Rob Bell Asks the Big Questions Ignored by Many Churches

What I love most about Rob Bell’s controversial book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), is the way it has triggered a new debate about what is really at stake in Christianity.

The odd thing about Christianity, at least in the United States, is that tens, even hundreds of millions of its adherents can’t really articulate its core beliefs beyond the most superficial, kindergarten level.

That is not a snobbish slam on Americans but simply a fact of life.

Like most religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism), Christianity is not so much a philosophical system as it is a subliminal, pre-conscious worldview that is passed on from generation to generation through rituals, symbols, readings from canonical texts, stories, proverbs, finger painting and occasional catechetical classes. This cultural inheritance carries, of course, philosophical ideas and historical claims, but it is the rare adult Christian these days who has taken the time to examine systematically any of that inheritance.

It is the rare Christian indeed who gets a systematic presentation of the key ideas and philosophical presuppositions of his or her religion – perhaps in a parochial school religion class or in a Christian high school senior seminar.

Some Christian denominations do a better or worse job at this than others, but even those denominations that try to give a systematic overview of what Christianity is all about rarely rise above the most simplistic, elementary teaching. Most children today inherit so little of the “basics” of Christianity – the who, what, when and where – that few denominations or schools can spend much time on the “why.” When people are not all that clear precisely who the Apostle Paul was… or what the Exodus was all about… you don’t have much time to discuss what it means precisely to be “saved” or the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s universalism.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had discussions with highly educated people – engineers, doctors, judges, movie directors – who will, when discussing ethics or religion, revert to what they learned from Sister Mary So-and-So in Eighth Grade or a class they took in Vacation Bible School.

It is a jarring shock to many naïve young people when they get to high school and college and start to actually think about the ideas and beliefs they inherited from their parents. The mere discovery that Christianity didn’t pop full-blown into the universe but evolved slowly over hundreds of years is unsettling to quite a few.

Some reject Christianity outright as soon as they make the startling discovery that the Gospels don’t agree on all the details of Jesus’s life… or that Genesis was written in a pre-scientific age and wasn’t supposed to be a treatise on astrophysics… or that the Gospel writers made use of Jewish scriptures in ways that, to modern sensibilities, seem a bit unusual.

So, that is why Rob Bell is such a bracing blast of cold air that should be welcomed by all.

His book, Love Wins, asks fundamental, Big Picture questions about what Christianity actually teaches. Even if you disagree with his answers – and judging from the firestorm in Protestant evangelical circles, many people do vociferously – you have to concede that his questions have rekindled thought. It is making thousands of adult Christians confront, often for the first time, what is really at stake in Christianity:

> How exactly did Jesus’s death save us from anything?

>> Who or what is Jesus saving us from?

>> Is the point of Christianity that Jesus came to save us… from God? If so, if he saved us from God, then how is that good news? Doesn’t that make God a deity from which we should, well, hide?

Of course, Christians have been debating these issues for centuries… but these debates rarely filter down to the masses in the pews. Pastor Bell’s book, precisely through its deliberately provocative questions and chapter headings, is forcing the issue upon a reluctant (mostly Protestant) Christian community – although I would say that the debate has profound implications for Catholics and Anglicans as well and even for non-Christians.

That’s because what is at stake in the “Love Wins debate” is what kind of a world we live in, what kind of a God we worship (if we worship a God), what we can expect from life, what we are here to do, the kind of people we should aspire to become, and so on.

These are questions that transcend denominational and even religious boundaries.

One tip: Buy the audio recording of Love Wins in iTunes or on CDs. Pastor Bell reads his book himself, and he is a marvelous narrator. He doesn’t merely read the text but interjects little comments so you have the feeling of attending a kind of small group seminar with him as the facilitator. It’s a great book for commuters, one that I am mischievously giving to all my Calvinist friends and relatives. (Rob Bell is the bête noire to all the followers of hyper-Calvinist preacher and bestselling author John Piper.)

How I Saw the Loch Ness Monster

I never really expected to actually see the Loch Ness Monster. As a result, when I looked through the tour boat window out at the frigid waters of the loch and happened to spot “Nessie” cruising alongside with a little monster in tow, it was a startling moment.

What made it more amazing was that I was gazing at the time at the radar scanner that the boat has in its main cabin. As it moves up and down the loch, this boat, and the other boats as well, are constantly scanning every nook and cranny of this 23-mile-long inland lake in the Highlands of Scotland. Loch Ness is the second largest lake in Scotland (after Loch Lomand, where the popular BBC series, Monarch of the Glen, was filmed). But there she was, right before my eyes, right out the starboard window (see nearby photo).

I was in the UK on personal business and decided, after visiting St. Andrews and its famous golf course and university, to take a trip up north and see Nessie for myself. I’ve always been willing to believe in most legendary creatures now derided by science, including the yeti of the Himalayas, the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest, fire-breathing dragons, at least some elves, trolls for sure (I’ve met some myself!), and giants. I haven’t made up my mind about vampires and werewolves, though, and am an unreconstructed skeptic when it comes to space aliens. But Nessie? A race of prehistoric plesiosaurs that somehow survived in the isolated lochs of northern Scotland and falsely believed, like the famous coelacanth, to be extinct? Sure, no problem!

The Loch Ness monster was first mentioned, as far as we can tell, in the 7th century. According to Adomnán, the ninth Abbot of the monastery of Iona, who wrote The Life of St. Columba, the great Celtic saint saw the monster himself around the year A.D. 565:

Also at another time, when the blessed man was for a lumber of days in the province of the Picts, he had to cross the river Nes [Ness]. When lie reached its bank, he saw a poor fellow being buried by other inhabitants; and the buriers said that, while swimming not long before, he had been seized and most savagely bitten by a water beast. Some men, going to his rescue in a wooden boat, though too late, had put out hooks and caught hold of his wretched corpse. When the blessed man heard this, he ordered notwithstanding that one of his companions should swim out and bring back to him, by sailing, a boat that stood on the opposite bank.

Hearing this order of the holy and memorable man, Lugne mocu obeyed without delay, and putting off his clothes, excepting his tunic, plunged into the water. But the monster, whose appetite had earlier been not so much sated as whetted for prey, lurked in the depth of the river. Feeling the water above disturbed by Lugne’s swimming, it suddenly swam up to the surface, and with gaping mouth and with great roaring rushed towards the man swimming in the middle of the stream. While all that were there, barbarians and even the brothers, were struck down with extreme terror, the blessed man, who was watching, raised his holy hand and drew the saving sign of the cross in the empty air; and then, invoking the name of God, he commanded the savage beast, and said: “You will go no further. Do not touch the man; turn back speedily”. Then, hearing this command of the saint, the beast, as if pulled back with ropes, fled terrified in swift retreat; although it had before approached so close to Lugne as he swam that there was no more than the length of one short pole between man and beast.Then seeing that the beast had withdrawn and that their fellow- soldier Lugne had returned to them unharmed and safe, in the boat, the brothers with great amazement glorified God in the blessed man. And also the pagan barbarians who were there at the time, impelled by the magnitude of this miracle that they themselves had seen, magnified the God of the Christians.”

Things were pretty quiet, though, for the next 1,400 years. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Nessie sightings really picked up… and led skeptics to charge that the whole thing was an elaborate publicity stunt for the money-grubbing Scots! In 1933, a man named George Spicer and his wife reported seeing a large creature crossing the road with a 25-foot-long body and a long, very narrow neck. Nessie gained a lot more publicity, though, when a famous photograph was taken of her the next year, in 1934, supposedly by a London gynecologist named Robert Wilson. That photo remains the iconic evidence for Nessie. Alas, it turns out the photo was almost certainly a fake. In 1993, Christian Spurling, stepson of a movie maker named Duke Wetherell and then age 90, confessed to two Loch Ness researchers that he had fashioned the “monster” in the photograph out of a toy submarine and plastic.

Yet sightings, photographs and films and videos have continued over the decades. What’s more, sonar scannings of the loch, far from disproving Nessie’s existence, have actually fueled the belief that she could be real. A series of acoustic scans in the late 1960s revealed tantalizing evidence that something was down there in the loch — something big and something fast! The Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, England, set up an acoustic “net” in 1967-68 through which no creature could pass without detection. In August 1968, the sonar system detected multiple moving objects, 20 feet in length and moving at speeds of up to 10 knots, ascending and descending to the loch bottom. “The high rate of ascent and descent makes it seem very unlikely that they could be fish, and fishery biologists we have consulted cannot suggest what fish they might be,” the lead scientist concluded. The next year, 1969, another scientific group, this one from the New York Aquarium, also spotted a large creature (at least 20 feet long) with its sonar equipment. A small submarine in 1969, launched to film a movie and dragging a fake Nessie behind her, picked up a large moving object on sonor just 50 feet from the bottom. In the 1970s and then again in the 2000s, an MIT scientist named Robert Rines, using a variety of photographic and sonar equipment, collected evidence of what did indeed appear to be some kind of underwater dinosaur-like creature — including a famous underwater photograph. In 1972, Rines’s sonar equipment also detected an underwater object, 20 to 30 feet in length, moving about 35 feet off the bottom. By the 2000s, Rines concluded that the family of underwater Nessies did, in fact, exist up until the late 1990s, when global warming finally finished off the last of the species.

In 1987, Operation Deep Scan, one of the most ambitious searches to date, deployed 24 boats throughout the entire width of the loch… and detected “a large moving object near Urquhart Bay at a depth of 600 feet.” One of the scientists involved in Operation Deep Scan, concluded “There’s something here that we don’t understand, and there’s something here that’s larger than a fish, maybe some species that hasn’t been detected before. I don’t know.” Yet more searches conducted in 1993 and again in 2003 for TV documentaries failed to detect anything significant.

Skeptics say there never was a Nessie, that all the sonar detected was large pieces of debris moving through the water due to the unusual currents of the loch; believers say that there may well have been a Nessie, or a family of Nessies, until perhaps the late 1990s.

All was quiet until 2007. That’s when a man named Gordon Holmes took some home video of what he and other Nessie supporters believe was or at least could have been the monster (see video). You can see for yourself below.

For my part, I kept my eye on the sonar all during the cruise down Loch Ness (see photo above). The scanner reached all the way down to the bottom of the loch, 650 feet deep. You would think that, with these boats moving up and down the loch, day after day, week after week, they would be able to detect something. But alas, no, not until I took my photo of Nessie out the window.

Can a Faithful Catholic be a Democrat, Republican or Green?

What’s a peaceful, freedom-loving, family-oriented, hard-working Catholic guy to do with the current state of U.S. politics? For decades, now, it’s been obvious that even a moderately faithful Catholic cannot feel at home in any of the major, or even the minor, U.S. political parties. We are given the choice between an increasingly militaristic, even bellicose Republican Party that goes out of its way to sneer at civil liberties and enthusiastically endorses torture, illegal surveillance of ordinary citizens and the death penalty… and the morally tone-deaf party of slavery (both literally and figuratively), the Democrats, who have never seen an authoritarian Big Government program they didn’t like and whose only economic policy prescription is to “Tax the Rich” (the “rich” being defined as anyone who holds a job) and whose embrace of “abortion rights” is so extreme that it even includes outright infanticide.

Not a very appealing choice. The Party of Death versus, well, the Party of More Death.

The truth is, Catholics are odd ducks in American politics. The ones who actually go to church and believe the central tenets of their Faith (as opposed to the “I was raised” Catholic variety who skew polling data) are, by and large, fairly conservative on social issues (abortion, marriage and embryo research), moderate on economic issues and occasionally downright liberal on environmental, peace and justice issues. (Most church-going Catholics, for example, accept Pope John Paul II’s teaching that the death penalty is illegitimate in most modern societies.) Part of this odd political schizophrenia stems directly from Catholic social teaching as enunciated in papal encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum (1891), Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Mater et Magistra (1961), Populorum Progressio (1967) and Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and Centesimus Annus (1991). As the popes have explained for the past 200 years, the dominant principles underlying Christian teaching on both social and economic issues are what’s called the Principle of Subsidiarity and the Principle of Solidarity.

The Principle of Subsidiarity means that, for both practical and philosophical reasons, matters ought to be handled by “the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.” That means that Catholics believe in local, de-centralized, “small is better” forms of government. You don’t have the Federal government setting education policy, for example, when education is done on a local neighborhood level. In practical terms, the principle of subsidiarity favors regional solutions to problems over dictats from distant and unaccountable authority. On this score, Catholics would gravitate more towards a free market or Republican approach to economic matters. The Catholic political sensibility favors federalism, states’ rights, regionalism, non-empire building. Small is beautiful indeed.

But the principle of subsidiarity must also be balanced by the Principle of Solidarity or a commitment to the common good. As Pope John Paul II explained it in his encyclical Solicitudo Rei Socialis, “Solidarity… is a virtue directed par excellence to the common good, and is found in ‘a commitment to the good of one’s neighbor with the readiness, in the Gospel sense, to ‘ lose oneself’ for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage (Mt 10:40-42, 20-25;Mk 10:42-45; Lk 22:25-27) ( Sollicitudo Rei Socialis ). Thus, while Catholics believe in the liberty-based ideals of a free market and de-centralized authority, these ideals are not absolute: They must be balanced with a “commitment to the good of one’s neighbor.” For that reason, most faithful Catholics do not object to, say, zoning regulations that prohibit strip clubs from opening near schools… or environmental protection laws that forbid dumping toxic waste directly in the ocean. The principle of solidarity is also why Catholics oppose abortion on principle: A woman’s freedom of choice ends precisely where another human life is involved.

For me personally, the only politician who comes close to living up to these ideals is the “unelectable” and “crazy” Dr. Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a libertarian on economic matters (more libertarian than Church teaching), opposed to the death penalty, opposed to America waging undeclared and unending wars overseas, opposed to the illegal and immoral use of torture, opposed to violations of civil liberties through the U.S. Patriot Act. Because he was a true physician and O.B. and delivered thousands of babies, Dr. Paul is also prolife, which, to me, shows a willingness to concede that his libertarian principles are not absolute. I thus voted for Dr. Paul in 2008 and will vote for him again in 2012. He is the only Republican candidate who even pretends to adhere to any fixed principles.

For a while, I was tempted by some of what the Green Parties say. I am, after all, prolife. I was raised in a vast forest. I’ve always liked the Greens and agree with a lot of the Global Greens Charter adopted in Canberra in 2001. The global Green Platform includes many very Catholic statements of principle in regards to nonviolence, social justice, participatory democracy, economic and ecological sustainability, de-centralized decision-making, human rights, and so on. Were it not for abortion, I would probably even sign up! The Greens oppose capital punishment and torture, as do I. They support regional farming and small business, as do I. Their champion for a long time was Ralph Nader, whom I have always liked even when I disagree with him on some economic questions and despite the fact that he is a lawyer.

Unfortunately, however, in the U.S. the Greens, like Amnesty International, have been taken over by extremist pro-abortion fanatics for whom the right to kill infants in the womb is “non-negotiable.” In Europe, most of the Green Parties insist that “questions implying life and death are sensitive ones indeed and let it be clear that the European Green Party has never advocated unrestricted abortion rights.” The European Greens, especially in Germany, have had painful experience with what happens when societies endorse medical killing…. and are thus much less enthusiastic when it comes to abortion and euthanasia than are liberals in the U.S. But for U.S. liberals, abortion trumps all else. How a party that claims to be “green” can celebrate the surgical dismemberment of an infant in the womb… or think that chemically poisoning such a child through saline solution or RU486 is somehow a “life-enhancing” act… is beyond me. Here is what the platform of the Green Party in the USA states on abortion:

Women’s right to control their bodies is non-negotiable. It is essential that the option of a safe, legal abortion remains available. The “morning-after” pill must be affordable and easily accessible without a prescription, together with a government-sponsored public relations campaign to educate women about this form of contraception. Clinics must be accessible & must offer advice on contraception; consultation about abortion and the performance of abortions. — Source: 2008 Green Party Platform from 2008 Chicago Convention Jul 13, 2008

Well, that crosses the Greens off of the list for Catholics, at least the Greens in the U.S.!

What about the Phillip Blond’s Red Tories? They are consciously drawing upon Distributist ideals. Distributism is the name given to the political aspirations of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Fr. Vincent McNabb, OP, in the early 20th century. Opposed to both Big Government liberals and Big Business conservatives, the Distributists favored small, locally owned farms and businesses and sought to put into practice the Corporal Works of Mercy. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement were an example of early Distributist thought. Certainly, neo-Distributism has many attractions for Catholics… and much of what the Red Tories say appeal to us. Yet among their many attractions, numbers isn’t one of them – meaning, both Distributism and the Red Tories are more of a philosophical objection than a real-life movement.

If I was really pressed, however, I would have to say that the political movement that comes closest to authentic Catholic ideals and my own temperament would have to be The Idler movement founded by UK writer and general layabout Tom Hodgkinson. IN a very real way, Tom comes far closer to living out the ideals of Distributism, and thus of Catholic social teaching, than any of the more “serious” political parties we’ve been discussing. In a very real sense, The Idler movement is apolitical. Like G.K. Chesterton and the Distributists, Tom thinks that the most important things in life have nothing whatsoever to do with politics — things like raising children, dancing with your wife, river racing, drinking with friends — and that we should, by and large, ignore both politics and politicians. For example, Tom does not vote… and, the more I see of U.S. politics, the more I understand why he takes this stance. How can a person with principles stand with either the Party of Slavery (the Democrats) or with the Party of Torture (the Republicans)?

The Return of the Republican Chickenhawks

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Republican debate on foreign policy, held November 12, was that it presaged the return of the Republican chickenhawks. The term “chickenhawk,” of course, refers to someone who is an extreme “hawk” on military matters without ever having served himself or herself in the military. It was a frequent taunt of Democrats aimed at the Bush Administration because so many dovish Democrats had, in fact, served in the military, while some of the most hawkish members of the Bush Administration — most notoriously Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the most staunchest advocates of using torture, assassination and other extreme measures — never saw a day of military service, much less combat.

As someone who also is not a veteran, I can honestly say that non-veterans owe two debts when speaking about anything involving the military. The first is respect. One of the biggest mistakes of liberals during the 1960s and ’70s, one which, I think, they have now corrected, was to blame rank-and-file soldiers for the decisions made by politicians. Most anti-war liberals now acknowledge that Americans owe a profound debt of gratitude and respect to the men and women who have served in the U.S. armed forces… whether or not you agree with the military policies of whatever administration happens to be in power. Freedom truly isn’t free. The second debt non-veterans owe is a frank humility when it comes to actual combat or anything having to do with the actual nightmare that is warfare. And this is something that the chickenhawks utterly lack. They pretend they know what they’re talking about when it comes to things such as waterboarding… which makes them only ludicrous. I think it was Jesse Ventura, who was waterboarded, who made the crack that if Dick Cheney doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, he should come on down to Camp Pendleton and let the Seals waterboard for a bit. A pasty-faced lump of dough like Cheney would last 4 seconds before begging for his mommy.

Well, the neo-con chickenhawks are back in the Republican Party. At the November 12th debate, the subject of torture came up… and only Ron Paul (naturally) and Jon Huntsman had the courage to stand up to their fellow candidates (and also the hawkish Republican audience) and say clearly and forcefully that torture is illegal, immoral and largely ineffective — and that waterboarding is torture. Of course, waterboarding is torture. It’s been defined as torture for decades in U.S. Army field manuals. The U.S. actually executed Axis prisoners after World War II precisely for waterboarding. The rest of the Republican candidates fell all over themselves in their praise of torture, or at least of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Of all the candidates, only Ron Paul and Rick Perry served in the military. Rick Perry joined the Air Force in 1972 and service with distinction for five years, discharged with the rank of captain. Perry, too, was quite hawkish and vocal about his support for a tough line on Iran and in favor of torture — I mean, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — but at least he isn’t a chickenhawk and actually served.

That is quite in contrast to Newt Gingrich, who praised the Obama Administration decision to assassinate U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, never served. In fact, Gingrich, like Cheney, went out of his way to get out of having to serve. “Gingrich received a draft deferment during the Vietnam War owing to the fact that he was studying at the time in Tulane University and he had children,” states a Republican fact sheet on the matter. “In addition, he was also impaired with short-sightedness and had flat feet.”

Mitt Romney, who also said he supports “enhanced interrogation,” also did not serve. He got numerous deferments for being a Mormon “missionary of religion.” Michelle Bachman, of course, did not serve. Neither did Rick Santorum. Neither did Herman Cain, although he did spend six years as a civilian worker in the Department of the Navy.

I don’t mind if non-veterans decide intellectually in favor of a strong military policy. I can see how you can decide that your personal record is irrelevant and what counts is your judgment about what is best for the country and for the world. Golda Meir, for example, who I’ve always admired, never served in a combat unit yet had to make military decisions all the time. Yet I think, at the minimum, a non-veteran has to preface any “hawkish” remarks with some sort of recognition to the effect that, “Well, it’s easy for me to talk tough like this when I’ve personally never seen the nightmare of combat… but here’s why I think we simply must pursue this policy.” The chickenhawks don’t do that. They merely talk tough. And that’s why they’re a laughingstock.

UPDATE: January 7, 2012, New Hampshire…

Democrats Love Death Squads… When They’re Obama’s!

The same Democrats who screamed the loudest over the illegal and immoral use of torture against captured terrorists, when it was done by the Bush Administration, have become enthusiastic supporters of the CIA’s new death squads.

Nothing like having principles, eh?

Both Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and fierce opponent of civil liberties, have announced that they publicly support the Obama Administration’s use of “death squads” to assassinate American citizens if the government decides they’re threats. However, in Feinstein’s case, she has politely requested that the White House release the legal memorandum, produced by the Office of Legal Counsel, that attempts to show how such “targeted killings” do not violate the U.S. Constitution and federal bans on assassination. Feinstein said that the release of the OLC memo is necessary “to maintain public support of secret operations” in the facing of growing public opposition.

“While U.S. counterterrorism operations are, by necessity, classified, I do believe the administration should make public its legal analysis on its counterterrorism authorities, whether in the form of a legal opinion or a white paper,” Feinstein said. “For both transparency and to maintain public support of secret operations, it is important to explain the general framework for counterterrorism actions.”

Meanwhile, left-leaning media outlets, like Slate.com, are falling all over themselves in an effort to excuse the Obama Administration’s born-again dedication to air-borne assassination. Both Christopher Hitchens and William Saletan have penned weak defenses of the president’s right to kill American citizens, without due process or even proof of guilt, if the CIA decides they’re “threats.” Hitchens, at least, while not wanting to criticize the Obama Administration’s action directly, nevertheless concedes he’s troubled:

As we engage with the horrible idea that our government claims the right to add its own citizens to a death list that is compiled by methods and standards unknown, we must concede that no government on earth faces such a temptation to invoke what I suppose we could call a doctrine of pre-emptive self-defense. Those who share my alarm at the prospect of this, and of the ways in which it could be abused, are under a heavy obligation to say what they would do instead.

I guess this means we will no longer have to listen to opportunistic Democrats like Feinstein and Levin prattle on about how evil the Bushies were for authorizing torture. The Democrats one-upped them: Feinstein and Levin now believe the CIA can legally assassinate anyone in the world, including U.S. citizens, if the government decides they are “threats.”

Ironically or not so ironically, the Democrats justify their shredding of the U.S. Constitution with the identical arguments used by the Bushies, as Glenn Greenwald points out:

So the AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force against al-Qaeda] allowed the President to designate Awlaki an “enemy combatant” without a shred of due process, and then to act against him using the powers of war, because we are at war with an entity for which Awlaki had become a combatant.

There are many problems with that reasoning, but one in particular that deserves attention now is this: that was exactly the theory repeatedly offered by the Bush DOJ for far less draconian acts than assassinating a U.S. citizen, and it was one that the very same [government lawyer] Marty Lederman categorically rejected. As I’ve noted many times, one of the most controversial Bush/Cheney acts was its claimed power to detain U.S. citizen Jose Padilla without charges or due process — not to kill him, but merely detain him — on the theory that the AUMF authorized the President to designate him as an “enemy combatant” and treat him accordingly.

Not all Democrats are willing to follow the new “tough” Obama and his election-minded cronies down the same path as the Bush Administration. A courageous few Democrats have dared to speak up. One is the consistently anti-war congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH):

“The Administration has a crossed a dangerous divide and set a dangerous precedent for how the United States handles terrorism cases. This dangerous legal precedent allows the government to target U.S. citizens abroad for being suspected of involvement in terrorism, in subversion of their most basic constitutional rights and due process of law. Their right to a trial is summarily and anonymously stripped from them. The U.S. has successfully tried hundreds of terrorism cases in federal courts. Intelligence operations that have virtually no transparency, accountability or oversight raise serious legal questions, particularly when the outcomes of such programs constitute possible violations of international law and violations of the Constitution. Mr. al-Awlaki’s allegedly violent rejection of America was not acceptable in any way. Neither is it acceptable to trample the Constitution through extrajudicial killings.”

Ron Paul on the CIA’s New Death Squads…

Thanks to the New York Times’s Charlie Savage, we now know that the creation of the CIA’s new death squads (authorized to assassinate any American citizens the president decides are “threats”) was the work, naturally, of two government lawyers — David Barron (who now teaches at Harvard Law School) and Martin Lederman (who teaches at Georgetown) of the hilariously misnamed Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

This was the same government office that produced the official legal memoranda (here, here, here and here) that authorized the use of torture and illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens condemned around the world.

Ironically enough, Marty Lederman, back when he pretended to have principles, rightly railed against the Bush White House for its torture policies. But once he was ensconced in the same office as the now-infamous torture memo authors — Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury — Lederman indulged in the same legal casuistry they did and went even further than they did in shredding the U.S. Constitution. All this has been amply documented, as usual, by Glenn Greenwald, stepping into Nat Hentoff’s shoes as one of America’s very few independent, principled journalists.

Predictably, there has been nary a peep out of Congressional Democrats about this. Two years ago, Rep. Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee for his role in justifying and excusing torture of foreign terrorists… yet apparently Nadler finds the assassination of U.S. citizens without proof or due process to be perfectly acceptable if it’s done by a Democrat president.

In fact, while the new Obama death squads have been condemned by human rights groups around the world — like that famous terrorist organization the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — practically the sole U.S. politician who has the guts to denounce them is Congressman Ron Paul:

According to the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, Americans are never to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Constitution is not some aspirational statement of values, allowing exceptions when convenient, but rather, it is the law of the land. It is the basis of our Republic and our principal bulwark against tyranny.

Last week’s assassination of two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, is an outrage and a criminal act carried out by the President and his administration. If the law protecting us against government-sanctioned assassination can be voided when there is a “really bad American”, is there any meaning left to the rule of law in the United States? If, as we learned last week, a secret government committee, not subject to congressional oversight or judicial review, can now target certain Americans for assassination, under what moral authority do we presume to lecture the rest of the world about protecting human rights? Didn’t we just bomb Libya into oblivion under the auspices of protecting the civilians from being targeted by their government? Timothy McVeigh was certainly a threat, as were Nidal Hassan and Jared Lee Loughner. They killed people in front of many witnesses. They took up arms against their government in a literal way, yet were still afforded trials. These constitutional protections are in place because our Founders realized it is a very serious matter to deprive any individual of life or liberty. Our outrage against even the obviously guilty is not worth the sacrifice of the rule of law. Al-Awlaki has been outspoken against the United States and we are told he encouraged violence against Americans. We do not know that he actually committed any acts of violence. Ironically, he was once invited to the Pentagon as part of an outreach to moderate Muslims after 9/11. As the US attacks against Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia expanded, it is said that he became more fervent and radical in his opposition to US foreign policy.

Many cheer this killing because they believe that in a time of war, due process is not necessary – not even for citizens, and especially not for those overseas. However, there has been no formal declaration of war and certainly not one against Yemen. The post-9/11 authorization for force would not have covered these two Americans because no one is claiming they had any connection to that attack. Al-Awlaki was on a kill list compiled by a secret panel within President Obama’s National Security Council and Justice Department. How many more Americans citizens are on that list? They won’t tell us. What are the criteria? They won’t tell us. Where is the evidence? They won’t tell us.

Al-Awlaki’s father tried desperately to get the administration to at least allow his son to have legal representation to challenge the “kill” order. He was denied. Rather than give him his day in court, the administration, behind closed doors, served as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.The most worrisome aspect of this is that any new powers this administration accrues will serve as precedents for future administrations. Even those who completely trust this administration must understand that if this usurpation of power and denial of due process is allowed to stand, these powers will remain to be expanded on by the next administration and then the next. Will you trust them? History shows that once a population gives up its rights, they are not easily won back. Beware.

Video: Avon Descent

One of my favorite gurus, Tom Hodgkinson of The Idler, demonstrates what you can do with your spare time if you don’t waste so much energy on work, paying taxes and doing what everyone tells you. An awesome achievement pulled off at the last minute! This was the 2011 Avon Descent, the only white water race of its kind in the world.

Video: Contemplative Nuns Doing Aikido

A sick, twisted member of my Aikido dojo sent me this video: Nuns practicing karate and, at the end, a little judo and Aikido. (One of the nuns does a pretty good sumi-otoshi there, albeit with a judo flair.) Some people really do have too much time on their hands.

Do We Really Want the U.S. Government Assassinating Its Citizens?

The assassination of a U.S. citizen by the Central Intelligence Agency has rekindled the legal debate on whether the U.S. government can kill its own citizens without them being found guilty of or even charged with any crime but merely because the government considers them “threats.” It is a chilling, terrifying day when we assert that Barack Obama can now order the execution of anyone he chooses without judicial oversight of any kind.

And make no mistake: That is precisely what the “targeted killing” of the American-born al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki now means.

The U.S. government has not produced a shred of evidence that al-Awlaki had “gone operational,” as U.S. officials lamely put it. It’s all “top secret.” When you read the details of the 12 or so plots al-Awlaki was supposedly “involved” in, it turns out that most of the would-be perpetrators had read al-Awlaki’s writings, or were “inspired” by his sermons. I have no doubt that al-Awlaki was a bloody-minded Islamic fanatic. But this case means that the U.S. government is now asserting, as a matter of policy, that it may assassinate its own citizens for writing or saying things it disagrees with, so long as the government claims (but doesn’t even bother to prove) they are “threats.”

Of course, the government’s legal apologists — such as Kenneth Anderson, an international law scholar at American University’s Washington College of Law — claim that, under the laws of war, people such as al-Awlaki can be designated “military” targets even if they are not actually in uniform or on a battlefield. (The U.S. Justice Department supposedly “signed off” on the assassination, the same pliable Justice Department that, under the Bush Administration, insisted that water-boarding is not torture even though the U.S. government executed people after World War II for doing precisely that!)

But many constitutional scholars insist that such an elastic notion of military targeting is a slippery slope that will lead to tyranny.

“For two years since Awlaki has reportedly been added to a kill list, the administration has made a lot of statements to the press but has presented no evidence to a court,” said Ben Wizner, the National Security Project Litigation Director at the ACLU. “There’s a distinction between allegations and evidence that’s pretty critical here. Our argument isn’t that you need to go to a court just to make the claim that he is an imminent threat, but placing someone on a kill list for months or years seems fundamentally inconsistent with the legal definition of ‘imminent,’ and so there’s really no reason why a judicial role can’t happen here.”

University of Notre Dame international law expert Mary Ellen O’Connell, one of the world’s leading experts on targeted killing, agrees. “The United States is not involved in any armed conflict in Yemen, so to use military force to carry out these killings violates international law,” O’Connell says. “It is only during the intense fighting of an armed conflict that international law permits the taking of human life on a basis other than the immediate need to save life. In armed conflict, a privileged belligerent may use lethal force on the basis of ‘reasonable necessity.’ Aside from armed conflict, the relevant standard is ‘absolute necessity.’ International law and moral principle have been breached in a place where the United States should be demonstrating non-violence and support for peaceful means of transforming society.”

I am currently reading Erik Larson’s bestselling In the Garden of Beasts, about an American family’s first year (1933-34) in Nazi Berlin. One of the chilling aspects of the book is the way in which members of this family — U.S. Ambassador William Dodd, his wife Martha and his daughter Martha — excuse and justify the assorted barbarism and “targeted killings” of the Nazi regime as isolated incidents. The Dodd family is constantly looking on the bright side, trying to see the good in the Nazi movement. They take the word of top Nazi officials that, say, the beatings of Jews and foreigners are aberrations, not reflective of the government’s real policy.

The other chilling aspect of Larson’s book is how the professional killers in the Nazi movement took advantage of real terrorist incidents — such as setting of the Reichstag fire by Communist agents in 1933 — to justify its wholesale abandonment of human rights. (Governments always justify their “targeted killings” by appeals to national self-defense, or by the notion that such killings are necessary to protect the people from “terrorism.”)

The “targeted killing” of al-Awlaki and another American-born al-Qaeda blogger by the CIA also reveals the cowardice of the American judiciary. Last year, when news of the U.S. government’s assassination “hit list” became public, al-Awaki’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni official, filed suit in federal court in an attempt to prevent the CIA from murdering his son in cold blood, without trial.

Assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the senior al-Awlaki sued Barack Obama and insisted the U.S. government could not take an American citizen’s life based on secret intelligence and without a trial. The father and the ACLU argued in federal court that killing the son amounted to “summary execution” without the due process of law guaranteed by the Constitution.

A sniveling jurist, U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates, said Mr. Awlaki’s father, the plaintiff, had no standing to file the lawsuit on behalf of his son and that decisions about “targeted killings” in such circumstances were a “political question” for executive branch officials to make, not judges. In his 83-page opinion, Judge Bates in essence asserted that the federal government could kill whomever it deemed a terrorist threat and that such killings were outside the purview of any judicial review. As the New York Times put it:

Judge Bates acknowledged that the case raised “stark, and perplexing, questions” — including whether the president could “order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization.”

But while the “legal and policy questions posed by this case are controversial and of great public interest,” he wrote, they would have to be resolved on another day and, probably, outside a courtroom.

(Note:  Judge Bates routinely mentions the “difficult questions” government actions raise… before obediently doing precisely what the government wants.  He did the same thing in the Valerie Plame case which he also dismissed.)

Barack Obama and all of his Republican opponents praised the “targeted killing” of Anwar al-Awlaki. Only Congressman Ron Paul had the courage to oppose such killing as unconstitutional and illegal:

I don’t think that’s a good way to deal with our problems,” Paul told reporters. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it’s sad.

“I think what would people have said about Timothy McVeigh? We didn’t assassinate him, who we were pretty certain that he had done it. Went and put through the courts then executed him. To start assassinating American citizens without charges, we should think very seriously about this.”

America has crossed a threshold. Most of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of President George W. Bush and his “chicken hawk” cronies, but Barack Obama proves that, on issues of military policy, the Democrats and Republicans are virtually indistinguishable. Ron Paul is virtually the only political voice standing up for human rights, non-violence and the U.S. Constitution.

“The targeted assassination program that started under President Bush and expanded under the Obama administration essentially grants the executive the power to kill any U.S. citizen deemed a threat, without any judicial oversight, or any of the rights afforded by our Constitution,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “If we allow such gross overreaches of power to continue, we are setting the stage for increasing erosions of civil liberties and the rule of law,” he said.

Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com blogger and constitutional lawyer, put the matter even more forcefully. Discussing the craven way supposedly anti-war Democrats have embraced the very same policies they once denounced in the Bush Administration, he, too, fears for America’s future: “If you are somebody that believes the President of the United States has the power to order your fellow citizens murdered, assassinated, killed without a shred of due process,” Greenwald said, “then you are really declaring yourself to be as pure of an authoritarian as it gets.”

The Conservative Case Against the Death Penalty

I’ve always been opposed to capital punishment, and for the most conservative of reasons:  I don’t believe government should have the authority to take human life, at least not in a society, such as ours, that has the resources to build prisons.

This is a fundamentally conservative position because it rests upon the assumption that government is, by definition, incompetent and often malicious.

Do we really want the same type of semi-literate, unionized sludges who run, say, the U.S. Postal Service or the Department of Motor Vehicles, having the power to execute people?  I don’t think so.

It’s not surprising that many liberals and Democrats support capital punishment (although many also oppose it).  (Yes, Virginia, Obama and Clinton are both supporters of capital punishment:  Obama led an effort in Illinois to restore the death penalty when numerous exonerations persuaded the Republican governor, George Ryan, to halt all executions and commute the sentences of everyone awaiting execution, giving most of them life in prison.)

Liberals and Democrats believe in government.  The more government, the better.  They teach the opposite of what Thomas Jefferson and Thoreau taught:  That government is best which governs most! But what does surprise me is that so many alleged conservatives also support capital punishment, although that is changing.  Ann Coulter, for example, who I often find hilarious and agree with at least 50 percent of the time, recently wrote a column defending the death penalty. “Fifty-nine percent of Americans now believe that an innocent man has been executed in the last five years,” Ann writes disapprovingly. “There is more credible evidence that space aliens have walked among us than that an innocent person has been executed in this country in the past 60 years, much less the past five years.”

But then again, Ann Coulter is herself a legal parasite by training.  Despite their veneer of cynicism, lawyers (even conservative ones) have a deep and abiding faith in government, at least in the court system.  How could they not?  Many of them are paid by the government!  They trust that since the court system is run by people who went to law school, it must be exempt from the mind-numbing imbecility and laziness that plagues every other form of government.

But anyone who has spent more than ten minutes in a court room soon discovers that the criminal justice system is riddled with incompetence and corruption.  It’s just the DMV with wood paneling.  It lets obvious murderers like O.J. Simpson go  free and sentences to death mentally retarded but innocent people like Earl Washington (convicted of rape and murder in 1981 but exonerated by DNA evidence in 2000).   Self-important prosecutors regularly pursue cases against innocent people, or ignore crucial exculpatory evidence,  just to make a name for themselves or because they are running for yet another overpaid, triple-pension government job.  Judges do their best, but they are overwhelmed with cases and must rely upon lying cops, ambitious prosecutors, scheming ambulance-chasing defense lawyers and, let’s be honest, criminals.  In short:  The court system is a hell hole.  Anyone caught up in it is living a nightmare.  Federal sentencing guidelines are like something out of a Victor Hugo novel:  You can get 20 years in prison for violating fishing regulations! (Best advice any lawyer can give you:  Avoid the courts at all costs!)

While reforming the corrupt criminal justice system is a task no political party wishes to take on, we could take at least one step that would ameliorate the worst aspect of it:  abolishing the death penalty.  As Pope John Paul II taught and the the Catholic Church now incorporates into its official catechesis, the death penalty is morally permissible, as an act of societal self-defense, in those societies without the resources to lock up dangerous criminals; but in modern western societies, it is ethically and legally indefensible.

Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent (CCC 2267).”

While Ann Coulter and other death penalty supporters are correct that most condemned men and women are almost certainly guilty of heinous crimes, she is dead wrong (pardon the pun) that wrongful executions are rare.  From Jesus Christ on down through the ages, literally thousands of innocent people have been wrongly executed by incompetent and malicious government authorities.   DNA evidence has exonerated and released at least 15 death row inmates in the U.S. since 1992 alone.  Another 93 people charged with murder were exonerated by DNA testing.

The formerly prolife and now pro-abortion organization Amnesty International estimates calculates that since 1973 over 130 people have been released from death rows in the U.S. due to evidence of their wrongful convictions.  In Texas, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for allegedly murdering his three daughters by burning down his house.   Despite the fact that the Texas Forensic Science Commission found that the arson claims were doubtful and Willingham’s wife disputed the claim that Willinham had killed his daughters to cover up abuse allegations, Governor Rick Perry refused to grant a pardon to Willingham. To me, that fact alone is a reason not to support Texas Governor Rick Perry for president and proof that he is still the big government Democrat he’s always been (when he supported Al Gore for president).

As the only sane candidate for president, Dr. Ron Paul, explains, the true conservative position is to oppose capital punishment:

“Over the years I’ve held pretty rigid to all my beliefs, but I’ve changed my opinion of the death penalty. For federal purposes I no longer believe in the death penalty. I believe it has been issued unjustly. If you’re rich, you get away with it; if you’re poor and you’re from the inner city you’re more likely to be prosecuted and convicted, and today, with the DNA evidence, there’ve been too many mistakes, and I am now opposed to the federal death penalty.”

Elsewhere, Paul explains that his opposition to the death penalty does not override his understanding of federalism, and thus, as president, he would not attempt to force the abolition of the death penalty on the states.  That is why he says he opposes the federal death penalty; that is the only death penalty a president has authority over.  However, in an interview with the Concord Monitor in August 2011, Dr. Paul made clear his opposition on principle:

“I don’t think it’s very good sign for civilization to still be invoking the death penalty. . . .

If you believe in the death penalty, what I really object to is the doctors participating in torture, and doctors who are there to make it smooth and sweet.

“Oh, let’s put him to sleep.” If it’s a death penalty, do it on Times Square, see ‘em get their head chopped off and see how all the people, see how much they like it, make ‘em look at it. I think it’s uncivilized. But, boy, there are some really bad people out there, makes it awfully temptin.”

 

As usual, Dr. Paul is willing to stick to his principles rather than kowtow, like most Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, to the latest public opinion poll — which tends to support capital punishment.

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