May 2009 Archives

I've just logged on and seen the news about the murder of abortionist George Tiller.

I condemn this murder, full stop. I think Tiller was an evil man. I really do. He was one of the few doctors who performed late-term abortions. He was an infanticide doctor, as far as I'm concerned. Nevertheless, his murder was wrong, wrong, wrong, in an of itself. And as a practical matter, it will do more harm to the cause of protecting unborn life than it will help. We already see that despite the plain fact that the overwhelming majority of pro-life activists are peaceful, and peace-loving, people, many on the other side demonize all pro-lifers as potential abortion-clinic murderers. Whoever committed this murder is not only guilty of a heinous crime and a moral outrage, but prudentially, he or she has also done tremendous harm to the noble cause of protecting unborn life.

That said, I would hate to be George Tiller facing judgment with those grave sins to explain.

UPDATE: Princeton's Robert P. George says it well:

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.

Yesterday I had occasion to speak with a British religion journalist, and told her that as a general matter, I found British newspapers' coverage of religion to be far more serious than that in American newspapers - this, even though Britain is a far more secular country than the US. I asked her why that might be. She speculated that the English education system makes it difficult to dismiss the Christian point of view, even if one disagrees with Christians. In other words, Christians are taken seriously from an intellectual point of view, even if people don't agree with them.

I'm in no position to say how much validity there is to her point. But thinking about it further, it seems to me that in America, though we're more religiously observant than the British, we don't like to debate and discuss the propositional truths of religion. We prefer to treat religion, at least in our media, as a hobby ancillary to real life. The British media, for all their secularism, at least seem to treat religion with more intellectual seriousness.

Am I right? Thoughts about why this might be?

Wandering around Cambridge this glorious afternoon, I stopped in at the tiny church of St. Edward King and Martyr, which was, they say, where the first sermon advocating the English Reformation was preached. From the church's website:

The church played a unique role in the early days of the Reformation. A group of evangelicals in Cambridge, of whom Thomas Bilney was the first, had been meeting regularly in the early 1520s. They were influenced by a fresh translation of the New Testament by Erasmus and by the ideas of Luther, and believed passionately in the forgiveness of sins through faith in Jesus Christ.

At the Christmas Midnight Mass at St Edward's in 1525 one of them, Robert Barnes, preached what was probably the first openly evangelical sermon to be preached in any church in the country, proclaiming the Christian gospel and accusing the Church of its heresies. St Edward's can thus claim to be 'the cradle of the Reformation' in England. Other reformers preached regularly at St Edward's, including Hugh Latimer until he left Cambridge in 1531. Some of his sermons preached here have been preserved, and the pulpit from which the reformers preached is still in use.

Bilney, Barnes and Latimer were all put to death for their beliefs. As he comforted Nicholas Ridley at the stake in Oxford, Latimer said 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out'. They are still remembered today by Anglicans worldwide.

It's a humble, plain church, dating to circa 1400. I went in and found myself alone there, and prayed. It felt so intensely serene -- if that's not a contradiction in terms -- in the cool of that church, I was reminded of Philip Larkin's great poem "Church Going," which ends:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

Greetings from Cambridge, England. On the drive in from the airport, my driver said he and his girlfriend had just put in a backyard garden, because that's becoming more popular among young people in England.

"Well, the next thing you need to do is get some chickens," I told him.

"Oh, funny you say that," he replied. "We have some hens on order now from a friend." He said that urban backyard chicken raising is very trendy here.

All together now, "We are the worrrrld ... we are the chickens....".

I may be able to blog a few things from here after all, about the classes we'll be taking. Was pleased to see that John Gray will be teaching one session. More on this later. I regret to say that Erin's having technical difficulties, which we're trying to sort out now. So, she'll be along in a minute. As for Your Working Boy, I'm off to the bookstore, and then the pub. It's a miserable job, but somebody has to do it. Heh.

This morning, I heard Andrew Sullivan say something wise and true on the Diane Rehm Show. The discussion was about empathy, courts and Sotomayor. A caller who identified himself as a white male Obama voter said he was troubled by the implications of Sotomayor's statement re: the relative wisdom of empathetic Latina judges over white males. The caller said that no white man could get away with making that comparison. Of course he's right, and I think much of the outrage from the right over what Sotomayor says comes not because white people think that your personal circumstances have no bearing on how you see the world, but because of the double standard employed in speaking honestly about such things. (Daniel Larison speaks to this point in a couple of places on his blog; do go read them).

The caller was resentful of the idea of "white male privilege," saying that he's a white male who drives a truck for $14 an hour, and if that's anybody's idea of privilege, they can have it.

I think this man is absolutely right to resent how in these media discussions, it's assumed that all white men must be Rush Limbaugh or Warren Buffett. In point of fact, through my family's fire department discussions, I know of a working-class white man who worked very hard to get onto the department squad, but was routinely turned down for racial reasons, despite his superior scores. He was told point-blank by the chief that the chief would like to hire him, but there was a quota problem. I know this guy somewhat, and he was, and I assume still is, a hard worker who studied a lot, and busted his butt, to make it onto the department. And he was explicitly denied his opportunity because of the color of his skin. This, as you know, is the moral issue in the Ricci case, which we'll be hearing more about. Some "white male privilege" this working-class white man benefited from.

In the Diane Rehm Show discussion that followed, Sullivan agreed that the caller made an important point, but said, as I've done, that Sotomayor's point in larger context deserved greater consideration. That is, all judges, being human beings, make their decisions based not only on the law, but on many factors -- including their own personal backgrounds. Dispassion is quite rightly the ideal in a jurist, but we can't ignore that we are not machines -- objects -- but subjects who have been shaped by our contexts. That's just a fact of human nature. Sullivan went on to say that consciousness of how our own experiences shape our worldviews may in fact be a prerequisite for achieving dispassion, that if we aren't fully aware of how our views were formed, and our potential biases, we are in a poor position to overcome them.

I think this is true. I also think it is helpful to be, or to have been, a minority in a given context. Working in a profession and having once lived in a culture (NYC's) in which religious conservatives are very much the minority gives me a certain perspective on what other minorities must deal with. That is not to say that I will always agree with the "minority perspective," whatever that is. How could I? How could anybody? Still, it's important to have had the experience of not being in power, to grasp emotionally what that must be like. The danger comes in thinking that because you have not been in power, that your resentments, however justified, somehow make you immune to abusing power when and if you and your kind achieve it. Human beings are fallen creatures. Your race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation -- none of that protects you from being likely to abuse power. But wise people, having been a (relatively) disempowered minority, will know in their bones what that feels like, but also be conscious of the temptation to become guilty of the same thing when and if they take power. The balance between empathy and dispassion is critical, especially in judges, but also in all of us.

If Sonia Sotomayor believes that, then we're going to benefit from her being on the court. If not, not. I expect all of this to get a full airing this summer. It's important that we talk about it, and talk about it as soberly as possible.

Sorry these thoughts are so disjointed, but I'm out the door in a minute, off to England this afternoon. Erin's in charge. I'll blog from Cambridge this weekend, if I can, but once class starts next week, I'm incommunicado.