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January 2019 Archives
January 1, 2019
Apple pulls app for Christian ministry
In case anyone remembers the recent attempt in California to ban so-called "conversion therapy," here is a related event: A Texas-based Christian ministry on issues of sexuality, Living Hope Ministries, has had its app pulled from the app store by tech giant Apple on the grounds of the alleged "bigotry" of their position. You know, teaching traditional sexuality, encouraging those with same-sex attraction who want to live according to God's plan for sexuality, and offering DVDs on how to help people in your church who have SSA--all very "bigoted" stuff. The claim is that all such programs to proclaim the traditional Christian view and encourage people to live by it are ipso facto "reparative therapy." That is precisely what those of us claimed when we opposed the CA bill. (That has been tabled for the moment, but I fear it will be back in another year.)
January 11, 2019
Christians in Netherlands face possible prosecution for opposing homosexual acts
Okay, so which part of this is "no big deal"? (Answer: No part of it.) Read on.
Background: The Nashville statement on biblical sexuality was written in the summer of 2017 and is promoted by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The text can be found here. I had not read it until today, and I'm such a cynic that I was afraid it would be wimpy, even though written by the CBMW. But as far as I can see on a quick read, it's good, without even the all-too-common breast-beating about how badly (how?) Christians have treated "LGBTQ persons," or that sort of nonsense. I may have just missed something, but on a first read through the statement looks like a simple, non-insulting, but firm statement of basic Christian sexual morality.
Someone translated the Nashville statement into Dutch.
Some Dutch Christians, despite the extreme leftism even of most "Christians" in their country, bravely signed it.
Now the Dutch public prosecutor is considering whether or not to bring charges against them for signing it.
January 20, 2019
Mako Three Zero Charlie
All Americans should know the name John Chapman. Fathers, tell your sons about him. Tell your daughters too.
An Air Force special operator working with the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, Technical Sergeant Chapman perished in eastern Afghanistan in March of 2002 after fighting, alone and seriously wounded, against many al Qaeda irregulars for several hours. In his final moments, he exposed himself to lethal fire in order to provide cover for comrades in a helicopter.
To this display of surpassing valor, the story adds a note of tragic bitterness between the various service branches. Specifically, the note of bitterness arises from the delay in awarding Chapman the Medal of Honor, which his widow finally received last summer. That delay, it seems, was primarily the product of Navy opposition (though some dispute that), and military-bureaucracy machination.
Sean Naylor supplies all the details, from the inspirational to the ugly, in this riveting report in Newsweek last year, which I will not summarize. Instead, just read it, and I’ll conclude with Sgt. Chapman’s official Medal of Honor citation:
Technical Sergeant John A. Chapman distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism as an Air Force Special Tactics Combat Controller, attached to a Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) Team conducting reconnaissance operations in Takur Ghar, Afghanistan, on March 4, 2002. During insertion, the team’s helicopter was ambushed causing a teammate to fall into an entrenched group of enemy combatants below. Sergeant Chapman and the team voluntarily reinserted onto the snow-capped mountain, into the heart of a known enemy stronghold to rescue one of their own. Without regard for his own safety, Sergeant Chapman immediately engaged, moving in the direction of the closest enemy position despite coming under heavy fire from multiple directions. He fearlessly charged an enemy bunker, up a steep incline in thigh-deep snow and into hostile fire, directly engaging the enemy. Upon reaching the bunker, Sergeant Chapman assaulted and cleared the position, killing all enemy occupants. With complete disregard for his own life, Sergeant Chapman deliberately moved from cover only 12 meters from the enemy, and exposed himself once again to attack a second bunker, from which an emplaced machine gun was firing on his team. During this assault from an exposed position directly in the line of intense fire, Sergeant Chapman was struck and injured by enemy fire. Despite severe, mortal wounds, he continued to fight relentlessly, sustaining a violent engagement with multiple enemy personnel before making the ultimate sacrifice. By his heroic actions and extraordinary valor, sacrificing his life for the lives of his teammates, Technical Sergeant Chapman upheld the highest traditions of military service and reflected great credit upon himself and the United States Air Force.
January 29, 2019
Death Penalty and Proportionality
Opposition to the death penalty (DP) takes many forms, but the ones I am focusing on here are objections based on a seeming difficulty with the thesis that the DP is the proportionate penalty for some crimes. Objections come in three flavors: (1) that no crime is bad enough to deserve death; (2) that even if death is proportional as a punishment for a crime, some lesser penalty might also be adequate and (therefore) should always be preferred over using the DP; and (3) that the insistence on proportionality by DP is undermined by the fact that if death is proportional for a certain level of serious crime (such as the murder of an innocent civilian), there are many much more serious crimes than that (such as the murder of many innocent civilians, or the murder of policemen, or the instigation of insurrection, or the treasonous assassination of a president…), and yet we cannot put the murderer to death many times to fit proportionality to the crime, hence the thesis that we ought to carry out death as the ‘proportional’ penalty for a single murder is disturbed by the lack of proportion found further down the line. The last objection could seem to lead to the conclusion that the DP should then be used only for the one single class of crime that is “the absolute worst”, but because of the difficulty of locating such a class, in reality the objectors’ intention is to fuzz the notion of proportionality sufficiently to undermine ANY certain or definitive claims about it, and especially claims that we can be confident that the DP is proportionate to any specific crime.
All three objections are wrong, and I hope to provide here if not definitive proof of this, at least good solid arguments that allow us to set the objections down as being inadequate counterarguments to the basic stance that death is a proportionate penalty for very serious crimes.
January 30, 2019
Roe v. Wade and the will to evil
The World Trade Center lit up recently in celebration of the passage of a new New York abortion law. As reported, it does indeed legalize abortion up until birth. The definition of "health," of course, is completely loose, and the abortionist gets to decide what counts. Other states, including Massachusetts, Virginia, and Vermont, are seeing a push from Democrat lawmakers to pass similar laws.
It's good to see my pro-life friends once more having the opportunity to point out the extremism of the pro-aborts. And if you had any doubt, bang on cue, here's an article that says the NY law still isn't radical enough, since the transparent excuse of "health" still has to be used in order to carry out a late-term abortion. Awww. The poor people who want to kill babies late in pregnancy have to check a phony box before doing so. Tsk tsk.
The publicity that this law is receiving may help to open some eyes.
What pro-lifers are not saying much, though, is this: This is the regime of Roe v. Wade. We may be nervous about saying it, lest we sound ho-hum about what New York just did. We don't want to sound like we are speaking like the pro-aborts: "This law doesn't change much. It encodes Roe in case the conservatives on SCOTUS overturn Roe."
Well, we should be so lucky as to have SCOTUS overturn Roe. I fear that isn't going to happen, at least not if "overturn" means what any pro-lifer means by that.
But the fact of the matter is that, with a few notable exceptions, the New York law replaced an obsolete dead letter, a pre-Roe law that remained on the books, with a law that enshrines the radical pro-abortion mandate of Roe.