God. Real. Right.

Here is an interesting cultural-ethical observation put about as succinctly as I can manage:

Marriage is the establishment, recognition, and sanctioning of a committed relationship between individuals by an external entity (such as God or society—or both, of course, as believers see it).

Individualism generally describes the West’s movement away from communitarian values toward the primacy of the individual (and ultimately toward the satisfaction of that individual’s psyche).

Communitarianism and individualism are at least contrary, if not fully contradictory—that is, they are mutually exclusive.

Marriage is obviously communitarian in the sense that (more…)

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I highly recommend the recent white paper by the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) as a starting point for a rational discussion about immigration. (Richard Land, the head of the ERLC, has a briefer statement about the issue here.) I believe the statements about immigration coming out of the ERLC right now are the sanest and most transparent of any I hear from either side.

My approach to the issue itself is simple. I believe any real solution to immigration reform must involve three things (which I will get to in just a moment), whether anyone in particular likes them or not. I don’t mean that statement as an arrogant disregard for public or private opinion. Rather, I mean by it that this problem, once properly defined, will neither simply go away because we build a bigger fence or stop offering ballots in Spanish, nor because we grant amnesty to everyone here illegally and open the borders completely. And for the problem to become something other than just that, we are going to have to be smarter than we have been for the past hundred years—on both political sides. Liberals have tried amnesty and other floods of illegal immigration have followed. Some conservatives have at times raised the ugly face of misoxeny. Yet the problem has persisted, partially because each side only acknowledges half of the problem from the outset.

So what is the problem? It is NOT simply that millions of people have entered the country illegally and that many if not most have stayed. And it is NOT simply that the illegal immigrants who are here are taken advantage of as they live on the fringes of society. It is rather BOTH the influx of immigrants who are neither fully accountable to nor fully protected by the law AND the things in our society which attract them and keep them here—basically economic interests. It doesn’t matter how big a fence we build as long as employers are motivated to pay sub-minimum wages to people who regard dirt-cheap work as so much better than what they can do at home that they leave everything else behind to get to it. Both sides of the issue must be addressed in order to effect real improvement. That is, laws must be BOTH enforced and morally and economically sane. The current law is neither enforced nor is it either morally or economically sane.

So here are the three components (more…)

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The pro-life position is not simply anti-abortion. Being against abortion is not sufficient to encompass what it is to be pro-life; there are, after all, still issues like eugenics and euthanasia. On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, trying to define the pro-life position in terms of enmity with abortion fails for a different reason.

Here’s an e-mail I received from a listener after a recent broadcast illustrating precisely this point. My response follows. (Oh, and the “next week” to which he refers is January 18-22, 2010, Sanctity of Life week, in observance of the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision.)

Subject: Abortion…

I thought that subject line would get your attention. I did want to get your point of view on something, though, and maybe you can comment on it next week when you’ll be on-topic anyway. I would like to note before I begin that I agree with you that abortion for convenience of the parents is wrong without question.

Years ago, my mother (more…)

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Live Action is a youth-led pro-life organization. Here’s a video they created based on a visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin in September. You can view this video and more at their website, http://liveaction.org.

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Here’s an e-mail I received from a listener troubled by a particular passage in the Old Testament. He says “Leviticus” but means “Exodus”. It’s an interesting e-mail because a slight shift in how one phrase is understood completely changes the implications of the passage for the issue of life in the womb. He takes it a way I have heard it taken on other occasions as well. However, as I mention below the letter, I believe both the context and wording itself point in a different direction.

Hi, Dr. Creamer:
I listen to your show almost every day on my way home, and really enjoyed the Christian perspective on various issues of our time. One of the most frequent topics that have been discussed is abortion. While I am staunchly pro-life, I have doubts whether abortion is tantamount to murder. Here is the verse that causes my doubt:

Leviticus 21:22-25 And if men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart, and yet no harm follow; he shall be surely fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if any harm follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (ASB)

A couple of things I observe from these few verses:

1. If a man commits murder, he will receive capital punishment.
2. If a man kills a pregnant woman, he will receive capital punishment.
3. If a man kills only the fetus without killing the pregnant woman, he only needs to pay a fine.

So the only conclusion I can (more…)

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President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court has drawn attention to a controversial appellate court ruling of hers in Ricci v DeStefano. In that case, the inherently unjust (self-contradictory) nature of Title VII applications is obvious. Essentially, a racially neutral exam was nullified by the fact that a white majority happened to perform better on it than their minority counterparts. Such coincidences occur naturally over any significant statistical sample. In some cases minorities would happen to perform better—not because of their minority status, but because of the relevant skills they would bring to the exam. In other cases, like (more…)

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I always receive “rebuttal” email or calls when I talk about the importance of preserving life in the womb. Here is an email with comments fairly representative of what I hear all of the time. I don’t think the comments are irrational. But I believe some brief, inline replies can show why I don’t believe they are sound assaults on the pro-life position either.

Dr Creamer,
…[off topic greetings]…
Now I wanted to respond to your subject today. I am pro-life in some ways and pro-choice in other ways. [So here are] The questions (more…)

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There are times when what is right or wrong seems so obvious that no explanation is necessary. Those times are misleading. The problem is not always that whether something appears to be right or wrong is inconsistent with the truth, though. Rather, the problem is always whether some explanation, aka justification, is still necessary.

That obviousness, that immediate sense that something is morally laudable, tolerable, or contemptible, can take different forms. But inevitably it collapses into some kind of moral intuitionism. Intuition is simply knowledge without justification. So moral intuition is an awareness of what is right or wrong prior to or separate from justification for the moral judgment in question. For an intuitionist like W.D. Ross, for instance, the awareness that a person ought to keep his obligations is prima facie right. Saying something is known prima facie or intuitively is a lot like saying some truth is self-evident. It really means nothing more than (more…)

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The storyteller is not Jesus, of course.
And when he heard that there were certain followers of Jesus living in a democratic republic who did not believe they should exercise their democratic prerogatives, he spoke this parable unto them, saying:

There was a certain king whose people suffered miserably under his reign, both directly from his own cruelty and indirectly from that of others in which he refused to intervene. Sadly, his son, heir to the throne, was no better.
But one day his son met (more…)

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Conservatives have a reputation for discounting the suffering of the needy and for legislating morality. But a swim just under the surface of that accusation reveals that the current is actually moving the other direction. Two strokes should make the point.

Stroke one: a fundamental of conservatism is confidence in the nature of free market economics. After all, anything other than free market force on an economy is actually an unjust intrusion on a system which presumes equality of opportunity for every actor, a basic value for conservatives. The critic asks, how does a free market feed the poor? The direct (but not complete) answer is that it simply doesn’t. The response to which is that the market, therefore, is morally insufficient, if not entirely vacuous, lacking compassionate intervention. (It is peripheral to this argument that hunger and poverty actually motivate productivity and that productivity benefits everyone in the system, including the poor.)

But nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, there is absolutely no reduction of the personal responsibility for benevolence in a free market economy. It is the presumption that benevolence must be the result of an artificial regulation on the market which conservatives reject, not benevolence itself.

And there’s the second stroke: making benevolence the concern of government instead of the concern of charitable organizations and morally responsible individuals is a terrible idea. What motivates it (the terrible idea) is the fear that people will fall through the cracks, and that even those who don’t fall through the cracks completely might be in significant misery before someone notices and gives them help. It’s a legitimate fear.

But in the free market, it is that suffering which motivates those who can to work out of their poverty toward a better future. And it is the aversion to the suffering of others and the fear that they will fall through the cracks which motivates individuals and local organizations to step in and help those in need who cannot work toward that better future. But it is necessarily organically motivated, not bureaucratically. To remove the risk and pain from the system removes the only thing that allows genuine altruism rather than artificial optimism to move the whole system. In other words, if it is moral to meet the needs (not just desires) of the needy, then it is the height of legislating morality to force everyone to meet the need through taxation, rather than to allow those who actually care to do something about it personally.

There are all kinds of practical reasons why it is better for the response to be motivated spiritually and engaged locally (which would also be a feature of the free market), but they are not the point here.

The gist of the issue is that a bureaucracy can enforce mandatory pain-amelioration to salve the public conscience and cover over the need, but it cannot tolerate a constant awareness of real needs and it cannot produce the legitimately helpful response to those needs which personal engagement brings. No. Only morally motivated agents acting either individually or freely in local organizations can do so. It is risky, messy, and in some ways painful (for everyone involved). But it is also both actually moral and actually compassionate. And it is, after all, always better to swim with the current than against it.

(Afterthought: By the way, the notion of compassionate conservatism meaning that conservatives ought to promote welfare-type issues along with conservative values is fundamentally flawed. Real conservatism condemns the legislated redistribution of wealth and promotes real compassion in the same stroke.)

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