Reason to live (second in a series): Miss Gracie

With her brother, Amos, Gracie was found as a kitten in a box at the back of a trailer park. Left to fend for herself as an undersized kitten. If the two of them hadn't meowed so loud, I never would've met them. And I am so, so glad we get to share a home. (Except for Amos -- he ran away one terrible Saturday in 2000. I still miss him.)

Gracie is a Maine coon mix who exhibits all the traits of a coon. She's chatty as all get-out. She loves -- LOVES -- to be petted. She's pretty indifferent about the other pets, but she loves people. As long as you'll rub her belly and her head, Gracie is your friend.

Miss Gracie has seen me through thick and thin, always a loyal companion. She's a snuggle bunny, to be sure. I just can't do without her.

Now 11 years old, Gracie is the grand dame of the homestead. On my best day and my worst, she's there by my side. A better feline friend could not be found, IMHO.

Law and Gospel: a terrific read

One of the thornier issues in the Christian faith is the balance between the law and the Gospel. Stray too far on one side, and you become a nagging hypocrite (i.e., "legalistic"). Dash off to the other, and you're licentious (the word is "antinomian," but that's too lofty to get the idea across, IMHO). Many, many Christians have erred and continue to err on one side or the other. I don't think I have it right, for that matter. It's simple, on the one hand, and very complex on the other.

Every once in a while I read something that seems filled with light, or rather, The Light. Such is a great find for today: The Internet Monk's rant on the subject. Rather than getting long-winded with scads of references to Bible commentators, the Monk shoots from the hip:

There’s a lot to discuss with this topic, because I believe genuine discipleship, which has aspects of law to it, grows out of and lives in the Gospel, not the law. (Think of Gospel as soil and law as fence. How does your garden grow?) The Gospel is the Gospel of the Kingdom, and the King has a moral law. So I’m not simplistic. I sometimes hear people that I really respect do things with the Law-Gospel distinction that makes my skin crawl and that sounds like weird dispensationalism.

As someone who was a Reformed Baptist (and got my fill of this, and then some) and is now a Reformed Presbyterian (and far less plagued with guilt, although it still happens and in spades from time to time), the Monk is reaching me, and I am feeling him:

For one thing, most of us have heard so much law preaching that we’re drowning in it. Most Baptists love it, too, or say they do. “You really told them today, preacher. You let ‘em have it” or my fave as a young preacher-boy “You really stepped on our toes today.” I must not have done it right then, because the law KILLS you, not annoys you, so you can be resurrected, not corrected.

That's the thing I have trouble hanging onto: The law's correction is no longer damnation for those who embrace the savior. The law's standard is impossibly high: Perfection. Only Jesus, the perfect Messiah, could bear that burden (and burden it was -- Gethsemane, anyone?), and He did it for us. Because we can't begin to do it for ourselves. I know I can't. I can get depressed over how horrifying short I fall of a holy God; I can't get depressed when I focus on He who never fell short, even though He fell hard under Roman whips, under the weight of the cross, and so much more so under the tipped Cup that He feared most. The Monk continues:

Law preaching is powerful. It feels powerful. Even when it’s done poorly and just amounts to nagging, it makes the preacher feel like he/she is doing something. That’s one reason it’s so popular- you’re telling them what to do. You’re like Moses hitting the rock. Look what I did, you bunch of stubborn yokels. And joined with invitationalism and revivalism, it works. It fills the altar with crying students. I brings people down to get baptized for the 5th time and really mean it this time.

The Gospel, on the other hand, takes the power out of your hands. It’s the announcement of what God has done. You aren’t powerful at all. You’re one loser telling a bunch of other losers that they are going to be treated like winners. Bread for the thieves. Pardon for the unquestionably guilty. Love for rebels. You’re announcing that everyone gets paid the same. You’re issuing banquet seats to people who have no right to a ticket because they are dirty and sinful. You’re telling sinners that the lamb of God has paid the bill and it’s not going to appear on their charge anywhere.

The wonder of this faith is that it was, and is, meant for the weak, the foolish, the crippled, the sick, the sore, the overwhelmingly guilty. It's a fall-flat-on-your-face thing, right into the filth of this world, so you can feel the shame and misery that sin has wrought within and without you. When you know that in your bones, you get a real sense of why it took a righteous man's blood to satisfy God's wrath.

"He eats with drunks and publicans," they said of Jesus. He still does. We walk fitfully and sometimes pathetically, but it's thanks to Jesus that we walk at all, and it's from Him we get the strength to take even one more step.

Anyway, if this subject interests you, the Internet Monk's rant is worth devouring in its entirety.

Reason to live (first in a series): Chloe

She's pretty sensitive to my moods, and has the ability to lift me out of a funk (however briefly) by dint of her enthusiasm for simple, good things -- walks, especially.

She likes to be close to me. I don't understand why, but there's no denying it. She'll follow me from room to room as I putter about the house, and lie down at my feet when I'm working at home.

She gives tiny kisses. But they're full of heart.

She's a gift from God, an "inheritance" from my sister, and a blessing to me.

Thanks for being here with me, Chloe. You're a lifesaver, more so than you know.

If being white=racist ... am I a racist?

I no longer know the answer to this question, even though I suspect the answer is "yes" and there's nothing I can do about it.

But I do know this: There are a lot of very angry "people of color" in the United States, and their anger is directed at me by virtue of my skin color (and of course the immense privilege I enjoy being white).

I suppose I first found my racial consciousness when I was in grade school, when busing became official policy. Overnight, our predominantly white school was busing black kids in. Some nasty attitudes accompanied all this, but it was really a pretty smooth process (from where I sat -- of course, I'm sure my white privilege blinded me to the reality of how I was oppressing those around me).

We moved frequently, from small city to large-ish town, throughout South Carolina and North Carolina. I was always the new kid, the one with the twisted-up face (dog attack at age 5, much surgery followed), so I got picked on. That's pretty normal. I also was assaulted twice by gangs of black kids who were angry about a lot of things that I thought had nothing to do with me. Made it to the ER once. Of course, the black kids in both cases were reported by ... a black kid who was my friend already in each case. They were both later identified and beaten up, too. "Stop snitching," right? (Nothing new about that.)

My parents were firm in teaching me that racism was evil, that it had done inestimable damage to our cities and towns, and that much had to be done to correct it. They would not permit me, even for a second, to direct my own anger at having been attacked toward my attackers. I accepted this then, instead blaming myself for being a representation of what made these kids so angry. It was a rough time to be in some parts of the South (and the North, for that matter).

My education in matters racial continued through the years, and certainly the TV miniseries Roots was a pivotal event. It drove me to the book, which I read and wept over. I read more about slavery and its evils, and became increasingly depressed over it all, deeply saddened at such abject human misery that my forebears had, at least, some part in supporting if only tacitly. No abolitionists that I'm aware of in my family tree.

Now, don't get me wrong here. I don't find anything the least bit commendable in any of my attitudes or beliefs. If anything, there's all the more reason to hate me. I'm white, after all. Guilt piled up. Hatred of myself (over racial matters primarily, but others as well) simply grew. I had a hard time believing anyone could even object to my hating myself, save for dyed-in-the-wool racists, and I didn't care what they thought. So much death and misery made me want to die, frankly. Suicide attempts followed, two of which in 1986 landed me in the hospital.

Over time, however, I grew resentful of my self-hatred. Why did I hate myself for simply being who and what I am? It made less sense, the longer I thought about it. Yes, non-white people may hate me, even though a few may put up with me; but that doesn't mean I have to join the party. Slowly, the whole burden of guilt over being white began to lift.

Now I'm beginning to realize that this, far from being a kind of liberation, is itself a form of racism -- at least in the eyes of some (maybe many?) people. I have come to realize, slowly, that not everything about being descended from Europeans is overwhelmingly evil and depraved. Some of it, at least, is actually quite good.

So, am I a racist? Let me say that none of my *best* friends -- those I'm closest to -- are of another race. Some of my friends are, but we all know that racists always say, "Some of my [best] friends are [insert minority name here]." I live in a very diverse condo/apartment complex, one that just kind of happened that way; I don't love it because it's diverse. I love it because many of the people there, regardless of racial heritage, are great folks and great neighbors. We genuinely seem to get along. (Or am I failing to see past my privileged white blinders again? I never know. Perhaps the default is to assume that people who aren't white hate me, and my white blindness prevents me from seeing that?)

Throughout each day, I encounter people of many different races and cultural backgrounds. I genuinely enjoy this, just the quick exchanges of pleasantries, just the bustle of commerce in relatively peaceful establishments. ("Relative" here to the rest of the world, I mean, which is in continual strife.) Black and Hispanic people are often kind to me, not for any reason other than that these particular folks are kind people. I try to encourage that in them (and me) by being engaged in kindness and understanding, by caring about how busy other people are, that sometimes they're having bad days and it's nothing personal, etc.

But it's not enough. Ultimately, it means zero.

I have become aware, long before Pres. Obama emerged first as a prominent (then dominant) candidate, then as our chief executive, that racial relations in the United States never really change. It's the same dance: whites feeling guilty or resentful (or both), blacks feeling oppressed and resented. It does not change. It will not change. If anything, it's gotten worse. That's not Pres. Obama's fault, by any stretch; expecting him to usher in a post-racial society was simply nuts, of course. The man's got a full plate, and then some. He's in over his head, simply because anybody would be, no matter how smart. There is no harder job than his.

But the recent arrest of Harvard Prof. H.L. Gates, Jr., illustrates -- regardless of your opinion of who's right in this -- that the old narrative has not changed, and will not change. It's clear to me that no white police officer should ever respond to a call involving black people without black officers present. While this will make little difference, it will at least provide some cover to the white officer while ensuring that he or she toes the line on appropriate behavior. (I'm all in favor of black officers policing blacks primarily, simply because there is a lot of ugly history in black encounters with white police officers -- for that matter, with whites, period.) Do I feel awful about the facts of our nation's racial history? Of course. You'd have to be inhuman not to. This nation was born in a bloodbath, and it has continued apace ever since, whether for racial reasons or not. That will not change, either.

So, I no longer hate myself as a rule, even though I lapse into it from time to time (for various reasons, and being white is part of it, admittedly). Right now, I admit, I'm feeling it with a mild intensity, so to speak. I look forward to death as it will, I do fervently hope, remove me from this wound in our nation that will never, ever heal. I am guilty, and I suppose to the extent I try to assuage my guilt by ignoring it, I am a racist.

I believe that all I have done wrong, and been privileged to by the evil others have done, will be forgiven because Jesus paid even for that on the cross -- not because I am worthy of anything other than condemnation, punishment, and eternal torture, but because and only because He is. I am nothing, and less than nothing. He is everything. I repeat this, as John the Baptist did: "I must decrease, and He must increase."

I am filled, however, with regret and guilt. And there is no relief. None. This world is an absolutely evil, fallen place, and it is that way in part because of me -- white, male me. No getting around that.

So, hate away. I am, I guess, a racist for all the reasons outlined above. I deserve your hatred. Right now, I'll join you! Have at it.

I hope that soon, we'll all get what we want: I want to be gone, erased, utterly annihilated, and completely forgotten. I wish I'd never been here, not even for one breath, in the first place.

The darker corners of my worn-out faith

"Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 4:1-3

Depression. It is what it is, and it is not always a bad thing. But it is what it is.

Coming off nearly a year of interferon therapy following my cancer diagnosis and surgery, I am finding that the big D is a big factor in my life, once again. It saps the life out of me, along with the desire to take even one more step. One more breath. (I'm so glad the life-sustaining functions are automated. Well, not glad ... but for the sake of those who care about me, very relieved that this is so.)

It is indeed very hard to reconcile depression with my faith. One thing that was much easier about being an agno-atheist (I was somewhere between, never willing to reject outright the existence of God or a god or gods, but angry at the lack of evidence for anything of the sort) was being depressed. It made sense. The world is a bleak, miserable place for most people most of the time. Easy to anesthetize oneself to that fact when one lives in a wealthy nation, as I do. But it's a fact, all the same. Believing that no one was out there, that life moved from a brief glimmer of vitality to breakdown and degradation, up to and including the deterioration of the body and death itself ... made sense. In the confines of my materialistic perspective, it still does. We can laugh at it all as much as we like, but in the end, bacteria and insects get the last laugh: they literally eat it, and us. Finis.

But several things about my unmoored beliefs troubled me. The utter lack of any sort of real justice for the very worst of us, for one. How does Pol Pot get to die in his dotage, blissfully unaware of the horrors he wrought? How do so many murderers get by with their deeds? How is it that so many people cause so much suffering on so much of this awful planet, and never see the first hint of judgment? Can love ever paper over all this? I think not. Love is a very hollow conceit on the grounds of Dachau. In the Soviet death camps. Or any of the other countless examples (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, most recently) of vile human cruelty on a scale so grand it mocks the mind.

And then there are the countless smaller sins of every passing day. The utter hatred that marks every corner of our politics. And the pride that blinds so many who imagine, "At least not I." Oh, wrong, so wrong. Especially you. Especially me.

My faith in Christ comes hard. It is empty-handed. It is broken-hearted. It is forlorn and wretched. It is hard. And it's hard won, by Him. He paid for it far more than I could ever dream of. I don't mean to compare anything about me with anything He suffered, not even for a second. For that matter, I don't compare anything I'm going through with what most people face in the course of their lives. It's relentlessly awful in most of the world, and it's going to get worse as populations climb in those areas that can least afford to sustain population growth.

I tremble at the evil of this world. I tremble at the judgment that is to come. And a nagging doubt persists: What is there is no judgment? What is the evil live fat and happy, and sleep well again tonight, and there is no recourse? What if there is no God?

Some may find freedom in this. I see nothing but the certainty of injustice and evil on a grand scale, with only the option of anesthesia to keep it at arm's length.

This is not the "why" of my faith. Like my depression, my faith is what it is. It is kept alive solely by the Spirit, who gave it to me freely -- even I, who was so undeserving of anything. He changes me by it, even in the midst of my downward spirals. He, and He alone, sustains me. He doesn't take away my despondency, doesn't remove the sadness or the anger; He just gives me another breath, another step. And sometimes, that has to be enough. Without Him, it is hard. With Him, it is hard, and it is everything.

I believe because He made me to believe, and made me believe. All else is, as Solomon so beautifully wrote, vanity. All is vanity.

Citizenship no requirement for voting in the U.S.?

American elections have always had their ugly and cynically comical points, going back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson making the decisive ruling (as Vice President and thus, President of the Senate) in favor of ... Thomas Jefferson in the bitterly contested 1800 election. (Some still aver that Jefferson stole that election by certifying the Georgia ballots, even though they were technically unacceptable.)

Plenty of dead and nonexistent people have voted in local elections over the years, and plenty of dead and jailed people have won these elections. And, of course, there are the various travesties of institutional racism and sexism which denied the vote to black Americans and women, respectively (and black women got both ends of those barrels). Those obvious injustices aside ... in modern times one thing remained fairly constant, in spite of clear and spectacular failures here and there: You have to be a U.S. citizen to vote in a U.S. election. Well, thanks to Attorney General Eric Holder, that's apparently no longer true.

Of course, most states have no way of verifying whether a voter is a citizen. Georgia is -- rather, was -- the exception. The State of Georgia's voter verification plan -- which simply sought to clarify whether a prospective voter was indeed a citizen of this country -- has been put on ice by the U.S. Department of Justice. As Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel states in her official response:

“DOJ has thrown open the door for activist organizations such as ACORN to register non-citizens to vote in Georgia’s elections, and the state has no ability to verify an applicant’s citizenship status or whether the individual even exists. DOJ completely disregarded Georgia’s obvious and direct interest in preventing non-citizens from voting, instead siding with the ACLU and MALDEF. Clearly, politics took priority over common sense and good public policy.

“This process is critical to protecting the integrity of our elections. We have evidence that non-citizens have voted in past Georgia elections and that more than 2,100 individuals have attempted to register, yet still have questions regarding their citizenship. Further, the Inspector General’s office is investigating more than 30 cases of non-citizens casting ballots in Georgia elections, including the case of a Henry County non-citizen who registered to vote and cast ballots in 2004 and 2006.

“It is important to underscore that not a single person has come forward to say he or she could not vote because of the verification process. Further, while DOJ argues that the process is somehow discriminatory, the historic voter turnout among Hispanic and African-American voters in the 2008 general elections clearly says otherwise.”

This isn't merely absurd; it's infuriating. Citizenship means absolutely nothing in the U.S. if elections themselves aren't limited to citizenship. While never explicitly stated as such in the Constitution, that's been the understanding (and rationally so) in jurisprudence since the mid-19th century.

Of course, AG Holder also recently admitted that hate crime and hate speech laws should not apply to victimized white people. It appears that he has his sites trained on the very low bar set by his predecessor, Republican and Democrat alike.

Franken: Another liberal chickenhawk

There are plenty of political people (politicians and pundits) worth loathing: unprincipled schmucks on both sides of the aisle. The newest addition to the U.S. Senate, Al Franken, was a hilarious writer and side performer on SNL during the glory years of the 1970s. I still chuckle over his kiss-off to the Me Decade as the "Me, Al Franken" decade dawned.

I also fondly remember his sketches with writing partner Tom Davis, in particular the Tony Orlando & Dawn skit (with knitting needles driven into their eye sockets -- the kind of anarchic, bizarre humor that made those years on SNL so great).

I have no idea what sort of senator Franken will be. He can be perceptive and sharp. He can also be craven and dishonest, as the Independent Institute's Anthony Gregory points out today in the II's blog:

In chapter 41 of Liars, Franken discusses how he was among the many deceived about the war, convinced by Bush of its necessity because, after all, “the world changed” on 9/11, and the U.S. government needed to deal with Saddam’s infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction. Franken cites the uranium-from-Niger lie as the piece of evidence that clinched it for him. When it became politically correct to point out that Bush had lied the country into war, Franken felt so betrayed.

But actually, that uranium lie was discredited before the war even began. Given that he had so many researchers helping him with his book, he should have known that.

Besides, even if he did believe every single piece of propaganda about Saddam’s non-existent weapons program—and here, by the way, is my Independent Institute article from before the war, explaining why we could not trust the propaganda and why the case for war was so transparently without credibility—he should have still opposed the war. There was never any justifiable reason to support Bush’s plan to wage aggressive war on the people of Iraq, to murder many thousands of them, even if you believed Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. It is an act of aggression to start a war, even if the enemy has scary weapons. The U.S. has a weapons stockpile that makes all the Middle East countries combined—even including Israel—seem minor in comparison. But that sure didn’t justify 9/11, did it?

Don't get me wrong -- Norm Coleman isn't any better, and I really couldn't care less who won that race. But if you're tempted to think Franken will somehow be different from all the "lying liars" he's had fun (and occasionally been very funny at) lampooning, you'd be wise to reconsider.

Our crumbling education infrastructure: Chicago

I happen to admire school teachers. A lot. I am the son of a teacher and brother of another one. There is no harder job that pays less or demands more. So nothing in this post is meant to slam teachers, even though a critique of teachers' unions is never misplaced.

Parsing blame has a purpose, but things have gotten so bad in public schools that it's hard not to blame our entire culture for the ever-declining standards of public education. For instance, Chicago Public Schools, from which comes our current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Duncan led a The much-vaunted improved test scores, as it turns out, were a trick of statistical manipulation, according to a new report from the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago:

Half of the students drop out by high school, and of those who remain until 11th grade, 70% fail to meet state standards, the report says. In fact, "In the regular (non-magnet) neighborhood high schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are prepared to succeed in college."

The report directly challenges widespread claims by current and former CPS officials that local students have shown substantial progress over the last decade on standardized tests.

For instance, it notes a 2006 letter from then schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. secretary of education, stating that the share of CPS students meeting or exceeding state standards had leapt 15 points in one year.

In fact, it says, the change occurred because of a change in the test, not because of real educational gains. As a result, it points out, while a test cited by local officials showed that 71% of 8th graders met or exceeded state standards in 2007, a national test taken here the same year showed just 13% were up to par.

Wow! Only off by 58 percent! Not bad, by public school standards, at least. But even worse is the fact that fully half of the students in the CPS system drop out before they enter high school. Small wonder that juvenile violence is such an issue in that city.

As the economy continues to dive, even a high school diploma will lose its diminishing value in the ever-tightening job market. Not even making it to high school -- and remember, that's fully one-half of Chicago public school students -- is utter damnation for the future, but a great recruiting ground for the increasingly violent gangs the city of Chicago is famous for.

The corruption that plagues everything in Chicago does not stop at the schoolhouse door, either.

On a related note, here's a great roundup of Chicago's most famous corruption cases. Mind you, it only skims the surface. And it's 5 pages long. As the Jossip writer notes, "The reason Chicago politics is so corrupt is because, in modern American history, it's never not been, which makes it very difficult to clean up."

Cap and Trade: Will it work?

It seems unlikely, from a variety of points of view. Greenpeace is opposed, as are most trade groups. It's yet another effort to get around a direct tax by coming up with a system for taxing without calling it a tax. It will result in job losses; the question is, how many, and how soon. The Brookings Institution estimates a 0.5 bump in unemployment.

As E. Thomas McClanahan writes in the Kansas City Star:

How do you end up with a vibrant economy and lots of net job creation by forcing people to pay higher energy prices? Well, you don’t, and that’s why this measure is one of the biggest threats to the U.S. economy ever to emerge on Capitol Hill. ...

The whole purpose of the bill is to force people to pay more for energy. That won’t spur economic growth. It will retard it, by slowing the growth of consumer spending, which makes up the greatest share of the gross domestic product. The result will be lower output and fewer jobs.

The notion that cap-and-trade will do little harm came from a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis that pegged the bill’s annual cost in 2020 at a mere $175 for the average family. (Lower-income households would get a rebate reducing their energy costs by $40.)

The Heritage Foundation pointed out that incredibly the CBO study failed to include in its calculations the overall effect on economic growth. The bill would not only make energy prices go up, but — because energy costs raise production costs generally — it would make the prices of almost everything else rise as well.

Earlier this year, Pres. Obama said that transitioning to a green economy would mean real economic pain -- he was right (and deserves credit for being honest then, at least). Now the message from Democrats is that somehow, magically, jobs will be created by higher energy prices and, er, lost jobs in the traditional energy fields. But they're apparently not as confident as all that; the Waxman-Markey (aka ACES) bill contains provisions to compensate workers laid off by the economic pressures the new system will undoubtedly produce.

The European Union's system, the Emissions Trading Scheme, has had mixed results, to put it mildly. Investors Business Daily reported that the system has major flaws, including perverse incentives not to upgrade to environmentally friendly technologies. Even environmental groups have given the ETS a collective thumbs down, according to IBD:

Begun in 2005, the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has raised energy prices with "uncertain" effects on greenhouse gas emissions, according to numerous studies.

Even green groups have been critical. The Natural Resources Defense Council, for example, has called ETS "an example of what not to do."

This failure has not daunted fans of Congress' cap-and-trade bill. They claim to have learned from the earlier mistakes.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Harvard Prof. Martin Feldstein argued that any unilateral (i.e., without anything compelling China and India to tighten environmental clamps) move toward cap-and-trade in the U.S. would raises costs without delivering any significant environmental benefit:

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices needed to achieve a 15 percent CO2 reduction -- slightly less than the Waxman-Markey target -- would raise the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year. Some expert studies estimate that the cost to households could be substantially higher. The future cost to the typical household would rise significantly as the government reduces the total allowable amount of CO2.

Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States.

Remember who pushed this scheme to start with in the U.S. Not Congress -- Enron -- and there is a reason they were hot to set this market up, as US News & World Report's William O'Keefe pointed out:

The cap-and-trade system being touted on Capitol Hill would create a multibillion-dollar playground that would, once again, create a group of wealthy traders benefiting at the expense of millions of average families—middle to low-income households that would end up paying more for food, energy, and almost everything else they buy.

Enron executives—before their well-deserved fall—did little to conceal their lust for cap-and-trade. In 2002, the Washington Post reported that "an internal Enron memo said the Kyoto agreement, if implemented, would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States."

Promoting the bottom lines of opportunists is not the job of policymakers. Assisting the staggering 2.6 million American workers who lost their jobs in just the last four months should be. With our nation struggling through the worst economic crisis in over 70 years, Congress shouldn't risk further economic damage by pushing a risky carbon emission mitigation scheme. There are far better alternatives for dealing with climate change.

Do we really want to go down this road? Apparently so.

Why this conservative Christian loves gay people

In a sentence: Because they're fallible sinners, just like me. Because God commands it. That's my view in the aggregate.

As for my individual gay friends, because they're wonderful -- each in his own (very different way). I treasure our friendships. I am thankful for them, even though they don't share my faith (for the most part). I don't want to think about what my life would be like without them.

In other words, it's the same as the way I feel about my straight friends, with only individual differences that have nothing to do with who they bunk with.

I have struggled mightily with the issue of homosexuality -- both within my life, years ago, and with the issue in general, since before that. Much has changed in the past 30 years or so, and much of that is good. Gay people aren't ridiculed, assaulted, or imprisoned for who they are to the degree they once were. And we've all learned a lot about gay people because so many of us have gay friends, gay family members, gay colleagues, gay leaders, or all the above.

But I was opposed to gay marriage ... until very recently. I believed that marriage was a foundational institution in our nation and culture, that tampering with it would open a Pandora's box of more difficult moral questions that could easily be answered to the horror of many of us.

I no longer believe that.

Gay marriage, I believe, would be a net positive for our society because it would bring greater stability on the whole. That's the broad view. Gay marriage, individually, would mean great joy (at least initially!) for millions of Americans.

(As a really solid piece on NPR this morning made clear, it's time for the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy to go, too. Gay marriage would mean that military spouses would at least be notified when their loved ones die while serving their country, and entitle them to the benefits they should, by all rights, have coming.)

Of course, I'd love to see the government get out of marriage completely. If two (or more) consenting adults want to bond together in loving union and call that marriage, that's their business, not mine.

I would strongly support a mandatory age minimum of 18 for marriage, regardless, unless a pregnancy is involved.

So, what does the Bible teach about homosexuality? Banned for the fledgling Jewish nation of Israel; seemingly condemned in Rom. 1, although "unnatural acts" is never defined (though presumably, given Paul's Judaism, including all the Levitical laws regarding sexuality). This is a difficult, thorny issue, to be sure for any honest Christian who holds the Bible in authoritative regard. I don't know how to reconcile my Libertarian views on marriage and my Biblical views of personal morality.

But I do understand what I believe (at long last) and why I believe it. I realize that this will not sit well with some (perhaps many) of my Christian friends, and I am sorry for giving offense. I do not intend to offend anyone, even though that is unavoidable.

Count the cost

Just stand there and take it. Nothing harder. But that's what Christians are called to do, commanded to do. The world is full of people who will insult us, demean us, even persecute us. That's OK. It's to be expected, in fact. The life and walk of a Christian is supposed to be hard, profoundly difficult at times. Jesus said:

Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
--Luke 14:25-33

Now, where might one find "health and wealth" in that passage? Where does the multi-million dollar homes, the mutli-million-dollar jets, fit in with the Savior's vision of discipleship?

You won't. And the passages that these wolves-in-sheep's-clothing quote are very, very selective, stretched out of all proportion to justify the unjustifiable.

There will be hell to pay for twisting the Word of God to suit one's own greed and ambition:

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea."
--Mark 9:42

"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'"
--Matthew 7:15-23

R.C. Sproul once called vv. 21-23 the most frightening passages in the New Testament. I tend to agree. But it's fair warning. Christ wants the heart devoted to Him; that's what He gave to us. There is no substitute. And living like rich people reveals a heart that is far, far from Christ.