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The Schoolbuses of Katrina
While we are still chattering about Hurricane Harvey and keeping an eye on Hurricane Irma, I saw a couple of comments that are worth a follow-up post of its own.
You all remember how we watched the flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and how we all saw the fleet of schoolbuses that were inundated instead of serving to evacuate the City. Evidently, those pictures were very memorable, but not nearly as memorable as the actual narrative of events. There is plenty to fault the City of New Orleans for, and especially there fault to be laid at the feet of Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, but I do not fault them for the schoolbuses.
Evacuating a big city is a huge problem. Especially so for New Orleans, since there are not many highway evacuation routes available. The likelihood is that an evacuation would cause lots of traffic crash deaths and lead to a politician becoming a laughingstock if the hurricane does not turn out to be so damaging as the weather forecasters had made it out to be. Everyone over 50 on the coast remembers occasions when they were told to evacuate, decided not to, and then experienced a bad storm that had not warranted evacuation.
In the case of Katrina, the National Hurricane Center started the warnings about a week ahead, and the fear that New Orleans would get clobbered was talked about all week. By Friday, the path looked like the storm would pass New Orleans to the east. No evacuation order was issued. The National Hurricane Center then started sounding the extra-high alarm warnings on Saturday, because the storm intensified just before hitting the coast. Mayor Nagin ordered a voluntary evacuation. A couple of hours later he called it a mandatory evacuation. Well, that was too late to corral the schoolbus drivers and implement an evacuation; the drivers and their supervisors were off for the weekend, and some of them had evacuated already.
The storm did pass to the east of New Orleans on Sunday. It made a direct hit that scrubbed Waveland, MS off the map and wrecked the coast of Gulfport and Biloxi. On Monday morning the news was “New Orleans was spared, but the Mississippi Coast got hammered.” Many people expected New Orleans to spend a few days cleaning up and then get back to normal. It wasn’t until late on Monday that it became clear that the floodwalls could not be shored up and would not hold. It wasn’t until Tuesday at midday that New Orleans was flooded. There was no way that there could have been an orderly evacuation on Monday night.
So I don’t think the schoolbuses should be pointed to as evidence of malfeasance. Rather, the malfeasance was slowness to recognize the severity of the situation. The malfeasance was in years of failing to address known shortcomings of the floodwalls and levees. The malfeasance was in shortcuts taken in the initial floodwall construction. The malfeasance was in developing emergency plans that were set on the shelf and ignored instead of being used for training, which was their purpose.
To me, the key thing that came out of Katrina was the exposure of the mass media. They had become full partisans, approvingly providing airtime to celebrities who said “New Orleans flooded because Bush hates black people.” They hid the faults of the Democrat machine in Louisiana and accused FEMA under Bush of being too slow to do stuff that had never been part of FEMA’s purview. Mass media used Katrina to pivot to full anti-Bush campaign mode, and they have only become worse Leftist advocates over the years since then.
Refugee Resettlement Reckoning on Obama Administration
Refugees come to the United States through several legal channels, and this post will focus on only the Refugee Resettlement Program. The Refugee Resettlement Program has its own issues, and is a high-profile element of our immigration policy. We have discussed this before at Ricochet, and it is time for an update. I am posting here to provide some background on Refugee Resettlement, to specifically discuss refugees from Syria, to comment on the program under the Obama Administration, and to document that @JamesOfEngland owes me a beer the next time we cross paths at a meetup.
The Refugee Resettlement Program brought 572,924 refugees to the United States during the Obama Administration (Feb 2, 2009 through Feb 1, 2017). In recent discussions, religion was an issue, so here are some highlights:
- 196,900 were Christians (34%)
- 160,622 were Muslims (28%)
- 47,679 were Hindu (8.3%)
- 38,781 were Buddhist (6.8%)
- 8,381 were categorized as “no religion” (1.5%)
- 249 were Atheist
The Refugee Resettlement Program is operated by the State Department, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. They provide an on-line database, which is the source of the numbers above. Links are in the comments.
I think it is good for the United States to maintain the Refugee Resettlement Program. It came to my attention during the campaign of 2012, when Christian bloggers started complaining that Team Obama was biased against Christians in the refugees that were admitted through the program. I wondered about that, and I did a little digging. The source of the complaints was Syria and Iraq.
Obama
Barack H. Obama campaigned in 2008 on an “End the Wars” theme. He said that Iraq and Afghanistan were failures of Team Bush and that America should get out of the Middle East where we are not wanted. We should drop our “imperialist colonizing” ventures and let the “peace-loving peoples” sort out their future “without American meddling.” Of course, by that time the Bush “Surge” had rendered Iraq as a stable, if restive place, trying to sort out their new government in the relative calm of a Pax Americana.
Obama kicked the props out from supporting our friends and allies in Iraq. He pulled out at the earliest possible pretense, counting on the absence of American power to be a positive measure that would allow the Iraqis to figure out how to cooperate without the necessity of keeping good relations with the Americans. He really does believe that American presence makes things worse and not better. He is ideologically blinded and blames America for many of the world’s problems. He was wrong, and millions of Middle Eastern people have suffered the consequences.
Of course, the first thing that happened after the Obama pullout was a round of quiet reprisals. I say “quiet” because pro-Obama western media ignored it when extremists assassinated some minor politicians in Iraq who had cooperated with the Americans.
Obama had famously gone to Cairo to apologize for America being American, and promised not to be American any more. I cannot connect all those dots here, but Obama contributed to the Arab Spring of early 2011, when an uprising in Tunisia spread to Egypt and then caught fire in a number of Arab countries. Most Americans know nothing more than what happened in Egypt and Libya. Ricochet spent a lot of energy discussing Libya, Quaddaffi, Benghazi and Hillary, so there is no need to go there just now.
Arab Spring came to Syria, mid-summer 2011
The dramatic events in Cairo were riveting across the world. The Assad regime decided that the best way to prevent an uprising in Syria was to double up on jackbooted thuggery to keep order. Bashir Assad underestimated the power of the internet to spread sedition, and underestimated the willingness of ordinary Syrians to stand up to the Baathist regime after many years of quiet.
By late 2011 there were at least five different militia groups fighting against the Assad regime and fighting each other. A torrent of displaced persons resulted as all sorts of Syrians were uprooted by war. Christians were particularly hard hit, because they were targeted by the anti-government forces of at least three militias.
One of the main new surprises of the multiparty civil war in Syria was the rapid rise of ISIS, who were overrunning northern Iraq and sending support to their friends across the border. Obama’s pullout in Iraq made the revolt in Syria much worse. Things went really bad really quick. Millions of Syrians left their homes. Many moved to safer places within Syria. Many fled to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Some made their way to Europe.
American Refugee Program
Obama spoke in the fall of 2012 and promised that America would take in more refugees from Syria. He spoke of “tens of thousands.” There was no corresponding change in the Refugee Resettlement Program; evidently no order came from the White House and the State Department did not pay any attention to what Obama had said.
Refugees kept pouring in to Europe. Europeans criticized America for not helping. Since the Europeans are all Obama fans (or at least the ones that were in power in 2012-2014), they did not blame Obama. But the “refugee crisis” kept growing. In September, 2013, Obama spoke again, and this time made a big splash about his promise to take in “tens of thousands” of Syrian refugees.
Ricochet wager
We spoke about this several times at Ricochet. One of our conversations occurred shortly after Obama’s speech in September of 2012. I predicted that Team Obama would favor Muslim refugees over Christian refugees. I knew nothing about State Department policy; I simply distrusted Team Obama. James of England also was uninformed about State Department policy, and he thought I was too harsh in my judgement of Team Obama. Since Christians were overrepresented in the population of refugees, James O.E. figured that they would at least be admitted at the ratio of their pre-war percentage of the Syrian population. In our ignorance of State Department policy, we made a bet. James stated the wager:
“If Christians are over-represented in the numbers, but Christians and Kurds are in the minority, we call it even. If they’re a majority, you buy drinks. If they’re underrepresented, I buy drinks.”
There was a lot of talk about refugees, but whether through disinterest, bureaucratic inertia, or incompetence, the Refugee Resettlement Program was extremely slow to react. Their performance was miserable. A year later, after Christian groups made some noise about the paltry number of Christians being admitted through the Refugee Resettlement, and some Republican officeholders made some noise about anti-Christian bias at the State Department. Their performance in this regard was so awful that I looked into it to see how the State Department defended themselves. They were saying that it was a matter of policy and not bias.
State Department policy
The State Department has been very concerned about America’s image in the Muslim world for a long time. State Department professionals in the Clinton Administration had supported the intervention in Bosnia, because in that case we were defending Muslims against depredations by Christian Serbs. The thinking was that it would help America establish credibility in the Muslim world and establish our assertion that America really does care about persecuted minorities, whether or not they happen to be Christian. State Department officials were leery of anything that could be portrayed by the Wahhabi Imams as “Crusader” activities, and they took steps to avoid favoring Christians over Muslims in several other contexts besides the refugees program.
One thing they did was to establish some bureaucratic rules and policies that would be “neutral” about oppression. They said that, to qualify as an “oppressed religious minority,” there had to be official government policies or track records of official government persecution by the country in question. So if a Christian lives in some country where Christianity is legal, but gets beaten by a Muslim mob and run out of town, so long as there is no official government persecution, then that would not qualify that Christian for the Refugee Resettlement Program. (Other helps were sometimes available for these sorts of victims, mostly involving charitable organizations.)
It is for this reason that Christian refugees from Syria got no respect from our Refugee Resettlement Program. Christians are a second-class but important element of the Baath coalition in Syria. Since Assad’s Baath Party government does not persecute Christians, the fact that Christians in Syria are persecuted by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and ISIS (in increasing order of bloodthirstiness) does not count. That does not mean that Christians are not persecuted; they are just suffering from persecution at the hands of the Islamicist militias and not from their government.
UNHCR
The current United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is Flippo Grandi. The State Department outsources most of the selection of refugees for admittance to the Refugee Resettlement Program to his office. The State Department contracts with the United Nations for this, primarily because it is the United Nations that has people on the ground in the areas where the refugees are.
I had said that I had a dim view of the UNHCR just as bad as my dim view of Team Obama at the State Department. James of E. said that I was being uncharitable. It turns out that James is mostly right in his defense of those folk. Later, about a year ago, I spoke with a Lutheran Refugee Resettlement person who spoke well of the UNHCR staff.
Many Syrian refugees are housed in refugee camps that are either established by or monitored by UNHCR. UNHCR provides security for some camps and sanitation for some camps. As you might imagine, refugee camps are highly variable as to the quality of life that can be achieved there. Some of the camps are quite dangerous for Christians, and Christians commonly find other places to live, many times with extended families or Christian parishes who shelter them. All refugees, whether living in the camps or not, can enroll with UNHCR and also apply for admission into the American Refugee Resettlement Program through UNHCR.
We discussed reasons why UNHCR staff might prefer to send Muslims to America in preference over Christians. This was before we learned about the State Department policy that said that Christians from Syria typically did not qualify.
Team Obama report on Syrian Refugees
In the period from Jan 1, 2009 through December 31, 2013, the Refugee Resettlement Program brought in 158 refugees from Syria. Of these, 20 were Christian, so 13 percent, just a little more than the background population of Syrians before the revolution began (the CIA had reported Syria as approximately 11.5 percent Christian in 2010). This is a paltry number when you consider that it covers a fifteen-month period after Obama had spoken of taking in “tens of thousands” of Syrian refugees (in the context of over three million refugees at the time).
Then in the period from January 1, 2014, through February 1, 2017, the Refugee Resettlement Program brought in 17,671 refugees from Syria. Of these, 156 were Christians, so 0.9 percent (yes, less than one percent).
James, you owe me a beer.
There was some talk over the past year about changes to State Department policy, but as near as I can tell no change actually happened. I figure this is just due to bureaucratic inertia rather than actual malice. But it happens like that because the people in charge are more concerned about political optics than they are concerned about refugees or American security.
I am not happy to report this result, when I consider the plight of the Syrian refugees. But, then again, bringing them to America is perhaps not in their best interest, nor ours.
Impatience
I saw a comment at Ricochet. I thought it was illustrative, and typical of a frustration I have seen many times in the past month.
I would be more optimistic if more major policies had been implemented (repeal Obamacare, tax reform, big military budget, etc.) and if more appointments had been made to the administration and the judiciary. Many substantial things still need done.
Patience, man. Patience. Have patience.
We did not expect that Trump would blow into Washington and set everything to rights in his first 100 days. In fact, some of us predicted that he would be hardly able to accomplish anything in his first six months.
Trump is just getting started. The past six months has just been a warmup. He is still getting an administration put in place. He was past his first 100 days before he had Senate confirmation of his Cabinet officers. In fact, there are still nearly a thousand administration positions to fill (and most of those are still temporarily filled by Deep State holdovers from Team O).
There is no need to start calling the Trump Administration a failure. That sort of foolish rhetoric just helps the Left.
Drinking Lessons
I was a scofflaw. In my state it is against the law to provide alcohol to any person who is under age 21. When my sons were underage, I broke this law on a few occasions. Neither of them ever embraced the binge-drinking culture when they went to college. Teach your kids how to drink.
I saw a story featured in the Google News “spotlight.” It was an article from CNN, a few months ago, titled “Is Drinking with your Kids at Home a Good Idea?” I say, yes it is a very good idea. Your kids need good role models. They need to see that adults can enjoy one drink or two drinks and then stop. They need to learn how to enjoy one drink and then stop.
Modern American youth culture wants to teach them that, when you drink, you are drinking to get drunk. It is all over social media, TV, movies, pop songs, etc. Drunkenness is a laughing matter. Often it is an excuse for bad behavior, such as casual sex, which is frequently blamed on alcohol.
It is a bad idea to let your kids learn about adult beverages from their friends. If that is how they learn to drink, then what they will learn is binge-drinking.
Political Legacy of Teetotalism
I live in the Bible Belt, which may be described as “Baptist World.” Where I live, well over 70 percent of households show up for a worship service at least once per month, so that is much higher than national averages. The largest denomination is Southern Baptist, with other Baptists, and also a number of “Non-denominational” churches that are best described as “Baptist lite.”
Our politics is thoroughly Baptist. One thing we discarded relatively recently is our “blue laws,” which were originally developed back when my state was even more Christian and was evenly more strongly influenced by conservative Baptists. Methodists also used to be strong around here, and they were teetotalers. Tennessee went for Prohibition, and most counties were “dry” up until the 1970s and 1980s. (We still retain some vestigial blue laws, but they are a very pale shadow of what was in force when Prohibition ended.)
But Tennessee also always had a strong strain of drinkers who were inclined to moonshine and a scofflaw attitude. It was an unfortunate culture in which drinking was a taboo and, when indulged, it led to ruin. I find our college binge-drinking culture related to the illicit roadhouses of my youth.
Drinking Heritage
I was always perplexed by that, because my family was strongly influenced by my father’s German Lutheran heritage. We would go to church functions and there would be beer. When we were kids we could have a taste or a small cup. Nobody got drunk unless after most of the guests left, a couple of families stayed behind to help hosts clean up, and then lingered for a few more drinks. I saw a lot of drinking compared to my school friends, but I only witnessed drunkenness on two or three occasions. I did not associate drinking with drunkenness.
There is a very old joke that still gets told.
You can take a Baptist fishing with you, but you don’t want to take two Baptists.
(That is because one Baptist by himself will drink beer with you, but if two Baptists are along, they won’t drink alcohol in front of each other. The joke was so common that the punchline was seldom uttered out loud.)
The same thing was told of Methodists. (In contrast, the Episcopalians were called “Whisky-palians.” They were typically few in number, comparatively more well-to-do, and, though they were more influential, they generally did not rock the dry boat.)
When I got to college I saw lots of Baptist and Methodist kids go wild with weekend binge drinking. They had no acquaintance with alcoholic beverages until they gained access to them and were away from home and in a student culture that encouraged drunkenness. This seemed to be less of a problem for Lutheran and Catholic kids, but many of them tried hard to catch up to their friends’ drinking.
Things seem to be worse on campus now than they were 40 years ago.
Drinking Age and Federal Coercion
This whole thing was brought to mind by a column that appeared recently at National Review. It was by Jake Curtis, and it was about federal government coercion of the states. The focus of the article was about the case that upheld the drinking age. In the 1980s, a version of the Surface Transportation Act was passed that included a provision that said that five percent of a state’s federal transportation funds would be withheld from states that kept their drinking age below age 21. It was upheld by the Supreme Court.
It came about because of a campaign by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who had mobilized an incredible amount of political capital over the issue of alcohol-related fatalities in automobile crashes. They were right, but the remedy they chose has consequences.
Consider that the “federal funds” in question are gas tax funds that were paid in the state; the federal government collects it all, skims some off the top, and then returns the rest with strings attached. The threat of holding out transportation funds was a big enough stick to get half the states to raise their drinking age (the other states had already raised their drinking age).
I am concerned enough about the number of people who get killed in traffic crashes to favor the DUI/ DWI laws. That is one of the issues where us Social Conservatives oppose the Libertarians.
But the way the feds coerced the states over the drinking age is still reverberating through such unrelated matters as Medicare.
The conservatives who opposed Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway Act were right. It should have been done through a constitutional amendment. If we had a Transportation Amendment it probably would not have supported the coercion that the Court upheld over the drinking age. Likewise we should have an Education Amendment, a Labor Amendment, and a half-dozen other amendments, if our founding document were to actually keep up with our current national practices. Those debates would be constructive; I wish we would have them.
Drinking Lessons
I would like to lobby my state to make a change to our drinking law. I want parents to have the right to serve alcoholic beverages to their own children in the privacy of their own homes. But my state legislators would be foolish to listen to me. Big Government won’t allow any dissent.
Gas Can Follies
I have a little can for gasoline. I use it to fuel my lawnmower. Recently the spout broke. I fixed it with duct tape, of course. And, of course, the duct tape only held up for a few months. The can itself is over 30 years old, and I have the idea that, since plastic deteriorates over time, it probably will need replacing within the next decade or two. I also thought that a cheap plastic gas can with a nice pouring spout would not cost very much more than a purchase of a replacement spout. So while I was out on Saturday morning I stopped by Autozone to pick up a new gas can. And, modern American life being what it is, I now have a story to post at Ricochet.
First, while my old can holds 2.5 gallons, the cans on the shelf all came only in two or five gallon size, so if I keep a little can it will mean more trips to refill the can. I don’t want to fool with the larger can, so I picked up one of the two-gallon cans and carried it to the counter. While waiting for the cashier to fire up his cash register (he had been in the back and so had to log in), I took a look at the new can. I unscrewed the cap and pulled out the pour spout, and started to install it for immediate use. The pour spout looked funny, and the cashier saw me giving it a close inspection. He said “You haven’t seen one of those before.”
“Nope.” Said I. “It looks like a new and improved safety pour.”
“Yeah, let me show you how it works. You have to press this release thing and then this catch slides back.” He tried it but couldn’t get it to work at first. He fiddled with the release and finally could get the catch to slide. He showed me the end of the spout, and said this opens the spout. It had a grooved stem that held the little cap out in front of the end of the spout.
“Oh, great; it’s a dribble-pour,” I whined.
“Right, but it should all splash into the tank if the end of the spout is below the top of the filler tube.” He handed the spout back to me.
So I pressed the release and tried to slide the catch. I couldn’t get it to move because the spring was really stiff. So I screwed it onto the can to get a better purchase on it. Then I aimed the can like I was about to pour, and pressed the release with the thumb of my left hand. I pulled the catch back with my right forefinger. The spring was really stiff.
He said, “what you do is push the catch by pushing it against the edge of the filler tube.”
“Oh, boy. I am going to pour gas all over my mower.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
I figured out quick that I would be better off to keep my old can.
“Do you sell replacement spouts?”
“Yes, but they all look like this. Or, the spout on the five-gallon cans looks a little different.” We went and looked at the five-gallon cans. They had two styles. One was worse than the two-gallon model. The other was really nice, easy to use, and I was considering whether it was worth the effort of fooling with the bigger can.
He said, “It’s good to get back in this aisle where the security camera can’t see me show you this.” He held up a spout. “See, what you do is cut off the end of the spout right here. Then, the whole apparatus slides off the end of the spout.”
“Cool. But then I need to remove the spout in order to cap the can. Do you sell replacement caps?”
“Gee, I don’t think so.” He looked around but came up empty.
“Or,” said he, “just take it off and use a funnel.”
“Great. That will release a whole lot more vapor and still be more likely to drench the mower with gas.”
“Right. Try not to set it on fire.”
Then he said “Only problem with this one (pointing to the nicer five-gallon can) is, this one costs fifty bucks.”
“Fifty bucks?!” Sure enough, this was confirmed by a glance at the shelf tag.
“Say, is this a national thing or a local thing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember when the gas stations all had those vapor-recovery nozzles? Those were only required within the metropolitan area on account of air quality, and if you were out in the countryside they weren’t required.”
“I dunno.” I was disappointed by that response, because I had been thinking he was being really helpful up ‘til then.
“Or maybe farmers don’t have to live with this foolishness? If I drove out to Somerville could I buy a can at the Farmer’s Co-op that had a regular old spout?”
“Maybe; I don’t know.”
“Alright, some internet research is in order.”
“Great; I just talked you out of a sale.”
“But you win style points for being real helpful,” I offered. He grinned.
After several minutes of banter that involved the other store employee and two other customers (this is the South), I headed home to look this up.
The internet is awesome.
Sure enough, this is unescapable by legal means. It came from California, of course, like many other vile elements of American society. Team Obama at the EPA made it national.
Even Big-Statist Progressives hate it. I found a hilarious complaint at DailyKos.
I also found a worthwhile blog post at Laissez Faire with this helpful remark:
It’s striking to me that the websites and institutions that complain about government involvement in our lives never mentioned this, at least not so far as I can tell. The only sites that seem to have discussed this are the boating forums and the lawn forums. These are the people who use these cans more than most. The level of anger and vitriol is amazing to read, and every bit of it is justified.
There is no possible rationale for these kinds of regulations. It can’t be about emissions really, since the new cans are more likely to result in spills. It’s as if some bureaucrat were sitting around thinking of ways to make life worse for everyone, and hit upon this new, cockamamie rule.
Yeah, so now I am laughing at some of the gas can hacks that are out there on the internet. Please send in your own suggestions while I plan my next move. First, I think I will just replace the duct tape on the old broken spout.
I think also I will write to my congressman.
Clueless Jonah
Over at National Review, Jonah Goldberg has a new column titled
“Does a NeverTrumper Need to be Forgiven?”
Now I know that everyone at Ricochet will boo me for bringing up the subject again, but this column from J. Goldberg is so obtuse that it needs to be addressed. It gets at tensions that are still reverberating here at Ricochet.
I saw Ricochet member Rodin had already posted about the column, but I thought most of the conversation there missed the main point, and I had too much to say to squeeze it into a comment, and multiple comments would be hijacking Rodin’s worthy post. So I will bore you with my own take on J. Goldberg’s cluelessness as revealed in today’s column.
Goldberg says “I don’t feel repentant.” But the essay misses the point of the people who have offered him forgiveness. He speaks at length about missing the call on Trump’s potential to win the election, and he speaks about misjudging how conservatively Trump may be expected to govern, based on the new revelations about Trump’s nominees for senior management positions in the incoming Trump Administration.
He never addresses the single issue that caused so much distress in the conservative ranks, and which led to the strong push-back that he and all NeverTrump pundits have received for the past six months.
Punditry on the “Center-Right”
The fact is that punditry may be considered as a guide to inform how we think. Conservative pundits won their positions by clearly articulating conservative principles and by cogently applying informed conservative principles to the issues of the day. They are called “thought leaders” for a reason. Many conservatives have come to rely of the body of work by the conservative pundits as useful to inform their opinions and to supply them with good arguments when they engage with the Left.
Then conservative pundits took a path that we could clearly see was very wrong.
But, not wrong in the way that J. Goldberg discusses in his column.
The reason for the distress in the push-back against NeverTrump is easy to see, but evidently J. Goldberg missed it. You would have thought that a professional pundit would actually listen to his critics enough to understand the reason for their discontent.
Conservatives focus on results
If pundits are thought-leaders, then their readers, the customers, should be able to act on the choices that they recommend. In the case of pro-Trump or anti-Trump, I don’t mind if you want to criticize Trump with fair criticism. But I consider the possible outcomes.
If I had followed the recommendation of the NeverTrump crowd, I would have been voting for Evan McMullin (after their attempt to promote David French failed). Many of their followers did, in fact, vote for E. McMullin. If enough of their followers had actually acted on their recommendation, E. McMullin would have ended up with enough votes to throw the race to Hillary Clinton.
Yes, there were potential outcomes in which the race would have been tossed into the House of Representatives, but that was always a long shot; it was a very low-probability potential outcome. The most likely outcome of many followers of the NeverTrump pundits acting on their recommendation would have been to elect H.R. Clinton.
President Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Let that sink in, again.
They were recommending a vote that would have left us with President-elect Hillary instead of President-elect Trump.
Goldberg only mentioned Hillary once in his column, up near the top:
My position as a committed “Never Trump” (and “Never Hillary”) conservative in the primaries and general election earned the disappointment and wrath of a great many folks on the right, from longtime readers to longtime friends. Although I still feel in my bones that I have nothing to apologize for, it does seem to me that forgiveness, solicited or otherwise, should elicit some introspection.
Then he talks about things he got wrong, but he never mentioned H.R. Clinton again.
Goldberg reveals just how clueless he is about his critics.
When people who meet him offer him forgiveness, it is not for blowing the call on the election. Regarding Trump’s character, he is mostly right and only a little bit wrong. Regarding the missed call on Trump’s senior management picks, many of us who fought against NeverTrump were also wrong.
The reason forgiveness is offered is because J. Goldberg turned out to be less influential than many of his former fans had feared. In fact the whole NeverTrump punditry cottage industry turned out to be less influential than we had feared. We can relax now, and, since Trump won, we can forgive.
If H.R. Clinton had won, then forgiveness would not have been so easily forthcoming from many former fans of the NeverTrump pundits.
Fear
Our distress was never motivated by agitation because NeverTrump missed the call on the ground. Our distress was firmly rooted in fear. We feared an H.R. Clinton Administration. Fear of Hillary was our primary motivation. J. Goldberg and his NeverTrump associates never did seem to fear Hillary the way ordinary conservative voters did.
Goldberg did miss the call about the polls and the votes. He may or may not have missed the call about Trump. We could have overlooked all of that.
The problem was that he missed the call regarding H.R. Clinton.
To Jonah Goldberg:
Jonah Goldberg, if introspection is in order, then return to your meditations, and think on the likely senior management nominees we would have been discussing for an H.R. Clinton Administration. If you still do not understand our fears, then perhaps you need to spend some time away from the East Coast. It would do you good. You might learn how Washington really does impair our lives. When you reach your retreat, you could relax with a good book that would help you understand why we fear the Leftist race to Utopian totalitarianism: Liberal Fascism.
Trashing Kevin Williamson
This post is to criticize Kevin Williamson for a recent column at National Review.
There was a previous post that was undertaken by another Ricochet member, in which he criticized Kevin Williamson for the same column. That post became to heated with emotional responses and unhelpful rhetoric. Factiousness emerged. Hopefully we can do better and consider the column on its merits at this post. The column is deserving of criticism.
Kevin Williamson
Kevin Williamson is a columnist for National Review and he is a Podcaster of Ricochet. I will state up front that I am not a fan of Mr. Williamson, and I am not a regular reader of his work, nor do I listen to his podcasts. He does have his fans, including some who are members of Ricochet. As near as I can tell, he has more former fans than current fans among the membership.
Jet Blue Incident
The recent column by Kevin Williamson was written on the occasion of a recent incident. A gay couple got to shouting at Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner about Ivanka’s father. Jet Blue security bounced them off the flight. Their behavior was pretty ugly.
I had heard a thumbnail version of the incident. I searched the Christian Science Monitor but could not find any coverage. The Washington Post article was extremely thin on information. An internet search got me the sort of information that I had expected to find. Here is the New York Daily News:
Before Lasner, Goldstein and their son ever boarded the plane, the teacher tweeted that his spouse had Ivanka and her hubby in his cross hairs.
“Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, flying commercial,” tweeted Lasner. “My husband chasing them down to harass them. #banalityofevil.”
They portrayed themselves as victims afterward.
“JetBlue kicked us off our flight when a (flight) attendant overheard my husband expressing displeasure about flying w/Trumps,” read the new version.
JetBlue released a statement confirming the incident and explaining its rationale for bumping Lasner and Goldstein — making it clear they were in the wrong.
Kevin Williamson Column
Mr. Williamson wrote a column for National Review in which he observed on the coarsening of our culture, as evidenced by the bad behavior of Goldstein and Lasner. I only read the column because it became the cause of a stir at Ricochet. I think it is a very poor column. Some of the points are blunt and over-the-top, while other points are so subtly presented that they went sailing right by several of our Ricochet members.
Uday and Qusay
Williamson’s column is titled “Manners, Even in the Age of Trump.” Most of you will already know that Kevin Williamson has a strong dislike for Donald J. Trump, and has written extensively and caustically to denigrate Mr. Trump, repeatedly, for well over a year. The column begins with a prelude that invokes our kinship with the animals:
But about 99 percent of our DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees — which are intensely social and fierce. The genetic difference between orangutan and chimpanzee is relatively small, and the genetic difference between chimpanzee and H. sap. is tiny indeed. (“My brother, Esau, is a hairy man.”) Every day presents a struggle between the better angels of our nature and the inner chimp.
Williamson then pivoted to the incident at Jet Blue:
The inner chimp shows up in unexpected places….
Then follows a very brief review of the incident. Next is the part that bugged an intrepid member of Ricochet:
I suppose that by now regular readers of National Review will have figured out that my sympathy for the Trumps is . . . limited. My own view is that Donald and Ivanka and Uday and Qusay are genuinely bad human beings and that the American public has made a grave error in entrusting its highest office to this cast of American Psycho extras. That a major political party was captured by these cretins suggests that its members are not worthy of the blessings of this republic. But here we are.
You really should read the entire column if you are at all interested in this dust-up. I will place a link in the first comment. Williamson continued:
It would be far better and far more human (and we Christians should be thinking this time of year about what it means to be human, in the flesh) to do the opposite, to pull past that coveted parking space and let him have it rather than let him have it. … We are called to be something more than our emotions and appetites and allegiances. But that is also the approach consistent with enlightened self-interest. Manners are a misunderstood thing: They are not, at heart, about aesthetics, about making yourself a more pleasant dining companion. It does not matter, in itself and in the greater analysis, which fork you use for your salad. The point of manners is to make other people feel valued, respected, and considered. Which is to say, the point of manners is to keep the peace.
Following additional remarks about manners, K. Williamson brought it back to politics, and then his conclusion:
Politics always brings out tribalism — politics is tribalism for most people — and this year’s election has been more tribalistic than most….
…
You don’t have to be a saint. All you really have to do is to mind your manners and you can pass for human most of the time.
Ricochet discussion
It was clear in the comments that those inclined to like and defend K. Williamson saw his remark about “inner chimp” to be a reference to the fallen state of humanity, and it is clear from the column that Williamson thinks he shares the problem of an “inner chimp” with everyone else. That theme is woven through this column from beginning to end. Near the bottom, he included this:
But we are called to be more, to be human, to be morally and spiritually larger than what’s within our own skins.
If you are inclined to put the very best construction on K. Williamson’s writing, then you might see this in a positive light.
However, it is clear that there is a Ricochet contingent that is not willing to be generous when reading K. Williamson. Some readers of K. Williamson were turned off recently by K. Williamson due to his bitter and caustic writing against Donald Trump. Others of us had dropped K. Williamson in previous years because of things he wrote long ago.
The key sentence that drew the ire of some readers was this one:
My own view is that Donald and Ivanka and Uday and Qusay are genuinely bad human beings and that the American public has made a grave error in entrusting its highest office to this cast of American Psycho extras.
Does this deserve criticism? If a Ricochet member had written it in a post, would it be considered a violation of the Code of Conduct? Would this, if aimed at Peter Robinson or Pat Sajak or Mona Charen, earn an Editor’s redaction?
We have had many long discussions about the awfulness of D.J. Trump. It has been common to see Podcasters, Contributors, Editors, and members all say things like “genuinely bad human being.” Does likening Donald and Ivanka to Uday and Qusay cross the line? Does “American Psycho” cross the line?
Ethics Contributor fails Moral Challenge
I did not see this at Ricochet. The column, by one of our Contributors, appeared on the editorial page of the gosh-awful Leftist newspaper that soils my driveway each morning. This Leftist newspaper has printed more columns by “Republicans” in the past four months than in the previous year, or any previous year, since their founding in 1841. These editorials by “Republicans” have all been disdainful and disparaging of the GOP nominee. This particular example is more of the same. I am writing to take issue with one paragraph:
Conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, who have rallied to Trump have squandered their own integrity and tainted the reputation of conservatism. They signed on for all of this when they saluted smartly and, in effect, acknowledged that all that character talk about Bill Clinton was so much gas.
This paragraph indicates a misunderstanding of a large segment of Trump supporters, and misunderstands how the moral issues apply to the choice of theologically-conservative people to support Trump. This is unsettling because this Contributor is identified with the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, and so should have a better understanding of reasoning that involves moral issues.
Integrity
From another part of this column, the Contributor wrote “Conservatives have standards,” in contrast to Progressives, whose standards are shifting and always subject to renegotiation. The Contributor thinks that, in order to support the morally-challenged Trump, supporters must toss aside our standards. This is a poor understanding of the way many conservatives think, and reveals that we have a Contributor pundit who does not understand many of the customers for opinion-writing on the “center-right.”
I have not abandoned my moral standards when I decide that a Hillary Administration would do greater damage to American values compared to a Trump Administration. Trump may be a boorish braggart of low morals, but Trump’s agenda is building the Trump Brand. Hillary, however, has figured out how to enrich herself by advancing the Leftist agenda of the most extreme Progressives. My support for Trump does not feature any endorsement of awful Trump; I support Trump only because he is not Hillary.
My standards are unchanged. I have not “squandered integrity” by making this assessment.
Prager
Dennis Prager has a column out where he takes issue with similar stuff from Jeff Jacoby and World. I was a little bit surprised by this scriptural exegesis:
The editors of World and Jeff Jacoby must think God was pretty flawed in “voting” for King David. King David did much worse than privately boast about women allowing him to grope them. He had a man killed so that his adultery with the man’s wife would not be exposed. And while God was angry at, and punished, the king, God still maintained David as king and gave him a central role in Jewish history. If God shouldn’t be ashamed for supporting King David, Christians shouldn’t be ashamed for supporting Donald Trump, given the far more corrupt and destructive alternative.
Ethics and Morals
I am distressed by the NeverTrump pundits and Contributors who keep saying I have embraced Trump’s low morals by supporting him over Hillary R. Clinton. I think by keeping up these slanderous charges, they betray that they are thinking emotionally and not logically about the choice that is presented to us in this election.
I support Trump precisely because it is the moral thing to do. A Hillary Administration will attack the churches, continue to distort language, promote Leftist politics as the only acceptable religion that is deserving of First Amendment protections, gut the Bill of Rights, betray America’s allies abroad, and spread lies all day long under the cover and protection that will be extended to them by their partizans in mass media. A Trump Administration will fumble around and make grave errors, but they will not be marching in lockstep to advance Progressive ideologies in a race to Leftist Utopia.
That is an assessment made logically and it fully embraces my theologically-conservative, Biblically-based moral standards.
The Moral Challenge
The election of 2016 provides a moral challenge. I think the responses reveal moral confusion.
I have been reading about how “morally compromised” I am alleged to be. This comes from the NeverTrump crowd. I see it here at Ricochet, and I see it at National Review, and I see it from elected Republicans. I have been called “immoral” so many times that I am feeling cranky about it. I am writing this post to push back against the charge that I am immoral because I prefer Donald J. Trump over Hillary R. Clinton.
I think some of my accusers display moral confusion, while others are simply making a choice that is different from my choice. Both candidates present choices that have problems with moral aspects. There are no choices that can be characterized as “morally good.” It seems to me to be poor form to say that someone who comes to a different choice than you must be morally defective.
National Review and the “Morally Compromised”
I saw my position called “immoral” on Monday in the comments at Majestyk’s post. But a more agitating essay from that point of view came to me via an e-mail from National Review on Tuesday morning, titled “Social Conservatives should begin a Long March through the Institutions” and it is by Avi Woolf. I am unfamiliar with Woolf, so I searched on the internet and find him listed as an editor at “a politically conservative Israeli website,” and that he is identified as “Modern Orthodox” and “leans libertarian.” (I suppose the usual NeverTrump pundits at National Review have said this so much that they decided to run with a fresh voice.)
Here is the fourth paragraph of his piece:
The truth needs to be said: Far too many social conservatives have morally compromised themselves this election. I myself was shocked and saddened to see many people I used to look up to as paragons of principle and virtue sell their soul for the Trump Train, and I’ve seen many others express similar sentiments. It broke my heart to see people who used to teach of morality and God not only go for Trump simply because “Hillary is worse” but even whitewash and defend the very antithesis of what they ostensibly believe in.
First, I want to make a distinction between the AlwaysTrump fans and the Rabble Alliance, which is my own sentiment. In the Rabble Alliance, there are very few of us who support Trump who can be described as trying to “whitewash” or defend his character.
AlwaysTrump
Trump does have his fans. There were lots of Christians who were attracted to Trump last year. It is commonly said that this is an anti-establishment vote, and I agree with that assessment. These voters like his attitude; they like the fact that he is willing to say things that need to be said, especially when they are “politically incorrect,” which is to say that they offend the perpetually aggrieved Left.
These voters do not approve of Trump’s morals. They weighed the options presented to them, and gravitated to the most anti-establishment choice that was available. They do not trust our political class. Nobody who had ever held elected office, especially in Washington, was going to win their enthusiastic support. Some of them gave a nod to Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson, but neither of them were willing to crash around and break things “like a bull in a china shop” the way Trump did.
Also, neither Fiorina, nor Carson — nor any of the other candidates — had the name recognition or celebrity Trump brought. Yes, we have low-information voters on our side, too.
These voters did not perceive their choice as a moral one. They are looking at it as strictly political. That does not mean that they are immoral for seeing the choice that way.
You do not have to endorse Trump as a role model nor embrace his low morals in order to assess that Trump will do more for America (and more for the social conservative cause) than the other candidates. He may be awful, but he may be what America needs at this terrible juncture.
I did not agree with that AlwaysTrump thinking, but I understand it, and I reject it as somehow morally defective to make that political calculation.
The Rabble Alliance
As a Christian member of the Rabble Alliance, I am making a political choice that may have moral consequences, but I am looking at the forest and not getting hung up on the particular trees. I agree that Hillary Clinton may be a “better person,” but that does not sway me. I opposed Trump in the primaries, but I have rallied to Trump for this general campaign. I candidly call Trump a man of low character and morals; nevertheless I strongly prefer him to Clinton, whose personal life sometimes seems less encumbered by moral offenses. I do not think he will do more for America; I think he is likely to do less damage to America than Clinton.
I think Clinton poses a greater danger to America, and that is a political calculation that includes morals but does not hinge on them. I think she will increase the debt faster, will do more to crush individual liberties, will be more likely to betray allies abroad, will do more to advance the paganism of mother-earth worship, will more effectively gut the Constitution, and do more to advance Leftist causes of all sorts. Under her, our progress in protecting the lives of infants in the womb will be halted, and possibly reversed back to the no-limits abortion/infanticide policies of the worst of the blue states. These are all aspects of government policy with moral dimensions.
Trump has a well-known history of sexual immorality. Clinton, however, is noted for displaying a greater concern for political optics than for the lives of Americans stationed abroad.
Neither candidate presents to me a good moral choice, but they both present an unpleasant choice with different likely outcomes. I am seeing a difference in personal morals that favors Clinton. I also see likely outcomes with moral consequences that favor Trump. I choose according to my judgment that another Clinton Administration will do more to gut the Bill of Rights than I would anticipate from a Trump Administration. I think this outweighs the difference in their personal morals.
I reject the idea that I have compromised on morals in order to choose Trump over Clinton.
The Republican Alliance Falls Apart
AlwaysTrump supporters in the primaries see things differently than those of us who make up the Rabble Alliance. However, both groups include a lot of Social Conservatives. Avi Woolf seems to sort of understand part of the AlwaysTrump motivation:
“I doubt I would be exaggerating if I said that social conservatives feel shafted by fusionism.”
By “fusionism” he is referring to the traditional alliance of conservatives, including defense hawks, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, the libertarians. None of us are happy.
The defense hawks are alarmed at our current weaknesses; fiscal conservatives look at the growing debt with alarm; and the libertarians look at the growing body of regulations from Washington with alarm. As for social conservatives, we have been on the defensive for fifty years. We generally support the other elements of our alliance on their issues, though not with their enthusiasm for their topics. We understand that there are defense hawks and fiscal conservatives who do not support us on our social issues. We never expected support from libertarians, but we were happy to make common cause with all of them in opposition to the Leftism of the Democratic Party.
As the Democrats proceeded to purge their ranks of conservatives, we all ended up as one big happy family in the GOP. Our Republican “big tent” was never a comfortable fit. Now, we are quarrelling with each other while the Leftist mass media breathlessly reports on every criticism a Republican has for any other Republican.
Back to Woolf:
Even before the disgraceful decision of Evangelical leaders to excuse or wave away Donald Trump’s comments on sexual assault, there were those in the Republican camp who argued that it’s time to end the old “fusionism,” which William F. Buckley Jr. helped form, between free-market advocates, robust internationalists, and those who supported family, religion, and moral virtue in American life. Wall Street Republican Ed Conard may have been particularly blunt in calling for cutting ties, but I highly doubt he is alone in thinking that social conservatives are now a political millstone to be tossed aside for other, more profitable Faustian bargains.
I read this as calling for a divorce that would jettison Social Conservatives from the Republican coalition. Conard, it seems advocates kicking the “religious right” out of the Republican Party.
This view says that Republicans can stiff Social Conservatives and win a majority in America. That would only be a viable strategy if Social Conservatives continued to vote for Republicans anyhow, which many would do because the Democrats are worse. The “GOP Establishment” has been taking Social Conservatives for granted for decades; this is not new.
What is new is loud, public infighting, in which the NeverTrump crowd is saying that those who support the Republican nominee are immoral for doing so. If you wanted open warfare with disaffected Social Conservatives, you found a good way to get it.
“A Political Millstone to be Tossed Aside”
Is National Review moving to a position like Ed Conard’s? Until this year, I would have said “absolutely not, but I sometimes get the feeling that the Squish Lords of Ricochet lean that way.
Simple Life
I am a monogamous married man. I am not a romantic person, but I do love my wife dearly. I enjoy a simple life with her.
I do not have an ex. No ex-wife, no ex-in-laws, no alimony, no child support, no lawyer. My wife is the mother of my children, which also simplifies their lives. Our kids never had to keep a personal scheduler to know which home to go to after school. They never had to do that blended family thing.
I don’t have any former friends who are now friends of an ex. I never changed church because it was too uncomfortable to attend the church of my ex.
My wife shares my faith, so that also simplifies life.
I passed up chances for professional advancement in order to stay near family and to avoid excessive travel. That simplifies life in a couple of ways. First, I had more time with family, which allows for better communications within the family. Second, we had less money, so we never got involved in complicated hobbies or travel.
I like my simple life. I enjoy simple pleasures.
Simple Sex
I will discuss a couple of recent conversations below. (Yeah, I know; too many words. Be prepared, because my remarks weigh in at five pages.)
First I want to put some thoughts out about married sex. Married sex is great fun. It is better fun when you keep things simple.
I never had any kind of sex with any other person but my wife. She can say the same about me. There are benefits.
When we make love, she never has to second-guess whether I am comparing her to some other woman, or wishing for some spicy babe. I am not comparing her body or her techniques to anyone else, because I have no other experience or frame of reference for such comparisons. I enjoy my wife for who she is. I am saving all my love for her, and she knows it. There is a security for her in this knowledge, and intimacy. She is the only one for me.
Male Promiscuity
We have recently discussed promiscuity in men, and the way male promiscuity is expected and celebrated, including here at Ricochet.
In the recent discussion on promiscuity in men, the Original Post stated that no religious responses were wanted. So I will post some of those thoughts here, and state now that everything I have to say is informed by traditionalist Christian moral teachings.
In the promiscuity thread, it was stated in the comments that the only strong curb on male promiscuity is women refusing sex. I think this is in error; there is another strong curb: morals. Men know that their acts are immoral, but they do them anyway. The women also know this.
Traditionalist Christianity (and Orthodox Judaism) teaches that G-d wants sex acts to be reserved for married couples. All other sex acts are sinful. You may disagree with this point of doctrine, but it remains the standard by which religious people should view sex.
Sexual sin has a very strong appeal. Resisting temptation is many times a difficult discipline. Nevertheless, we still prize self-discipline, don’t we? So, why is it that we have a culture that mocks the 40-year-old virgin as somehow a defective state of living? In fact, it is clear that contemporary American culture is obsessed by sex, and, in particular, celebrates sexual perversions. Our mass media have been pushing into increasingly disturbing territory.
I do not see how a productive conversation about promiscuity can avoid the topics of sin, morality and religion.
Mass Media v. monogamy
I first noticed this with “Summer of ’42,” a Warner Brothers movie that was billed as “a coming of age film.” That was a euphemism for losing virginity. Young people fascinated by sex, and the celebration of first sex, all mixed with themes of loneliness and sadness and a May-December fling. The movie became a blockbuster hit. It celebrated fornication. It came out while I was in high school.
Of course, mass media has been pushing a libertine agenda for a century. The rise of Progressivism coincided with the invention of movies. So, let me ask the movie buffs out there, what was the most recent big-budget Hollywood romance that did not feature adultery? I think you have to go back to the 1950s to find one.
Television has been snickering at male characters who were clumsy and naïve and not successful with the women, ever since the advent of TV. “Bad boy” characters are popular with the women, on the screen and in real life. We celebrate the peccadilloes of the rich and famous on the covers of tabloids at the checkout line. We entertain ourselves by celebrating their sexual sins.
Of course, this is a theme of literature that can be traced back to Renaissance poetry. Romance!
Romance
Romance is a topic that could be a field of study, and probably is (though I would not trust anyone who claimed to be an expert in the literature of romance, since they would probably be both Leftist and libertine). Romance celebrated the concept of love, and exalted the concept of unrequited love. Romance is full of tales of love for the unavailable. Romance is full of bad boys who turned out good in the end. Romance is full of tales of women who made the choices expected of them by tradition, and who lived to regret their choice. Romance is full of young lovers who made foolish choices. Foolish choices were celebrated whether the tale turns out happy or sad.
Our culture has been filled with foolish notions of romance.
These cultural memes are leveraged by contemporary mass media libertines who keep pushing the edge of taboos, celebrating the perversions of colorful characters, and portraying all sorts of self-destructive behaviors in formats that conclude before getting to the part that shows any consequences.
Feminism
Feminism embraced the sexual revolution. Movement Feminists have been encouraging women to behave like men when it comes to sex. This betrays their motives as more interested in Leftism and libertinism than in the welfare of women. The availability of foolish women who are living the hook-up lifestyle encouraged by the feminists are the ruin of many men.
Pornography
Porn rots your brain. Men are visually stimulated. This is why the women work so hard on their looks, and this fuels the revealing of female skin. The visual orientation of the male brain with regard to sex has given rise to a shameful industry of pornographers and a robust and widespread practice of homemade porn and the easy availability of porn on the internet.
Porn is particularly damaging to young men. It gives them all sorts of wrong ideas about sex and about women. These wrong ideas lead to strife in relationships. I think many couples have split up because the man completely misunderstood the woman on account of his indulgence in porn.
Rationalizations
All this cultural obsession with sexual sins serves as a broad base for rationalizing sexual sin, and for dismissing sex acts as sinful. The cry of “victimless crime” was used to repeal all sorts of laws that forbade sexual sins. Pornography led the way, with famous lawsuits from the 1960s through the 1980s. Homosexual sex was recently made legal, and now in blue states we have the enforced celebration of it. Incest, group sex, underage sex and prostitution are all current fronts where the mass media is softening the resistance to overthrowing all the old taboos.
This background makes it easy for Americans to rationalize that resistance to temptations to sexual sins is old-fashioned prudery.
This is spiritually dangerous.
Spiritual consequences
Leftists have their religion of leftism. Leftist mass media are vigorously proselytizing on several fronts. They promote syncretism and ecumenism. They promote agnosticism and Atheism. They promote Pantheism and Panentheism. They wink at Paganism, because they like how it goads theists, especially Christians. They condemn traditional Christians; we are characterized as hateful ignorant bigots. (These slanders have become so ingrained in the culture that our Supreme Court has ruled that voters who are motivated by traditional religious morality are hateful ignorant bigots whose choices must be overthrown.)
This shift of America into Leftism dulls the moral sense. It provides a background of moral chaos and contradiction and confusion. It paves the road to perdition.
The sexual sins do have consequences, both grave and mundane. They set you on a path that leads away from G-d. That has eternal consequences.
But, back to my original point, the sexual sins complicate your life.
Divorce
Conservatives were mocked when they said that no-fault divorce was a bad idea. All the cautions of the conservatives have come to fruition. Divorce is endemic now, to such an extent that many young people are avoiding marriage because they fear divorce.
“G-d hates divorce” says the prophet Malachi. G-d does not hate divorced people. G-d hates what divorce does to his people. Divorce divides. It separates families. It complicates life.
Life is better when you keep things simple.
This is not finger-pointing at divorce, nor am I blaming all divorce on sexual sins. I am just speaking up as a monogamous male, since we are seldom heard from.
I have no complaint about blended families. I know many, though, and I can say that there are stresses that come with that life. A family that is dear to me is a blended family because a young mother died, and a young father died. The widow and the widower are blessed to have each other. They stand out among the blended families in my acquaintance. The lack of ex-spouses greatly reduces the complications of their blended family life. May G-d bless them.
Adultery
Adultery really complicates life. You tell a lie, then another and another. Soon you need to upgrade your schedule software to keep up with your lies. You get dodgy and sneaky. And the sex has an extra zing because of the forbidden nature of it. That reveals just where the moral line belongs, doesn’t it? The fact that everyone, especially the participants, all know it is a forbidden relationship; that it crosses the line and should be taboo. It is a taboo because it is a betrayal of trust and a betrayal of intimacy. It erodes your moral fiber. So, why have Americans shelled out so much money for generations to entertain themselves with stories that highlight adultery?
Fornication
Fornication also complicates life. See my early section above, “Simple Sex,” to see the simple version. Racking up a series of previous lovers will diminish your ability to connect with the sort of intimacy that G-d intended for marriage. Having a robust sexual past will give your new spouse all sorts of questions that impede true intimacy. Each spouse will be holding a little of themselves in reserve, just in case this relationship doesn’t last. A past life history of fornication does not doom a marriage, but it does inhibit the fullness of togetherness that you should experience in marriage.
Biblical morality
As noted above, the Bible says that sex should be reserved for married couples. Period. All other sex is sin.
G-d created sex; Adam and Eve enjoyed each other in the Garden before they chose disobedience. Sex for them was perfect and holy.
Sex for us is not perfect, nor holy. We are corrupted; all our acts are corrupted, and we learn every day the consequences of sin.
Division, dishonesty and distrust all result from the sexual sins. The practice of habitual sexual sins sets a person on a spiritual path that leads away from G-d. This is the most damaging consequence of all; and it makes true repentance more difficult. The worst sins are those that increase the division between the person and G-d. Those are the sins that the Bible calls “abomination.”
Consequences
Sin complicates your life. We all live in families and communities, so other people have to live with the consequences of your sins. Your spouse and kids, sometimes parents, friends or even neighbors or coworkers have friction enter their lives due to the consequences of your sins.
And, you have to live with the consequences of other peoples’ sins. Complications affect your emotional wellbeing. When people cannot trust each other, this is borne out in lots of ways. Emotional distance is kept, or people don’t talk to each other; sometimes someone dear to you moves away because of some third party’s sin.
Complications due to sin affect your financial wellbeing. The costs of divorce are devastating. There are other costs in other circumstances. Perhaps the greatest financial costs accrue to the poor unfortunates who are most emotionally devastated by betrayal. A small fraction of these people will get involved in alcohol, or drugs, or gambling, or some other self-destructive behavior, sometimes including the sexual sins that caused the distress in the first place. Those all have big financial costs, plus they compound the emotional misery.
Complications also affect your spiritual wellbeing. That is perhaps a topic for a separate post.
Keep life simple.
Trust
By being steady, and trustworthy, I win her trust. Because she trusts me, she is secure in our relationship. She is comfortable with me. The lack of second-guessing and hesitation allows free and honest communication. No secrets and no surprises. This also keeps life simple.
Monogamous Man
I recommend monogamy. It keeps life simple.
It helps you walk in the ways that G-d wants for you.
It helps your marriage. It helps spiritually, emotionally, financially, and it enhances intimacy, which leads to great sex.
I enjoy my simple life.
SCOTUS: No Free Exercise of Religion Allowed in Washington State
There was a lot of noise this week about how the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a Texas law that imposed regulations on abortion clinics, but there was little notice of a more important ruling. In Stormans v. Weisman, the Supreme Court declined (5 – 3) to hear a petition on a Ninth Circuit case out of Washington State that affirmed a state law requiring all pharmacies to stock and dispense the “Plan B” pill, which can act either as an emergency contraceptive or an abortifacient.
The Stormans own Ralph’s Thriftway, a grocery store/pharmacy with two locations a couple of miles apart in Olympia, Washington. Despite the Ralph’s employees’ willingness to refer customers to any of the 30 other nearby pharmacies that stock the drug, Washington State is determined that traditionalist Christians must not be allowed to run a pharmacy that does not stock the pill. That is unfortunate, because the Washington State law is a clear violation of the Stormans’ First Amendment right to the free exercise of their religion. Writing for the dissenters (and joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas), Justice Samuel Alito writes:
This case is an ominous sign. At issue are Washington State regulations that are likely to make a pharmacist unemployable if he or she objects on religious grounds to dispensing certain prescrip- tion medications. There are strong reasons to doubt whether the regulations were adopted for—or that they actually serve—any legitimate purpose. And there is much evidence that the impetus for the adoption of the regulations was hostility to pharmacists whose religious beliefs regarding abortion and contraception are out of step with prevailing opinion in the State. Yet the Ninth Circuit held that the regulations do not violate the First Amendment, and this Court does not deem the case wor- thy of our time. If this is a sign of how religious liberty claims will be treated in the years ahead, those who value religious freedom have cause for great concern.
Indeed.
The Leftist Horde: Two Thousand Reasons to Vote for Trump
Some fellow Ricochetti have lamented that they’ve yet to see a coherent reason to support Donald Trump and it’s a staple of many #NeverTrump arguments that there is no difference between him and Hillary Clinton. In response to these, I wanted to offer an argument that addresses an issue that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves, with a focus on which of the two candidates will cause the most damage to America’s culture, values, rights, and finances.
It likely goes without saying that I am convinced that a win for Clinton would be bad for America and result in greater (and more lasting) damage, and my reason is simple: I fear the Leftist horde — some four million strong — that she will direct and unleash through the executive branch.
Politics is a Team Sport
The president is the head of the Executive Branch and the cabinet secretaries serve as managers of large agencies. The secretaries, deputy secretaries, and other high-level management positions are all subject to the “advice and consent” provision of the Constitution. This means that, if we hold the Senate, we can block the worst of the marxists and libertines a president might nominate. But there are over 2,000 such management positions. (Below that level, federal civil service rules apply, and it is very difficult, but possible, to fire those federal employees.)
So, the president is the head of a large enterprise that is running the federal government. When there is a change of party at the White House, there follows a change of management in the government, and it’s one of the under-appreciated jobs of the presidency.
Clinton and Team Obama
If Clinton comes to power, she will have an enormous advantage in that she will inherit Team Obama. These are the people at the IRS who targeted conservatives and leaked private information about Republican candidates. These are the people at the Department of Education who decided that “gender” is a synonym for “sex,” and are threatening states if they do not comply with Team Obama’s preferred bathrooms policies. These are the people at EPA who want to regulate every puddle and rivulet, taking control of your land without any thought of due compensation. These are the people who have been putting coal out of business and who block such good economic proposals as oil and gas pipelines. These are the people at the Department of Justice who covered up “Fast and Furious,” but who took a peculiar interest in local crime matters regarding Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. These are the people at the State Department who promote abortion globally, and hides details of his deals from Congress.
Those are just a few examples of the way Team Obama have leveraged their control of the federal agencies to push their agenda of curtailing individual liberties, increasing regulatory control over businesses, farms, cities and states, and taking up the Leftist side in all the culture war issues. They have been busy for two terms, chopping away and tearing down the supports that hold up Western Civilization. Nathanael Ferguson put a post on the Main Feed with a nice review of Team Obama, “Slumping to the Occasion,” so you can check that out for additional matters of Team Obama actions to bring America down.
When Obama was first elected, the Democrats controlled the Senate, and he had no trouble putting his team in place. While Clinton will no doubt wish to make a few changes, the dirty work in this regard is already been done for her: She can just keep the team already in place, without having to submit replacements to the Senate unless she so chooses. With the exception of a small number of folk who rubbed her the wrong way, we can expect her to retain the bulk of Team Obama. And, for any vacancy she does have, there is a large number of leftists with solid Democrat Party pedigrees who are ready to help do their Progressive worst to America.
They will get a boost of fresh enthusiasm to continue their assault on the family, the churches, and all the supports of western civilization.
Team Trump
Trump, on the other hand, has won the GOP nomination with a very small political team. He does not have a large number to draw on in order to make up an administration and will need help staffing the Executive Branch. He is likely to look first to those Republicans who rallied to his cause the earliest. Team Trump will be a mixed bag, with many who are not conservatives, and probably some who are very liberal, but they will not be as focused and like-mindedly leftist as Clinton’s Leftist Horde would be . They will have to work with each other, perhaps compromising here or there, in order to get anything done. This will be likely to slow them down on initiatives that Trump assigns to them, and will keep them from doing as much damage as Team Hillary could do.
Also, recall that “You’re Fired!” that is an integral part of Trump’s brand. He, unlike Obama or Clinton, will not overlook incompetence for the sake of ideological purity. Some of his team will have to go when they screw up, so that the rest of the team learns to take the boss seriously. That is just good business sense, which is something that neither Obama nor Clinton have. Remember the Obamacare website crew? And the Veterans Administration? Trump would get rid of some of those incompetents just to protect his own brand.
Obama has been criticized by conservatives for overlooking incompetence. I think that Obama keeps slackers on because — ever since his 2010 shellacking — he wants to avoid the advise and consent process. Clinton will be able to keep Team Obama in place, while Trump is not likely to keep very many of them.
Individual Liberties
Ricochet members — and conservatives in general — should know how Team Obama has been chopping away at our individual liberties these past seven years. That could be a separate post. For now, just consider that they are the enemy. They have been working to arrogate power away from individuals, and they have been working to arrogate power away from the states.
Trump may be bad for individual liberties and he may be bad for states, but he cannot possibly be as bad on either score as Clinton.
Vote for Trump
This is not about the Republican Party and it is not about the conservative movement. This is about the United States of America. Vote for awful Trump. Stop Scofflaw Clinton.
And yes, fear is a motivating force. I fear the damage that a Team Hillary could do to American values, American culture, American security and American finances. Fear of Clinton is why I am earnestly supporting Trump for President.
Lord, help us.
A Separation of Church and Scouts
My congregation will not renew the Charter for the Cub Scout Pack that we have hosted for many years. This is a decision that took us over two years to reach. It makes me sad and angry to see this relationship come to an end. G-d does not like broken relationships. It was sin that caused the broken relationship between G-d and Adam, and our relationships with Him are broken by sin. In His mercy, He gave up His own Son to die so that a way was made possible to restore the broken relationship. And, though our hope rests in the restoration we look forward to, we still must live in a world that is corrupted by sin. We live in a tangle of broken relationships.
You might think that a Cub Scout Pack (generally, for boys aged 11 or less) would not be affected in the same way as a Boy Scout Troop, but the Left divides — they break relationships — and the Left has split our church from the Scouts and brought us to this new parting of ways. To understand why that is, you have to understand what the controversy is about.
This painful decision on the part of my congregation is not about the boys. Nor is it about the Pack leaders, nor any particular broken relationship among the friends and neighbors who have benefitted by having the Cub Scout program available here for their sons. It is certainly not about homosexuality, or homosexual scouts, or even homosexual candidates for scout leadership positions.
Rather, it is about the message of the Church. The Church must proclaim the Gospel. The Good News that Jesus our Lord and Savior has made a way for broken relationships to be restored; that is our message. We must be able to proclaim this message in all its fullness.
By “fullness” I mean the Bible. The whole Bible story, of how G-d deals with His people, and how He took an astounding path in order to restore your relationship with Him.
The Parting
We received a charter renewal letter from the Cubscout pack. The renewal of the charter is an annual thing that has been routine for a very long time. The form changed this year. Among other changes, this provision was added:
Chartered organizations must not use the Scouting program to pursue any objectives related to political or social advocacy, including partisan politics, support or opposition to government action or controversial legal, political, or social issues or causes.
Shame on the Boy Scouts of America. Not content to take a side in the culture war, they now want to limit chartering organizations from taking sides in it as well.
I don’t think we have ever had cub scouts in uniform do any activity of the church. The only time they are asked to come to church in uniform is once each year for Scout Sunday, where they are recognized. We typically do not make a great deal of Scout Sunday, but recognition, and public prayer for the program and its leaders and the kids is a good thing.
However, we cannot cease “social advocacy,” nor can we avoid anything “controversial.”
Some might say that we could slice the issue real thin and pretend that we could still get along. Cub Scouts pledge to “do my best,” which everyone can subscribe to. The part about keeping “morally straight” does not come in until they reach Boy Scouts. But that is not the issue.
The issue is that the BSA has compromised our ability to proclaim that there is such a thing as sin, and that the Bible clearly identifies sins. The Boy Scouts of America have, very publicly, sided with the faction that says that what the Bible has to say about sexual sins does not apply to modern life. We reject that message. We cannot allow that message to get mixed up with our Christian message. Muddled messaging hurts our ability to teach the Gospel. In this world of confusion, we must maintain a clear proclamation of the Good News.
This is bad for the boys. It would be better to retain the relationship, if the welfare of the kids were the only concern. The Church wants what is best for the boys, but this change is not good for the boys. As such, we have to take care to preserve the clarity of our message.
The Message
If you understand that this is about the message of the church, it then becomes clear that it is not much about homosexuality. Homosexual sex acts are just one sinful act among many. It is the Left that has chosen to make homosexuality the current cultural and spiritual battlefield. Some of us tried to warn our fellows, but conservative Christians are genial and generous people, and did not rally to the fight early enough to mount a winning defense. Now it appears that this is a lost battle, like easy divorce and casual sex were lost. The onslaught against the family and against the Gospel continue.
Traditional Christian morality remains the best way for G-d’s children to live, but our culture is embracing and celebrating sexual sins, and now preaches that there is no such thing as sexual sin. The Left would have us believe that the only sins are violence, intolerance, and hypocrisy. In the church, we continue to proclaim that sin is sin, that the Bible explains sin, and sin separates us from G-d. We are bound to tell about sin, because if you do not understand that you are a sinner and that it is sin that separates you from G-d, then you cannot understand why you need a Savior. We are called to reach out in love to sinners, to call them to repentance and help them to find peace and reconciliation through Jesus.
We must not let our message get muddled with a message that says that sexual sins do not matter. The implication of that message would be that the Bible is not reliable for spiritual guidance.
Legal Issues
There is another matter that we, as Elders of our church, have had to consider: the legal environment that appears to offer potential legal risks to churches that continue to charter a Scout Troop or Pack. We anticipate legal challenges to churches that charter troops, that will be contending that the troop is subject to public accommodation law. We doubt if our own jurisdiction will be selected, but other nearby courts will be welcoming to such challenges.
We recently received a bulletin from Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod headquarters that reported on a legal investigative task force. It arrived the same week that the new charter document came from the BSA Council office. It included this:
… it appears that the law is growing stronger for those who might be in a position to file suit for discrimination against the BSA, and, by extension, against chartering organizations, including LCMS congregations.
Though the legal risk to our own congregation is small, it is not negligible. The likelihood of such lawsuits makes the messaging problem worse, because we know that the Leftist media will report on one side of these cases, and they will not be reporting on our side.
We have not yet decided whether to have one final Scout Sunday. Just thinking about it makes me sad. But we will part ways with the Scouts. They will have no trouble finding a new home, but it will be likely that the new chartering agency will be one of those leftish churches who are comfortable with compromises about the Bible. We wish them well.
I am confident that the boys will continue to learn useful skills and self-reliance and the manly virtues that are wrapped up in scouting. They will enjoy the outdoors and good fellowship. I know this because I know some of the Scout leaders. They are good men. Some of them are members of our congregation, and they will stick with the Pack, and the Troop, wherever they go.
And so the Left divides us. The Girl Scouts are next.
Fault Line: Culture Wars Playing Out in the Church
There is a divide among American Christians. Less a disagreement between Catholics and Protestants — or other divisions of doctrine and theology — the difference turns on culture, and relates to a fundamental difference in worldviews that transcend the old schisms. In short it, is a matter of orthodoxy, with non-denominational evangelicals and cafeteria Catholics on one side, and traditionalists on the other. It has been talked about within the various churches for decades, but affects almost all of them in the same fashion, and reflects larger trends in the culture that mirror political parties.
A recent conversation on the Member Feed turned to the matter of how Christians consider each other with respect to true worship and doctrine. Along the way, member Gary McVey asked:
My “local” [Lutheran parish] is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America [ELCA]. To folks in the know, are they in or out?
Well, in or out of what, precisely? “Orthodoxy,” I say. There are Lutherans, and then there are Lutherans.
I think the ELCA Lutherans have a good foundation: the words in the “resources” page of the ELCA website are good. But there are many ELCA parishes that have pursued non-orthodox approaches to the Bible, and there are ELCA parishes that — on casual observation — are hard to distinguish from those of Universalists. While some ELCA parishes are still orthodox, they have become a minority. Several more orthodox ELCA parishes have broken away in recent years and set up new networks of congregations.
In 1998, I cut a syndicated column out of a newspaper, and have shared it a number of times over the years. (Yes, real paper and real scissors. I know: how quaint). Still available on the Internet “Ten Years of Reporting on a Fault Line” by Terry Mattingly begins:
Back in the 1980s, I began to experience deja vu while covering event after event on the religion beat. I kept seeing a fascinating cast of characters at events centering on faith, politics and morality. A pro-life rally, for example, would feature a Baptist, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox rabbi and a cluster of conservative Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans. Then, the pro-choice counter-rally would feature a “moderate” Baptist, a Catholic activist or two, a Reform rabbi and mainline Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans.
Similar line-ups would appear at many rallies linked to gay rights, sex-education programs and controversies in media, the arts and even science. Along with other journalists, I kept reporting that today’s social issues were creating bizarre coalitions that defied historic and doctrinal boundaries.
Later in the same piece, Mattingly describes James Davison Hunter, a professor at the University of Virginia, who is credited with coining the term “Culture War”:
The old dividing lines centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic — the nature of truth and moral authority. … [Hunter wrote] “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” in which he declared that America now contains two basic world views, which he called “orthodox” and “progressive.” The orthodox believe it’s possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to “re-symbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life.”
That’s what I was seeing at all of those rallies and marches. And that’s why, whenever I covered separate meetings of Catholics, Jews, Baptists, Episcopalians or whatever, I almost always found two distinct camps of people fighting about the same subjects.
…
Ask any big question and this issue looms in the background. Is the Bible an infallible source of truth? Is papal authority unique? Do women and men have God-given roles in the home and the church? Can centuries of Jewish traditions survive in the modern world? Can marriage be redefined? Is abortion wrong? Can traditionalists proclaim that sex outside of marriage is sin? Are heaven and hell real? Do all religious roads lead to the same end?
…
Many in the orthodox camp disagree on some of the answers, but they are united in their belief that public life must include room for those who insist eternal answers exist. Meanwhile, progressives are finding it harder to tolerate the views of people they consider offensive and intolerant. This is not a clash between religious people and secular people, stressed Hunter. This is a battle between two fundamentally different approaches to faith.
And so it is in Lutheran circles. The ELCA are the progressive Lutherans who take a “poetic” approach to the Bible and the historic documents of the Lutheran faith. I belong to the LCMS, where we are the traditionalists; we insist that eternal truth is revealed in the Bible, which is to be trusted as the revealed Word of G-d.
That said, I increasingly find that I have more in common with theologically-conservative Catholics and Baptists than I do with most ELCA Lutherans. I enjoy spirited exchanges with a Baptist preacher friend: we can go hammer-and-tongs over chapter and verse. In contrast, few ELCA Lutherans of my acquaintance are willing to engage this way, as they aren’t sure that faith should be “confined” by what the Bible says. They aren’t sure that what is true for me is also true for them. These arguments strike me as slippery and I lose patience.
My answer to Gary is this: I am not saying that the ELCA is “out” of orthodox Christianity. But if you want to investigate the claims of orthodox Christianity, expand your search beyond that ELCA parish and include some orthodox, traditionalist churches. At one level, it almost doesn’t matter which among those you pick.
Reading the Quran: Abrogation and Hadith
The Islamic State (or ISIS or ISIL) has been in discussion across America (and within Ricochet) lately. I saw a few comments while browsing over the past week, and I think I can help inform the conversation.
Several Ricochetti have written comments to the effect that ‘Islam is a violence-saturated religion and all you have to do to understand this is to read the Quran.’ A couple of comments quoted from the Quran. So I think it appropriate to offer a few observations on reading the text.
I can tell that several of our Ricochetti are very well-informed while others are new to the topic, so consider my remarks as coming from someone in the middle of the spectrum and addressed to newcomers as they approach the Quran. I am confident that if I include any errors they will be corrected con brio in the comments.
Contradictions
I have read the Quran several times. Anyone who is familiar with the Bible will find the Quran very frustrating. It seems relatively disorganized. In style it is most like Deuteronomy, but it jumps around more and has many repetitive passages.
Critics disparage the Bible by alleging self-contradictions, which I think are mostly comprised of deliberate misunderstanding (though a few difficult passages are acknowledged and debated by Christians). By comparison, however, the Quran offers several glaring examples that are troubling for outsiders and make reading the Quran quite difficult. Here are examples that address a topic of recent interest:
- “Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things,” (2:256).
- “And an announcement from Allah and His Messenger, to the people (assembled) on the day of the Great Pilgrimage,—that Allah and His Messenger dissolve (treaty) obligations with the Pagans. If then, ye repent, it were best for you; but if ye turn away, know ye that ye cannot frustrate Allah. And proclaim a grievous penalty to those who reject Faith,” (9:3).
- “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful,” (9:5).
- Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued,” (9:29).
The latter three verses all seem to offer direct contradictions to the first one. There are several examples like this.
Islam is a divided faith, sort of like Judaism and Christianity. There are many differing schools of thought. These are not quite like the Protestant denominations of Christianity, but there are major differences. We have all learned about the divide between Shia and Sunni Islam, and the Four Schools of Sunni thought, and about Sufis. There are many subtle distinctions that we do not need to trouble ourselves with here, but a major one worth learning about is the various theories of abrogation.
Abrogation
Abrogation means replacement, which in this context means that as Muhammad taught the Quran to his followers, sometimes an early verse would be replaced by a later verse. Many Muslims follow a school of thought that accepts this definition of abrogation, and many have differing definitions. Several groups of Muslims reject abrogation in the Quran.
Many of the groups of Muslims who accept this definition of abrogation still have disagreements about which verses are abrogated, and which verses are the definitive ones for doctrine. That is because they do not all agree on which verses are the earliest and which are the latest. This turns out to be the key to understanding some of the fundamental theological issues that divide Muslims.
The Quran is not printed in chronological order as taught by Muhammad. The Suras (chapters) are generally placed in order from longest to shortest, the way the major Prophets are organized in the Old Testament. Also, the paragraphs or subsections within most of the Suras are organized from long to short. Much of medieval Muslim theology was focused on schools of thought as to how to put these passages into chronological order, and questions about which were taught by Muhammad in Mecca, and which were taught in Medina, which also affects the relative emphasis placed on a passage for some Muslims. The sources for the life of Muhammad are two biographies and the Hadith. The first biography dates from nearly 150 years after the death of Muhammad, and the second one (mostly derivative of the first) from 300 years after the death of Muhammad.
A large majority of Sunni Muslims belong to groups that accept some theory of abrogation. Depending on the group of Muslims, they may take abrogation to mean that a later passage should completely replace an earlier one whenever there is a conflict, or they may take abrogation to mean that both passages have to apply to life today, but the later passage should somehow get more emphasis. There are many shades of meaning involved in understanding abrogation.
Hadith
The Hadith are collections of the sayings of Muhammad, and they contain many narrative episodes from the life of Muhammad, so that there is much overlapping material with the biographies. For Muslims who belong to a school of thought that accepts abrogation, the key to interpretation of the Quran is their chronology of Quranic passages. The key to the various schools are the biographies and the Hadith, which allow teachings of Muhammad to be connected with the life of Muhammad, and provide hooks to establish the likely order for the various passages of the Quran. This is why the different groups of Muslim scholars are often called “Schools of Hadith.” There are several of these Hadith, with the best-known and most influential one being the one by Muhammad al-Bukhari, the author/editor who compiled it two centuries after the death of the Prophet.
It is interpretations of the various Hadith that give rise to differing chronologies of the passages in the Quran. The differing Schools of Hadith have long histories. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
A number of medieval writers have recorded ancient lists which give the chapters in what is allegedly their correct chronological order. There are different versions of the list and they disagree with each other about the precise order in which the chapters were revealed. The origin and value of the traditional lists is uncertain, none of the lists originate from before the first quarter of the 8th century, and they seem to be based on the learned opinions of scholars rather than carefully transmitted reports dating back to the time of Muhammad or his companions. Several versions exist: A version is given in a 15th-century work by a person named Abd al-Kafi. Another writer named Abu Salih mentioned a different list and another significantly different version of Abu Salih is preserved in a book named ‘Kitab Mabani’. A different list is mentioned by the 10th-century writer Ibn Nadim.[4] The standard Egyptian edition of the Quran (1924) gives a chronological order based on one of the traditional lists, the one given by Abd al-Kafi.[4]
As a result, the uninitiated cannot just pick up a Quran and start reading. You have to be instructed in the chronology of the passages, which means you must choose from among the Schools of Hadith before you can begin.
When I first learned about the Schools of Hadith, four decades ago, they were hard to find in English translation. I arrived at a university library system in Knoxville that had over a dozen volumes containing the Hadith, but every one of them was checked out to some faculty member or other, and, though I looked a few times each semester, I never got hold of one. Hadith in English translation were more costly than my starving-student budget allowed.
Over the years I learned that Muslims do not want the Quran, the Hadith, or their theology to be easily accessible to westerners. (In this they are sort of like Scientologists, who will only present a portion of their teachings to you until you have advanced through to some level of accomplishment, so that you have to step through their theology step by step over many years.) In the case of the Muslims, they want to teach you Hadith by teaching you how to read the Quran in the original Arabic. That presented enough of a barrier to me (way too much time needed) so that I never undertook the lessons they offered.
After 9-11, when an understanding of Islam became essential, I thought I would find the Hadith on the internet. Sure enough, but not in very many places and not in a complete collection. It is only in the past six years or so that you can reliably find the complete Hadith on the worldwide web. You can start casually browsing, but be advised that these are also organized in arcane and nonintuitive ways. Here is one good source: http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/
Reading
The bottom line is that you cannot just pick up an English translation of the Quran and start reading. There are five English translations to choose from, but without a theory of Hadith and abrogation to guide your reading, you will come up with your own individual idiosyncratic interpretation of the Quran, and it will not match the interpretation of any of the hundreds of groups of Muslims.
There are several books available that purport to explain Islam. These are generally shallow, surface-level skims that are written by Muslims or secular Islamophiles. Helpful for the basics, but limited.
Anti-Muslim
One book that appears to me to be very accessible and does what I wanted (reorganizes the Quran into chronological order) is also problematic. A Simple Koran, by the Center for the Study of Political Islam, is problematic because the author and publisher are notorious anti-Muslim advocates. Caveat emptor. I went searching the internet to see if I could find any Muslim source that would provide a refutation, but all I found were condemnations. I did not find any site that put up a quarrel about the chronology used by Bill Warner, the author, but I found several places that object to him and the publisher as islamophobic hatemongers, such as this.
The upshot of this chronology is the assertion that the teachings that exhort violence are later than the passages that teach peace. The result is that the passages of violence abrogate the passages of peace. What that actually means depends on your version of abrogation. Author Bill Warner writes as if the vast majority of Muslims accept a ‘total replacement’ version of abrogation, but I think he overstates the case on that point. I do think it is reasonable to assert that this is a majority position among traditional Sunni Islam.
Muslims
There are large groups of Muslims who reject all theories of abrogation, and then go in several different directions as they try to reconcile the contradictions. Small groups of westernized Muslims reconcile these passages by arguing that the jihad is an inner spiritual struggle, but it is apparent that they are comparable to theologically liberal Christians who deny the resurrection. Like those liberal Christians, they get no traction in the larger world of Islam.
Though the various Schools of Hadith have theological quarrels about the chronology of some Quranic passages, the chief Four Schools of Sunni Islam — as near as I have been able to find — pretty much agree that Muhammad’s exhortations to violence are relatively late in comparison to the passages that are widely used to establish the “religion of peace” characterization.
Abrogation: http://www.quranicstudies.com/tag/abrogation/