Lux Lucet

Last week Americans were treated to an extraordinary spectacle: the Golden Rule was booed and an adulterer was cheered by a crowd likely composed of a majority of professed Evangelicals. I’m speaking here about the two Republican presidential debates in South Carolina.

When Ron Paul introduced the idea that America’s foreign policy should be based on the Golden Rule, he was nearly drowned out by boos from the crowd. They did not want to hear that the US should make it a policy to treat other nations the way we would like other nations to treat us. Yes, a Bible belt crowd actually booed the doctrine of Christ.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, elicited wild cheers from the crowd the next night when a reporter from CNN opened the debate by quizzing Gingrich about comments put forth by his ex-wife that he wanted an open marriage. Gingrich, who seems to have perfected the art of playing the professional indignant, deflected the question by turning the issue of his marital fidelity into a referendum on the liberal media. The crowd ate it up.

As an Evangelical I have to ask, What’s up with that? What god do these people worship? Is it the Lord Jesus Christ or Mars the Roman god of war? Is it the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, or Priapus the Greek fertility god?

For more on the SC crowds booing of the doctrine of Christ, please see this article by a professed believer.

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If you’re like me, you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States. If for some reason Fillmore’s name does come up, a lot of us would probably react something like “That guy? What a nerd. Seriously, with a name like that, you must be joking.”

That’s what one write for Foreign Policy would have your believe as well. In his snarky hit piece on Ron Paul, Uri Friedman tries to tar Paul with the Fillmore brush. To Friedman’s credit, he does provide a rather extensive quote from Fillmore’s first state of the union address, which gives the reader ample opportunity to decide for himself just how foolish Fillmore – and by extension – Paul are. Here’s the Fillmore quote,

Among the acknowledged rights of nations is that which each possesses of establishing that form of government which it may deem most conducive to the happiness and prosperity of its own citizens, of changing that form as circumstances may require, and of managing its internal affairs according to its own will. The people of the United States claim this right for themselves, and they readily concede it to others. Hence it becomes an imperative duty not to interfere in the government or internal policy of other nations; and although we may sympathize with the unfortunate or the oppressed everywhere in their struggles for freedom, our principles forbid us from taking any part in such foreign contests. We make no wars to promote or to prevent successions to thrones, to maintain any theory of a balance of power, or to suppress the actual government which any country chooses to establish for itself. We instigate no revolutions, nor suffer any hostile military expeditions to be fitted out in the United States to invade the territory or provinces of a friendly nation. The great law of morality ought to have a national as well as a personal and individual application. We should act toward other nations as we wish them to act toward us, and justice and conscience should form the rule of conduct between governments, instead of mere power, self interest, or the desire of aggrandizement. To maintain a strict neutrality in foreign wars, to cultivate friendly relations, to reciprocate every noble and generous act, and to perform punctually and scrupulously every treaty obligation — these are the duties which we owe to other states, and by the performance of which we best entitle ourselves to like treatment from them; or, if that, in any case, be refused, we can enforce our own rights with justice and a clear conscience. (Emphasis in the original)

Yep, that Millard Fillmore. What a dunce. He just didn’t realize the great benefits that can accrue to a nation for killing lots of people in foreign entanglements. He was so stupid he actually believed Christ’s golden rule has “a national as well as a personal and individual application.” Outrageous! Unthinkable! Clearly the man had no business in the White House, just and Ron Paul clearly has no business in the White House. As Friedman sees it, the problem with these gentlemen is that they just don’t want to kill enough people. But thankfully, Friedman is on the case to make sure we stay on the warmongering straight and narrow.

Please click here to read Friedman’s piece in full.

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While Texas conservatives were at war over the weekend trying to decide which Roman Catholic Republican they could back against Mitt Romney, along comes Voddie Baucham to give Ron Paul a ringing endorsement. It’s truly refreshing to read the comments of a man who is able to look past all the hype and see that Dr. Paul is far and away the best friend Evangelicals have among current presidential candidates.

Baucham writes,

Dr. Paul does not beat his Christian faith like a drum in his public/political life. Unfortunately, that is off-putting for the “Christian Right”. However, in a world full of ‘posturing’ in an effort to win over evangelicals, I find Paul’s public demeanor refreshing. And it is not as though he is a ‘closet Christian,’ either. “I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, and I endeavor every day to follow Him in all I do and in every position I advocate,” wrote Paul on his Web site.[5] I have also had the privilege of talking with both him, and one of his five children about his faith and how it influences his policy positions.

Please click here to read the rest of Baucham’s article.

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I see that Rush Limbaugh’s daily excoriation of all things Ron Paul continues unabated. Today on his website (I’m not a member so I have to read the transcript) he comments on a news piece by Erin Burnett in which she discusses the possibility of large numbers of democrats voting for Ron Paul in the Iowa Republican caucuses.

This is anathema to El Rushbo. Rush would have us believe that if Democrats vote for a Republican in large numbers, they would do so only for purposes of sabotage. No other explanation is possible or permitted. This puts Limbaugh in the position to spin the caucus results any way he wants. If Ron Paul does well in the caucuses, it’s obviously Democratic conspiracy designed to undermine the Republican party by voting for an unelectable candidate. If Ron Paul does poorly, this is evidence that Paul is just a fringe wacko whose appeal is limited to the tinfoil hat brigade. Heads Rush wins, tails Paul loses. What a deal!

But here’s another way of looking at it. What if a whole lot of Iowa Democrats come out and vote for Paul, not because they want to sabotage the Republicans, but because they actually like Ron Paul and support his ideas. Can’t happen, you say? Naive, you say? If this is what you think, I have two words for you: Reagan Democrats.

See, I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. He won the election in a landslide over Jimmy Carter in part due to a phenomenon called the Reagan Democrats. The Reagan Democrats were for the most part blue collar folks who got fed up with Carter’s lack of leadership, his depressing incompetence, and the general “malaise” felt by much of the nation at that time. For more on the Reagan Democrats, please click here. These traditional union democrats crossed over to large numbers to support Reagan in the general elections of 1980 and 1984.

Now as anyone who’s followed Rush even a little bit knows, Ronald Reagan is one of Rush’s heroes. Rush loves to brag about Reagan and has himself touted Reagan’s crossover appeal as a sign of the Gipper’s greatness. So how is it that if Reagan attracts Democrats, Rush finds that a good thing, but if Paul does likewise, it’s proof positive that the good doctor is a crank? Instead of bashing Paul for attracting Democrats, by his own logic, Rush should be one of Paul’s biggest supporters.

Could it be that Paul’s crossover appeal in Iowa may be a sign, not of his weakness as a candidate, but of his strength? Could it be that in the general election large numbers of Paulian Democrats may seriously undermine Obama’s electoral base and usher in a Republican landslide? Could it be that these Paulian Democrats may even turn out to benefit the Republican party in the long run by increasing the breadth of its appeal? I know, I know, in Rush’s cloistered world behind the golden EIB microphone, this is unthinkable. But it the real world, who knows, stranger things have happened.

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Newt Gingrich went and did it. After several months of bluster, boasting and nonsense – he’s a historian, by golly, and don’t you forget it – he finally managed to say something interesting. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, the former speaker admitted that if he had to choose between Ron Paul and Barak Obama in the general election, he’d go with Obama. For what it’s worth, Gingrich later hedged his language, but the cat’s out of the bag.

This should surprise no one given the fact that when it comes right down to it, Gingrich and Obama have far more in common with each other than either one does with Ron Paul. Both love welfare at home, warfare abroad and neither cares a whit about the Constitution.

Now that one hypocritical, statist Republican has shown his true colors, perhaps more will have the courage to follow. Rush Limbaugh. Paging Rush Limbaugh. Has anyone seen Rush Limbaugh…

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In a recent piece, I commented on an article in Time by Joe Klein. For a mainstream media writer, I thought Klein was reasonably fair to Ron Paul, and was in fact more open to Paul’s free market ideas than many leading conservatives. I also mentioned that the article had a number of errors in it as well. I dealt with one of those already: Klein’s conflation of popularity and constitutionality. For Klein, it seems, if legislation is passed by Congress and is popular with the people, it must be constitutional. It was on this basis that he defended Social Security. This, of course, is fallacious. A law is constitutional if it is in agreement with the Constitution; it is unconstitutional if it is not. This has nothing to do with popularity.

There is another common, mistaken idea in Klein’s article based on the unstated assumption that complexity is good and simplicity is bad. Klein wrote, “This is a complicated society, undergoing an ever more rapid transformation in the midst of a potentially long economic slump…It’s these sorts of times that raise up people with simple answers: ideologues and demagogues. Paul is an ideologue and – we’re lucky – an entirely honorable one.” Klein, like many people, assumes complexity is good and normal, simplicity is not.
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In a article in Time, political writer Joe Klein spotlights Ron Paul in a not too negative fashion. In all honesty, I Klein’s piece was much better than I would have expected out of the MSM. It’s funny, but in some ways the MSM is less hostile to Paul’s ideas than many prominent voices in the conservative media. Limbaugh regularly bashes Paul as do the fine folks in the flagship conservative political magazines. Not that Klein quite gets it. I doubt he’d ever count himself as a Paul supporter, but stranger things have happened.

One area where Klein could improve is in his view of Social Security. Klein writes, “On an even more basic level, it would be nice to believe that people could take care of themselves without government help, but it just hasn’t proved true: programs like Social Security and Medicare – with run directly against the Jeffersonian-libertarian tradition – were necessary because people couldn’t take care of themselves. The elderly, especially, had trouble paying medical bills after their working days ended. The American people, through their government, decided to make a rudimentary deal, to make sure their parents didn’t starve or sleep in the streets and were able to get medical care.”

Of course, this raises the question, how did people take care of themselves before Social Security? They or their families did. If that wasn’t adequate, there were many charities that assisted people. When the Republicans won the House in 1994, Newt Gingrich put out a list of books supporting limited government. On that list was a publication titled The Tragedy of America Compassion. In it, author Marvin Olasky effectively refuted the notion that before the modern welfare state – including the advent of sacred programs like Social Security – people were starving in the streets. Socialists would have you believe that were it not for government “charity,” there would be none. That idea is simply false.

Klein continues, “There was nothing unconstitutional about that – just as there’s nothing unconstitutional about requiring people to have medical insurance now. The deal was made with the consent of the governed. In the real world, these are the most popular programs the government offers – about 80% of the American people are happy with them.”

Here, Klein shows he himself to be well off base. He seems to confuse popularity with constitutionality. And while I won’t deny that many government programs have popular support, this is very different from saying they are constitutional. The logical rule is that if it is not granted in the Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from that activity. The Constitution does not authorize Social Security, therefore it is unconstitutional for the federal government to provide Social Security benefits. The logic is simple to understand, but hard to face.

The Apostle Paul stated the Christian position on charity when he wrote, “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim.5:8). Christians are to provide for their own households – including aged parents – out of their own resources, not use the government gun to do so. Charity starts at home. Ron Paul’s voting test – he will not vote for a bill unless it is authorized in the Constitution – is logical, constitutional, and in accord with Christian ethics. Would that there were many more like him in Congress.     

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This morning I was driving to work on the interstate, minding my own business, and sipping a nice, hot, oversize mug of coffee. It was a pretty typical morning commute. Nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting. At least not until a Volkswagen Jetta passed me on the left. The Jetta itself wasn’t remarkable. It was like hundreds of others I’d seen before. But something about it caught my eye and caused me to do a double take. Much to my surprise, the car had a gas pump nozzle still inserted in the gas tank sticking out the side of the car. Even better, the six feet of hose still attached to the nozzle was dragging on the road surface well behind the rear tire. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Clueless!,” I thought to myself, “How could anyone be that oblivious to what’s going on around him?”

Of course, we can all be clueless at times. When I was in grade school, I used to fill up the lost and found with gloves and hats and coats. I could have outfitted half the third grade with all the stuff I misplaced.

And to tell you the truth, I’m still that way. Those who know me are well aware of my bad habit of putting things in odd places and completely forgetting about them. I recently lost my eyeglasses for a week and had no idea what I might have done with them. I finally figured out they were in the pocket of my new hoodie, but not after overturning the house and making special trips to two restaurants, thinking that I had left my glasses at the table.

Some people think that my writing is clueless too. I hope that’s not the case, but maybe they have a point. No doubt I have several cords worth of wood in my eye. A man should never judge his own case. Whatever.
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Why were we flying a drone over Iran? – Rep. Ron Paul

Much has been made of the lost American surveillance drone recently captured by the Iranians. The Pentagon has lied about it, John Stewart has made fun of it, and Obama has asked for it. But what is important in all this is the question, what was it doing there in the first place? As usual it took the temerity of Ron Paul to ask this important and – as far as our masters of the universe in the government and media are concerned – impertinent question.

Many Americans take it for granted that the US has the right and the duty to bomb, occupy and spy on the rest of the world. They take it as a matter of course that the US ought to engage in these activities and become angry should anyone suggest otherwise.

But God never commanded Israel to spy on its neighbors as a regular practice. Yes, spies were sued on occasion, but this occurred only during times of war. John Robbins made this point quite well in his essay The Sine Qua Non of Enduring Freedom. He wrote,

A related foreign policy question is the matter of spies, for perhaps the predominant function of embassies today (and perhaps whenever they have been used) is espionage. Ancient Israel used spies, but only during war and for short periods of time. Just as there was no standing army, so there were no standing armies of spies and diplomats. God commanded Moses to ‘Send men to spy out the land of Canaan,’ one from each tribe…

Some of this spying was commended by God, and perhaps all of it was, but we are not told that all of it was done at God’s express command. But spying was used exclusively during wartime. Spying on other nations was not a normal, peacetime practice of either the Hebrew republic or the monarchy. It seems clear that spying on one’s neighboring governments during peacetime, even more than maintaining embassies that harbor spies, is a form of prohibited foreign intervention. It can hardly be argued that God’s command to Moses justifies the regular use of spies, for the command was very specific: Spy out the land of Canaan. Espionage, except during wartime, is not a proper function of government..

The absence of both resident ambassadors and spies is the norm.”

The Bible commands individuals and governments to mind their own business (1 Thess. 4:11), but peacetime spying is anything but that. If anyone objects that droning Iran is not an example of peacetime espionage because we are at war with Iran, I would ask him to show me where the Congress has declared it.

And if anyone supposes that regular espionage is fine because it is done only to bad men from bad nations who deserve it but has no implications for the civil rights of American citizens, I would point out that the airport porno scanners, warrantless wiretaps and vanishing financial privacy we have come to enjoy in the post 911 world all suggest that what the feds do over there doesn’t stay over there, but rather that both the foreign and domestic surveillance apparatuses are in reality two sides of the same lawless federal coin.

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