainment. But as Babb makes clear, what is also evident on the 20th anniversary of the O.J. Simpson chase and following trial is the fact that there was a basic coarsening of the culture. Things that had never been discussed in polite company or even in public became the conversation of everyday life given the fact that the trial itself and the investigation that led up to it were constantly discussed on cable news stations and in the larger national media. Babb suggests that all of the news coverage concerning O.J. Simpson became what he calls a “gateway drug” to the coarsening of American culture in terms of the constant crime coverage and other things that we now take for granted. He documents, for instance, that going back 20 years ago, CNN, or Cable News Network, was 14 years old. It had a certain hold in terms of American media, in terms of kind of a niche market, but it became an overnight sensation with Americans turning in to the constant coverage from that Cable News Network that found its viewership growing exponentially. The coverage of the trial, the murders, and the evidence led to a coarsening of the culture and a discussion of things that had previously just not been discussed in public. This is made clear by Greta Van Susteren, identified in the articles as a former adjunct law professor at Georgetown University (most Americans don’t even remember that she had that job), who became a star for her legal analysis on CNN and now hosts a nightly show on Fox News. She said, “It made a lot of things look pretty rotten, made things look pretty raw” – talking about all the evidence that was brought forth in rather grotesque and graphic form in the midst of the investigation and the trial.

 

But Americans accommodated themselves to it. If the O.J. Simpson trial was a gateway drug to what later became known as reality television, it also open the gateway to the discussion of the most grotesque and graphic criminal evidence, especially having to do with sensational murder trials. The Washington Post quotes Mark Crispin Miller, a well-known professor at New York University who studies media and culture. He said that the Simpson case was “a harbinger of an entirely different media landscape.” He also said, “You have to become gradually acclimated to this kind of spectacle. Fifty years ago,” he said, “what you would’ve turned away from as outrageous, you turn to as kind of normal and interesting and then you can’t do without it.” That is a very interesting statement. He suggests that Americans would once have recoiled in horror from this kind of information, but they began to laugh it up salaciously and now they expect it.

 

And in terms of expecting, one of the very interesting developments in terms of the law was that until the O.J. Simpson case, most Americans knew nothing about DNA evidence. But that DNA evidence, for the first time, in a widely-publicized criminal trial, played a big part in the controversy over the trial of O.J. Simpson. And as a matter of fact, it led Americans to believe that DNA evidence should be expected, if not required, for a conviction in criminal cases. Something that was hardly the case even at the time that the O.J. trial took place. Looking back to that development, Greta Van Susteren said:

 

DNA was so complex and complicated that nobody really asked for it. They might find some man or woman, usually man, sitting in some county jail somewhere in the middle of some state, and, all of the sudden, after watching O.J. Simpson – because the world – did, he asked for a DNA test.

 

Ken Babb is absolutely right that the O.J. Simpson trial became a gateway drug for Americans to something else; that it became an addiction of sorts, an addiction to very graphic criminal information, especially having to do with murder. This explains also a major shift in crime dramas on television. A shift from speaking in generalities and merely speaking about murder weapons, for example, to speaking about actual wounds and mechanisms of killing and graphic depictions even in terms of visual elements of what took place in a murder.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, one very important lesson from this is the reminder that our culture defines us and we define the culture. Our entertainment reveals a very great deal about us. What we find interesting, informative, humorous, or moving reveals a great deal about our moral disposition and our worldview. The O.J. Simpson trial was not in and of itself a major culture shift, but it is a portrait of that culture shift revealed in the viewing habits and expectations of Americans when it comes to television coverage, both in the news and in terms of depicted dramas. As this article makes clear, the O.J. Simpson trial demonstrated that over time Americans have become very bloodthirsty when it comes to both information and entertainment.

 

Next, shifting to the issues of assisted suicide and euthanasia, just a few days ago we discussed the fact that last week the state of Washington reported a 43% increase in assisted suicides in that state in a single year. We also discussed the fact that the mainstream media in that state largely buried the story. In the case of the Seattle Times, publishing it last week on page B7 of the Thursday edition. But now The Week is out with another report. This time datelined from Zürich in Switzerland, where we read that the Swiss Right to Die Group, known as Exit, has begun offering suicide assistance to elderly people who do not have terminal diseases. At its annual meeting this past week, Exit added what it called suicide due to old age to its list of offered services. So to be very clear, here you have a group that not only advocates, butt offers assistance for suicides. And in this case, they are now offering what they describe as services, as if this is a medical clinic offering services for healing. But now the group is offering not services for healing, but services for assisted suicide, and not just to elderly people who are defined as having terminal illnesses, but to elderly people who are merely elderly. Their so-called “suicide due to old age” is one of the most ominous developments I’ve come across in a very long time. As The Week reports, the group said it received numerous requests from elderly individuals who been “mulling suicide for years.” Religious groups in Switzerland and also medical authorities and groups of doctors have condemned the new practice. Dr. Jürg Schlup of the Swiss Medical Association said this is causing us great concern “because it cannot be ruled out that elderly healthy people could come under pressure to take their own life.”

 

In Switzerland, euthanasia has been illegal since 1942. We need to document that very carefully. This slide into euthanasia and assisted suicide in Switzerland is not a recent development. It goes back before the end of World War II. But even as euthanasia in Switzerland has been legal since 1942, the logic of euthanasia has now unwound itself to the point that now you have a group offering what it describes as “suicide due to old age.” And as the medical authorities in Switzerland along with religious groups are now beginning to warn, this will put elderly people in the position of having to justify why they do not commit suicide. The interesting thing to note there is, of course, that elderly people, like the rest of us, simply get older as every passing day goes by, and that means, that given the logic of assisted suicide for those who are merely elderly, the logic of assisted suicide becomes at least partly an economic argument. Why should these old people be taking up space, using up so many resources, and especially needing so many expensive medical treatments? The logical argument coming from the culture of death is that the elderly should simply get out of the way and stop costing money. The fact that elderly people will become pressured to end their lives is not hypothetical. As we well know, in many contexts and in some countries, this is already happening. Civilized societies understand that a civilization or culture is judged by how it treats not the strong, but the week. A civilization is judged by how it treats the unborn, the infirm, the mentally disabled, and the elderly, and in all of these cases, the culture of death is now suggesting that the way to deal with such persons is to offer them a away out, and perhaps not even merely to offer a way out, but to usher them towards a way out, if not outright to coerce it.

 

But, then again, that respect for human life is based in at least the residue of a Christian worldview, and when that Christian worldview is rejected and that residue finally passes away, so does the understanding of the sanctity and dignity of every single human life. This much becomes clear. The secular worldview, in whatever its form, wherever it is found, has been proved to be stunningly incapable of defending the most vulnerable when it comes to the sanctity of human life. Here’s further evidence from Switzerland with the ominous words “suicide due to old age” offered as a service from a group known as Exit. Prime testimony to the fact that the culture of death is on the ascent and the sanctity of human life is under sustained attack.

 

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. Remember we’re collecting questions for the upcoming season of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Just call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’m speaking to you from Baltimore, Maryland, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 06-11-14

1) College anti-discriminatory policies a collision of theory of toleration and actual practice

Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy, New York Times (Michael Paulson)

2) 20 years later, Simpson trial has revolutionized American entertainment, and worldview

How the O.J. Simpson murder trial 20 years ago changed the media landscape, Washington Post (Kent Babb)

3) Switzerland groups offers suicide ‘due to old age’ as secularism undermines sanctity of life

Swiss group to allow assisted dying for elderly who are not terminally ill, The Guardian (Maddy French)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 06-10-14

The Briefing

 

June 10, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, June 10, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Charles Blow of The New York Times yesterday published an op-ed entitled “Religious Constriction.” He writes, “I am both shocked and fascinated by Americans’ religious literalism.” Now when you see the word literalism used in a context like this, especially in a secular context speaking about religious beliefs, you have to question what literalism means. Well he makes that clear. He means any actual understanding that the Bible would convey factual information. He writes citing last week’s Gallup report indicating that 42% of Americans believed “God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.” In other words, this very secular writer for a very secular newspaper has come to the very secular conclusion that he’s absolutely shocked that 42% of Americans believe that the Bible’s account of creation is true. He writes:

 

Even among people who said that they were “very familiar” with the theory of evolution, a third still believed that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago. Whatever the case, on this issue as well as many others in America, the truth is not the light.

 

That’s a very interesting statement in itself. He goes on to say:

 

[This] is in part because, compared with other developed countries, America stands out for the level and intensity of its religiosity. People are generally more likely to say that religion is an important part of their daily lives in relatively poor countries, but as Gallup pointed out in a 2010 report:

 

“The United States is one of the rich countries that bucks the trend. About two-thirds of Americans — 65 percent — say religion is important in their daily lives. Among high-income countries, only Italians, Greeks, Singaporeans and residents of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states are more likely to say religion is important. Most high-income countries are further down the religiosity spectrum.”

 

So Charles Blow, citing this Gallup report, cites the conventional wisdom of the secular left that has for the better part of the last century and a half predicted that religious faith in America would disappear or at least go into great decline as the income of Americans was raised along with their educational level and other social factors.

 

Well that has indeed happened, but it hasn’t happened to the degree that the prophets of secularization promised that it would. And you have figures such as Charles Blow who are absolutely shocked about this fact and they continue to be shocked as poll after poll, survey after survey, comes out. Blow writes:

 

In America, when people say that they are religious, they overwhelmingly mean Christian. In fact, nearly eight in 10 Americans identify as Christians. It’s not only that Americans are more religious — Christian, in particular — but that for many, their beliefs in their religious text — the Bible, in particular — are literal.

 

Well there’s that word literal. In other words, the literalism that Charles Blow is talking about is the fact that the Bible would convey factual information, accurate truth claims, that are making claims about events that have taken place in space and time and history. He goes back to that Gallup report that came out last Wednesday and reports that nearly a third of Americans continue to believe that the Bible “is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word.” He continues, “Furthermore, nearly half believe that it is “the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally.” So you put those two together and you end up with about a third and about a half who suggest that they believe that the Bible in part, if not in whole, should be taken as the literal word of God. That’s about three quarters of Americans and that’s absolutely shocking to this very secular writer for The New York Times.

 

He identifies himself straightforwardly in those terms, by the way. He writes:

 

Now, I don’t seek to deny anyone the right to believe as he or she chooses. I have at points in my own life been quite religious, and my own children have complicated views about religion. As my oldest son once told me, “I’d hate to live in a world where a God couldn’t exist.” That is his choice, as it is every individual’s choice, and I respect it.

 

Well he seems to respect his son’s choice, but he says he respects everyone’s choice, and that he clearly does not do, as this column makes abundantly clear. And when he uses the word literal here, once again, he makes very clear he’s referring to the fact that anyone would believe that the Bible is actually conveying factual information. That becomes clear in his statement when he says, “What worries me is that some Americans seem to live in a world where facts can’t exist.” Here’s his next paragraph:

 

Facts such as the idea that the world is ancient, and that all living things evolved and some — like dinosaurs — became extinct. Facts like the proven warming of the world. Facts like the very real possibility that such warming could cause a catastrophic sea-level rise.

 

Well note the use of his word facts here. In other words, he is explicitly, conclusively limiting all that he refers to as facts to that which can be produced by a naturalistic or materialistic worldview through the intellectual process of modern empirical science. In other words, science produces facts. Whatever religion does, it doesn’t deal with what Charles Blow considers facts. He expresses his deep concern when he writes:

 

How does America remain a world leader in an increasingly technological, science-based world, when so many of our citizens — and even our leaders, including Republicans who might run for president — deny basic science?

 

Well now we go back to the last several presidential races when, as Robert Putnam of Harvard University and others have pointed out, the single most clear indicator of a person’s vote for president was the question of whether and how often the individual voter attended church. There is, of course, a deep partisan and political divide in this country that points to an even deeper ideological and worldview divide, but that divide points to an even deeper theological divide. And as Charles Blow both demonstrates and documents, that is a divide between the seculars on the one hand and the religious on the other, and Blows exactly right: in America, the religious are overwhelmingly Christian, and whether intentionally or not, and probably very unintentionally, the revealing statement by Charles Blow in this statement comes in the paragraph in which he writes:

 

Americans, particularly political leaders, who choose religious piety must also create an intellectual framework in which things of faith that exist without proof can make space for truths for which there is proof.

 

So there you have the materialistic, rationalistic worldview laid very evident for us all to see. That worldview holds that the only facts that can be known are facts that can be demonstrated by human reason, facts that can be demonstrated by the operation of human reason in some intellectual enterprise such as empirical science. Nothing else can produce facts.

 

That is a direct and diluted rejection of the very possibility of divine revelation, and that points to the most basic worldview collision in America today between those who believe that the only source of knowledge is that of secular reason and those who believe that knowledge includes not only what is learned by what might be called secular reason, but by divine revelation. And, furthermore, those in that second category understand that even what is claimed to be the knowledge gained by secular reason is only made possible by the fact that a very un-secular Creator has made the creation intelligible and knowable to His human creatures. In other words, secular knowledge, insofar as it is true knowledge, isn’t actually so secular after all. We are deeply indebted to Charles Blow for making that deep intellectual divide in America very, very clear. That in itself is a form of a gift.

 

By the way, The New York Times also made that very same point emphatically just a few days prior to the arrival of Charles Blow’s opinion piece. Writing in the same paper a few days previous, George Johnson, one of The New York Times science writers, wrote an article entitled “Creation in the Eye of the Beholder.” Now in this article George Johnson is trying to do something monumental. He’s trying to tell us that when we look at the complexity of the created world and we see evidence of an intelligent Creator, we’re merely being fooled by what we see. He writes:

 

When we see such intricate symmetry, our brains automatically assume there was an inventor. Overcoming that instinct took centuries, and it was only then that the living world began to make sense.

 

So here you have another very secular writer, writing from an exceedingly secular worldview, who tells us in the pages of The New York Times that when we see what we believe to be evidence of design in creation, we’re merely being fooled by our own eyes. We’re being driven by an evolutionary instinct we have to overcome in order for the world actually to make sense. He cites William Paley, who wrote in defense of intelligent design back in the 1800s:

 

The English clergyman William Paley argued that if you were walking in the countryside and found a watch on the ground, you would be right in inferring that there was a watchmaker. By the same token, he argued, the intricacy of a living organism implies the existence of a creator.

 

How does he follow that? Well just listen to the next paragraph:

 

What creationists and conspiracy theorists share is a deep disbelief in accidents like the ones that drive evolution, and a certainty that everything that happens was somehow intended.

 

That’s an absolutely amazing paragraph. He writes that creationist and conspiracy theorist belong in the same intellectual camp. Why? Because we share “a deep disbelief in accidents” like the ones, he says, that drive evolution. Well just remember the fact that earlier he suggested that the world certainly looks as if it were designed and created. In other words, he explicitly said we have to overcome that intuition of design in order rightly—and he means in this term by secular science—to understand the world. Later, he says, that it basically is common cause with conspiracy theorists that those who believe in divine creation share a deep disbelief in accidents.

 

Well I would suggest that George Johnson and others who try to make this argument are on very weak ground. They’re clearly not being very persuasive. Charles Blow’s own column that appeared just a few days later makes that very clear. Most Americans aren’t buying the argument. Why? Well it goes back to the kind of thing that Abraham Lincoln talked about when he was talking about the practice of law. He said that a lawyer’s in a very weak position when he has to say to the jury, “Who are you going to believe: me or your own lying eyes?” Well the reality is most of us see so much evidence of design in the universe that it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to believe that someone had to have designed this.

 

The frenzy of the secular left, in terms of these issues, is abundantly clear. Papers such as The New York Times, but not just The New York Times, repeatedly run this kind of article because the secular left finds it absolutely almost impossible to believe that a majority of Americans aren’t accepting the theory of evolution and the naturalistic and materialistic worldview that goes with it. Why? Because there is so much evidence of design that these arguments coming from very powerful intellectual authorities in the secular academy just can’t overcome that impulse and intuition to see what is obviously there; evidence of the fact that what we’re seeing in the cosmos is not an accident, profoundly not an accident, but rather that at the giant macro level and the most miniscule micro level there is at every turn fundamental, undeniable evidence of design.

 

When we think of the culture war and the great worldview clash in America, we often think of how the battles in this particular kind of intellectual conflict are meted out. And in so many cases, they’re demonstrated in conflicts that occur in terms of Hollywood entertainment, national politics, economic theory. But as yesterday’s Wall Street Journal also makes clear, you can see this basic intellectual worldview conflict on the pages of America’s comic books. Writing in yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, two men with vast experience in the comic book industry write about how the worldview issues are now being hammered out in terms of the transformation of American comic books. The two men are Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche. Mr. Dixon is the author of hundreds of comics. He helped to create comic characters such as Bane and The Spoiler. Mr. Rivoche co-created the 1980s figure Mr. X and has illustrated dozens of Batman, Superman, and Iron Man comics. But, as these two men write, the culture war has landed squarely in the world of American comic books. They write:

 

In the 900th issue of Action Comics, Superman decides to go before the United Nations and renounce his U.S. citizenship. “Truth, justice and the American way’—it’s not enough anymore,” he despairs. That issue, published in April 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic example of modern comics’ descent into political correctness, moral ambiguity and leftist ideology.

 

The two men with vast experience in American comics then write:

 

We are comic-book artists and comics are our passion. But more important they’ve inspired and shaped many millions of young Americans. Our fear is that today’s young comic-book readers are being ill-served by a medium that often presents heroes as morally compromised or no different from the criminals they battle. With the rise of moral relativism, “truth, justice and the American way” have lost their meaning.

 

Well they go back to the story of comics in America, especially since the Great Depression and the war against the Third Reich in Germany. They say the story goes all the way back to the 1930s. They write:

 

Superman, as he first appeared in early comics and later on radio and TV, was not only “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” he was also good, just and wonderfully American. Superman and other “superheroes” like Batman went out of their way to distinguish themselves from villains like Lex Luthor or the Joker. Superman even battled Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II.

 

But they also say, he “led domestic crusades, the most famous against the Ku Klux Klan.” They go on to reveal that in the 1950s the great comic book publishers, including DC and what later became Marvel, created what was known as the Comics Code Authority. As they describe it:

 

[It was] a guild regulator that issued rules such as: “Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal.” The idea behind the CCA, which had a stamp of approval on the cover of all comics, was to protect the industry’s main audience—kids—from story lines that might glorify violent crime, drug use or other illicit behavior.

 

In the 1970s, our first years in the trade, nobody really altered the superhero formula. The CCA did change its code to allow for “sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior . . . [and] corruption among public officials” but only “as long as it is portrayed as exceptional and the culprit is punished.” In other words, there were still good guys and bad guys. Nobody cared what an artist’s politics were if you could draw or write and hand work in on schedule. Comics were a brotherhood beyond politics.

 

But, as they make clear, the 1990s brought about a vast change. “The industry weakened and eventually threw out the [code], and editors began to resist hiring conservative artists”. In a very important paragraph, they write:

 

The superheroes also changed. Batman became dark and ambiguous, a kind of brooding monster. Superman became less patriotic, culminating in his decision to renounce his citizenship so he wouldn't be seen as an extension of U.S. foreign policy. A new code, less explicit but far stronger, replaced the old: a code of political correctness and moral ambiguity. If you disagreed with mostly left-leaning editors, you stayed silent.

 

But they say it now goes far beyond:

 

The political-correctness problem stretches beyond traditional comics into graphic novels. These works, despite the genre title, are not all fiction.

 

They report that some comic adaptations of texts are making their way even into American schools.

 

This article in yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal is priceless in terms of its worldview content. Here you have two insiders in the comic book industry making clear that a comic book is never merely a comic book. It is an artifact of culture and it is sending an intellectual and a moral message, and as these writers make very clear, the message, in terms of so many comics these days—indeed, coming from the mainstream comic industry—is no longer one that has clear distinctions between good and evil. There are no longer clear good guys and bad guys. Instead, not only is moral ambiguity now the order of the day, but even something more pernicious, and that is the glorification of violence and the questioning of whether there is indeed even a distinction between good and evil.

 

There’s a political dynamic to this, of course, when it comes to the United States and Superman renouncing his American citizenship, but far more than that there is a worldview issue here. And it’s one that should have the attention not only of young people, but of parents and all others. There is no sector of our culture that is untouched by this basic cultural conflict. Every artifact of culture, no matter what the medium, is making a play for hearts and minds, trying to convince and to conform the heart and the mind to the worldview that is being presented. It’s very important to us to know there is no worldview neutrality, and those of us who are committed to developing a Christian mind need to understand how other messages are being sent very effectively throughout the conduits of culture. We know that that’s true in terms of Hollywood and movies. We know it’s true in terms of the mainstream media, but yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal helps us to understand something else that is profoundly true and urgently important. Not even the comic books are immune, not by a long shot, as these two insiders have made abundantly clear.

 

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. Remember that we’re taking questions now for the next season of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition beginning late in the summer. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’m speaking to you from Baltimore, Maryland, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 06-10-14

Transcript: The Briefing 06-09-14

The Briefing

 

June 9, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, June 9, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Well the big stories over the weekend had to do with dads staying home to take care of children. The headline in USA Today, “More Dads Do the Mom Role”; in The New York Times, “For More Fathers Who Stay Home, It’s a Choice”; in The Washington Post, “More Dads Stay Home to Raise Children.” But the variance you saw in those headlines is a variance that is also reflected in the interpretations of the data, and the data is coming from the Pew Research Center, a major report that came out late last week. As Brigid Schulte of The Washington Post reports:

 

The number of stay-at-home Dads has doubled in the last 25 years, reaching a peak of 2.2 million in 2010, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center. And although the Great Recession contributed to a sharp uptick, by far, the fastest growing segment of at-home Dads say they’re home taking care of the kids because they want to be.

 

Now that’s a very interesting lead paragraph, and a very similar kind of lead is what you find in The New York Times. Claire Cain Miller reports for The Times:

 

Despite a recent small decline in the number of fathers who take care of children full-time, their numbers have doubled over the last 15 years, according to new data from Pew Research Center. And the main driver for the growth is the increase in men staying home by choice, not because of unemployment or injury. That shift reveals a structural change in gender roles in families and at work in the United States.

 

Now when you look at a news report like this and paragraphs interpreting data in this way, you need to go back and look at the data and find out if these conclusions are warranted. Does this pattern reflect a major change in gender roles in the United States? Well it might, and if it did, we would want to know so.

 

But a closer look at the data reveals that the picture is a bit less clear than these lead paragraphs would have us to think. In the first place, The New York Times conceded that there’s actually been a decrease, a net decrease, over the last couple of years in the number of fathers staying at home. So why the headlines there are more dads “doing the mom role” as USA Today reports? Well it’s because the report looked at a long-term pattern, and over the last 15 years, there has been an increase, indeed, roughly a doubling of the number of fathers staying home to take care of their children. But the newspapers also report the data further down in their articles, and that is that far more mothers than fathers are staying at home with their children. As a matter of fact, it’s only about two million fathers at the height of this pattern who are staying home to take care of children. Over against the total population of the United States and about 300 million, that’s not insignificant, but it certainly is not necessarily any kind of major trend.

 

But the other thing that is also clear from the data is that the economic recession that started in 2008 was the major driver. To their credit, all three of these newspapers acknowledge that fact in their reports. But we should note that they buried that very important piece of information long after their evaluation was made in the opening paragraphs. Now when you think about the claim being made by at least two of these three newspapers that this is a major trend reflecting a change in gender roles, we need to again step back and figure out if that’s really what we’re looking at here. For instance, what we have is the acknowledgment that the biggest factor here from 2008 forward was economic. So many men lost their jobs vis-à-vis women in the last recession that many economists refer to the recession itself as a “he-session;” in other words, a recession that particularly affected professions and jobs generally held by men. One thing alone explains that more than anything else and that was the severe downturn in construction. So many men who would be working were not working because there were no houses being built. Well you look at that and you recognize that, once again, there is an honest acknowledgment in these articles that over the last couple of years there are actually fewer, not more, men staying home with their children, and they also acknowledge that as economic. More of these men have returned to the workplace.

 

So when you actually look at the data, here’s the way it comes down. If you take the fact that approximately two million at some point have stayed home to take care of their children, approximately 80% of those men are staying home for economic reasons. But the fastest growth in the remaining 20% of the two million is among those who say they are making the decision to stay home with their children. Now if you’re following, that means that this really isn’t a very big development at all. As a matter of fact, in The New York Times, we find this: 35% of those stay-at-home dads say they stay home because they are ill or disabled; 23% are unable to find work; 22% are in school or retired. As you follow on down, only a bare minority of those fathers who are staying at home say they’re doing so out of choice. But that’s not insignificant, but it doesn’t justify the kind of headlines that we find in these newspapers. For instance, within the article in USA Today, we read a statement by Fred van Deusen, a researcher at Boston College. He said:

 

I think it’s a shift in cultural trends. Probably the main factor is the expectation for fathers is changing. Women expect more involvement, men see peers becoming more involved, so it’s kind of self-reinforcing.

 

Well that’s an interesting statement and there may be a good bit of truth in it, but it simply isn’t verified by the very data reported in the article. Similarly, the coverage in The Washington Post includes the fact that of those fathers who are staying at home, they tend to be older, poorer, and have less education than their working-father counterparts.”

 

Now let’s look for a moment. Those are the very same things that are cited in these same reports as the reasons why men have been unable to get back into the workplace or have left the workplace in the first place. In other words, there’s an internal tension within these articles. There’s also a very interesting pattern that should have our attention here, and that is the fact that this reveals the fact that so many in the media seem to have a great urge to declare at virtually every turn that gender roles are changing. Well we’re living in a time of gender transformation, that’s for sure, but a closer look at these articles indicates that there really isn’t that much to shout about here. But it’s very telling that there are people who want to do the shouting, who want to declare that gender roles are changing, and that when it comes to the raising of children in the domestic life, men are finding their way into this more eagerly by choice, even as women are by choice more eagerly entering the workforce. But a closer look at the data indicates that this is actually a very small picture and it’s a very small development. It’s one that should have our attention, of course, but it doesn’t deserve the screaming headlines in the mainstream media. In this case, the headlines tell us more about the media themselves than about the matters about which they’re reporting.

 

These stories do give us a heads up, by the way, with fatherhood close on the calendar that this time of year points out the cultural awkwardness in American society these days of talking about the specific role of fathers. The epidemic of fatherlessness is one of the main engines propelling all kinds of dysfunctionality and pathology, broken lives and great harm to lives in this country, but it’s become almost politically incorrect to speak honestly about it. So it’s very interesting. Father’s Day coming along requires the culture to talk about fathers in some way. It tells us a great deal that this is the way at least these newspapers have wanted to talk about fatherhood with Father’s Day looming on the horizon. As it comes even closer, you can count on this: there will be further confusion even as there is something of an attempted celebration of the role of fathers. We’re living in a time in which the role of fatherhood has become so confused to so many they’re not sure what to condemn or want to celebrate.

 

This past weekend, I was speaking to a conference in Seattle, Washington, and while I was there, I noticed Thursday’s edition of The Seattle Times. And what I noticed was not a glaring headline, but a story that was effectively buried deep within the newspaper. As a matter of fact, the story appeared in the print edition of last Thursday’s edition of The Seattle Times on page B7, and that, as it turns out, is incredibly telling. The headline of the news story is this: “More Than 100 Died After Taking Lethal Dose in 2013.” The report that was based on information from the Associated Press indicates that in Washington State last year more than 100 people died after requesting and taking a lethal prescription through Washington State’s Death with Dignity Law. That was reported last Wednesday by the Washington State Department of Health. Officials with the department said 173 people requested and received lethal doses of medication in 2014. Now listen to this: that’s a 43% increase from the year before.

 

Now let’s just pause for a moment. So you here you have an article about assisted suicide. Washington State is one of the few states in the United States that has legal assisted suicide. It celebrated the adoption of that legislation just a few years ago, but now you have a state that has had a 43% increase in requests for legal assisted suicide in a single year and the story is considered so insignificant that it appears in the print edition of the leading newspaper in the state on page B7. That’s the seventh page of the second section of the newspaper. What does that tell us about the devaluation of human life? Just consider the composite information coming from this report from the state’s health department. Those who requested assisted suicide ranged in age from 29 to age 95. More than 95% lived west of the Cascade Mountains. That tells you something else. In other words, almost all—95% of those who requested and received assisted suicide in the state of Washington—were from the more liberal coastal areas of the state on its western edge. The report indicates that 77% of those who applied had cancer; 15% had a neurodegenerative disease; 8% had heart disease or another illness. The report also indicates “most of the people who ask their doctors for a lethal prescription told them they were concerned about losing autonomy, dignity, or the ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable. Most died home and were in hospice care at the time of their deaths.”

 

Now we need to note this very carefully. When the legislation for assisted suicide was sold to the voters in Washington State, as elsewhere, it was sold with the idea that those who were terminally ill had the right to end unbearable suffering by means of assisted suicide. But even in this report that was released last week by the State Board of Health there in Washington State, it is revealed that a good many of those who have requested and received assisted suicide just in the last year were not so much terminally ill, they were not speaking of pain, but rather they were “concerned about losing autonomy, dignity, or the ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable.”

 

This report in itself tells us a great deal about the devaluation of human life. That is, if this report had been on the front page, it would have given us that information. But it wasn’t on the front page. It’s even more telling and even more haunting that a report of this consequence appeared buried within the newspaper’s second section on its seventh page. In other words, this was information that The Seattle Times felt obligated to report, but not obligated to point out with any importance. The devaluation of human life is seen in the entire complex of euthanasia and assisted suicide. It’s a short jump from arguing that those who are certified to be terminally ill and are claimed to be suffering unbearable pain should have the right to end their lives, to the claim that one is justified to assist one in suicide simply if the person claims that they’re no longer able to enjoy those pursuits that had made life meaningful.

 

The loss of the Christian worldview, as it turns out, makes euthanasia and assisted suicide not just possible, but probably inevitable – because the devaluation of human life, once one no longer believes that every single human life at every point of experience and development is made in God’s image, then we come to understand that all of human life becomes a negotiable good. And eventually there are those who will decide that death is preferable to life, and there are those in society who evidently will decide that it is actually right to help those who have made that decision to end their own lives. And mark this very clearly: once you cross that barrier, there will be no limit to the number of acceptable reasons for ending life and there will be a continual marginalization of the sanctity and dignity of human life to the point that this kind of story slides from page one to page B7, and, hauntingly we think, soon perhaps to no notice at all.

 

Meanwhile, on a related issue, Saturday’s issue of The New York Times included a story datelined from California. The headline: “California Pioneers the Court-Aided One-Day Divorce.” We can thank California for the entire idea of no-fault divorce. In 1969, California, the nation’s most populous state, became the first state to feature legal no-fault divorce. Interestingly, it was signed into law in 1969 by then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, and it was signed into law with the claim that this would be a great assist to families. It’s the kind of argument of doublespeak that we need to see very clearly now in retrospect. The claim was that families were being harmed by the fact that divorce (back before no-fault divorce) required the finding that one party or the other in the marriage, one spouse or the other, had committed adultery, and thus there were legal grounds for the divorce. No-fault divorce meant that that was no longer necessary and it was claimed as a great humane act. Of course, what we now know is that it was not humane at all. What it led to was the acceleration of divorce and the breakup not of thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands, but millions of marriages. Such that marriage became redefined in a single generation; such that divorce became customary when it had been rare; and no-fault divorce that began in 1969 in California soon spread so that in now all 50 states there is the equivalent of no-fault divorce.

 

But now this news story appeared Saturday in The New York Times indicating that California is pioneering divorce once again. In this case, it’s a one-day divorce. The article by Ann Carrns points out there have to be a couple of preliminaries. For instance, one spouse has to serve the other spouse with divorce papers, but once it gets to court, it’s a greased slide. Just one day. As Carrns reports, “now some courts in California offer one-day divorce programs for people who either can’t afford or don’t want to hire a lawyer.”  As Carrns explains:

 

Couples arrive at court in the morning having generally agreed on the division of property and debts and a plan for the care of any children. The coordinator makes sure the paperwork is in order and helps wrap up any remaining details. (The coordinator isn’t representing either side and doesn’t offer legal advice or strategy, said Judge Hallahan.) Then, you go before a judge in the afternoon and leave with a divorce judgment. Since the program made its debut in March, the court has handled four to five such divorces a week, said Judge Hallahan.

 

Later in the article, Randall Kessler, a divorce lawyer in Atlanta, said that one day divorce programs are “the wave of the future.” Well he may be right. After all, California pioneered no-fault divorce and it spread across the country in less than 15 years. Now, as this headline explains, California’s pioneering the one-day divorce and we just have to wonder how fast it will be until California’s quickie one-day divorce becomes a national norm. We now know that no-fault divorce led to devastating consequences. We can only imagine that the one-day divorce will lead to even worse. Well at least we’ve been warned

 

Finally, the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal included a news article about pioneering new efforts in therapy for dogs and other animals. The article’s written by a specialist by the name of Laurel Braitman, and she tells us, “There are depressed and anxious gorillas, compulsive horses, obsessive wombats, self-harming dolphins, and dogs with dementia.” Writing about Oliver, a dog she tried to help cure of depression, she wrote:

 

I tried almost everything available to American pet owners, from Valium and Prozac to behavioral modification training. I couldn’t save him. But others have been more successful in treating troubled animals.

 

Dr. Braitman says that some forms of therapy aren’t so medically inclined. She writes:

 

When it comes to the animals dearest to us, this may mean, for instance, working harder to gauge our cats’ opinions of particular houseguests, taking our dogs on more challenging walks, giving the hamster more places to hide or removing a bullying turtle from the tank.

 

I feel obligated to insert at this point: No, I’m not making this up. This is an article that appeared in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. There is evidence of mental illness here, of course, but I don’t think the mental illness is particularly attributable to animals in this case. We’ve become a society that finds it somehow reasonable that in one of the most important and influential newspapers in the country, we would find a serious article mentioning anxious gorillas, compulsive horses, and obsessive wombats. If you’re looking for evidence of a worldview out of whack, I can hardly come up with anything more emphatically important than this. In Washington State last year, there was a 43% increase in assisted suicide, and we’re a society that pauses to give serious interest to obsessive wombats.

 

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. We’re receiving questions now for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition and the new season beginning in late summer. Just call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’m speaking to you from Baltimore, Maryland, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 06-09-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Reports on rising stay-at-home dads reveal urge to declare changing gender roles

More dads stay at home, but reasons are complex, USA Today (Hoai-Tran Bui)

More Fathers Who Stay at Home by Choice, New York Times (Claire Cain Miller)

Dads who stay home because they want to has increased four-fold, Washington Post (Brigid Schulte)

Growing Number of Dads Home with the Kids, Pew Research

2) 43% increase in Washington suicide requests buried – the devaluation of human life

More than 100 people used lethal prescriptions under state’s Death with Dignity law, Seattle Times (Associated Press)

3) California once again pioneers destructive divorce practice with one-day divorces

California Pioneers the Court-Aided One-Day Divorce, New York Times (Ann Carrns)

4) Anxious gorillas and obsessive wombats now of legitimate national interest

When Animals Lose Their Minds, Wall Street Journal (Laurel Braitman)