Recent years have seen a resurgence of thought about the age-old topic of Christian engagement in the public square. This is true in the United States in particular, where a historically Judeo-Christian culture is rapidly shifting, church attendance is declining, and once largely shared civic convictions are deteriorating. The 2016 election added another wrinkle to the story, especially for conservative Christians who struggled to rethink political allegiances in light of new realities. All of these developments are necessitating new answers to old questions. Namely, how do Christians engage faithfully and prudently in a pluralistic—and at times, antagonistic—public square?
- Property/Wealth Allows you to be self-governing.
- Homestead Act, not Basic Income
- Value Added Sales Tax instead of Income Tax.
- Targeting Families with incomes 80,000-$200,000 for wealth accumulation (UPS Drivers, previously $150,000)
- Divorce Tax
- Anti-Pornography
- Require Schools to teach biblical literacy.
- Principle and Duty of Self Defense, Just/War (26 min)
- The Issue is not Populism, but Management Society and Selfie Man (30 min)
- Gay Marriage is the ultimate-one percent issue (R.R. Reno) (51 min)
- We should care most about the middle, not the bottom third. (R.R. Reno)
- We are in the midst of the 3rd Great Awakening without Religion: Guilt, Debt, Fault without a Religious Architecture. (56 min)
- We have a world with rights, but without a need for each other/responsibility
- The Freshman class at College realizes that something is wrong (1:07)
- Foolishness of those Evangelical Leaders who value Proximity to Power (Falwell, Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham)
- Black lives matters attacked the Democratic Party.
- Identity politics is a betrayal of Martin Luther King
- Slavery is the only Moral Claim. Africans are not one group among many.
- The African American Community has been decimated by Planned Parenthood, an organization that started out with a eugenics policies (Roe) (1:29)
Thank You for Asking
Young people are radically changing how we think about violence, consent
and gender. Antioch College is where much of the conversation started... When Alyssa Navarrette, a third-year student who is studying anthropology and art, came home for her first visit after starting college, she was taken by surprise when her mother hugged her.
.. “If you don’t want to be touched and your mom wants to hug you, you should be allowed to say no,” Ms. Navarrette said. “It’s about having autonomy over your own body.”
.. People introduce themselves with their preferred pronouns (“I’m Katie and I use ‘they/them/their’”).
.. In a lot of ways, Antioch College exists in a bubble. With a current enrollment of 135 students
.. it guaranteed free tuition to its first four enrolling classes.
.. He attended several sessions at orientation devoted to the policy, including one led by Planned Parenthood educators, another about the history of sexual relations.
.. “silence conveys a lack of affirmative consent.”
.. the school and the women who created the policy were portrayed as endemic of a politically correct culture run amok that was trying to desexualize sex.
.. it became the subject of a lot of media attention, including a blistering skit on “Saturday Night Live” in 1993 starring Shannen Doherty (“major in Victimization Studies”)
.. programming has included screenings of ethical pornography
.. The college’s administration sees this all as a big selling point for the school.
.. “There’s an idea that it has to be very unromantic and very contractual and that’s not true at all,”
.. “You can learn to ask in ways that are sexy and romantic and say, ‘Is this O.K.? You want to continue to do this? Can I touch you there?’ These are all thing that can enhance the experience instead of killing the buzz.”
.. “The challenge was, ‘How do you get consent in a situation where everyone is so nervous?’”
.. She thought the policy was too based in political correctness. “I was an eye roller,” she said.
.. “I have very little patience with the notion that something like this isn’t needed,”
.. “I’m also looking for it to help people get justice or get acknowledgments at least for microaggression,”
The Ivanka Way
Ivanka Trump made an offer to Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood. The first daughter had pressed her father to say positive things about Planned Parenthood during the 2016 campaign, and now she had a proposal for the organization’s leader: What if Planned Parenthood split up, creating a small operation that ran abortion clinics and a larger one whose health clinics didn’t perform abortions? Then her father would call for increasing funding to the larger operation, instead of joining with congressional Republicans in their efforts to defund Planned Parenthood entirely.
.. It was indeed implausible to imagine that Richards would seriously consider Ivanka’s proposal. But as a political idea, a way of rethinking the whole Planned Parenthood debate, it reminded me of Ivanka’s father’s 2016 approach to many questions — the Trumpian habit of ignoring the ideological assumptions around an issue, and groping toward views that more Americans might be likely to support.
.. It implies that Richards’ organization performs, say, a few thousand abortions for high-risk pregnancies and rape victims annually, instead of the real number, which last year was 328,348 — dwarfing the number of prenatal care visits by a factor of more than 30.
.. Republicans often imply they would happily support Planned Parenthood if the organization wasn’t the nation’s largest abortion business. But this is misleading as well: Many religious conservatives would still object to funding contraceptives, and many small-government conservatives would oppose public health care spending, period.
.. So a politician who proposed to fund a large network of women’s health centers that offered contraceptives, H.I.V. tests, mammograms, prenatal care and adoption referrals, but absolutely no abortions, would run afoul of both the liberal commitment to abortion-as-a-positive-good and various conservative positions.
The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead
Will Progressives erase the history of their racist heroes, or only their racist enemies?
.. Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving standards of probity. In some cases, such damnation may be understandable if done calmly and peacefully — and democratically, by a majority vote of elected representatives.
.. Few probably wish to see a statue in a public park honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the racist Dred Scott decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.
But cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk.
In the present climate of auditing the past, it is inevitable that Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood will have to be disassociated from its founder. Sanger was an unapologetic racist and eugenicist who pushed abortion to reduce the nonwhite population.
.. Should we ask that Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign from the Supreme Court? Even with the benefit of 21st-century moral sensitivity, Ginsburg still managed to echo Sanger in a racist reference to abortion (“growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of”).
Why did we ever mint a Susan B. Anthony dollar? The progressive suffragist once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”
Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II while he was California’s attorney general.
President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?
In the current logic, Klan membership certainly should be a disqualifier of public commemoration. Why are there public buildings and roads still dedicated to the late Democratic senator Robert Byrd, former “exalted cyclops” of his local Klan affiliate, who reportedly never shook his disgusting lifelong habit of using the N-word? Why is Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman, in the 20th century, still honored as a progressive hero?
.. Are the supposedly oppressed exempt from charges of oppression? Farm-labor icon Cesar Chavez once sent union thugs to the border to physically bar U.S. entry to undocumented Mexican immigrants, whom he derided as “wetbacks” in a fashion that would today surely earn Chavez ostracism by progressives as a xenophobe.
.. What is the ultimate purpose of progressives condemning the past? Does toppling the statue of a Confederate general — without a referendum or a majority vote of an elected council — improve racial relations? Does renaming a bridge or building reduce unemployment in the inner city?
.. Does selectively warring against the illiberal past make us feel better about doing something symbolic when we cannot do something substantive? Or is it a sign of raw power and ego when activists force authorities to cave to their threats and remove images and names in the dead of night? Does damning the dead send a flashy signal of our superior virtue?