The Fear of God: The Beginning of Stupidity
Politics
| January 17, 2008
| Tim
The bible says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. In one sense, I agree: if you believe in God, and that belief causes you to realize you don't know everything, to be more humble, and act as though you could be held accountable for your actions, then that can produce a great deal of wisdom.
On the other hand, a great amount of stupidity (not to mention scary intolerance) is displayed by people who freak out at any hint of meaningful belief in God. In particular, they imply it's wrong or immoral for Christians to be involved in politics.
The usual argument goes like this, or includes some subset of these arguments:
1. Christians get their ethics from the bible.
2. Christians vote, and those ethics inform their voting
3. Therefore, Christians are trying to legislate the bible
4. That's a violation of the "separation of church and state"
5. Therefore, Christians should not be involved in politics, or must distance themselves from their beliefs when doing so.
The logical end of this argument are religious tests, where holding certain beliefs legally disqualifies one from holding office or even voting. But hey, to save the Constitution, some are quite prepared to destroy it.
I generally like Professor Bainbridge, but he recently flipped his lid in precisely that manner.
He quotes a tendentious account by Greg Sargent:
In an interview with Beliefnet.com, a religion Web site, Huck has just clarified his view that the Constitution should be amended to be brought in line with God’s will — and he directly equated homosexuality with bestiality.
First, a technicality, but an important one which gets under my craw, as I see it so often: I don't know what it is that causes people like this to lie so boldly, but Huckabee (a candidate I strongly do not support, by the way) did not "directly equate" homosexuality with bestiality. Read the quote yourself:
QUESTIONER: Is it your goal to bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible? Some people would consider that a kind of dangerous undertaking, particularly given the variety of biblical interpretations.
HUCKABEE: Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.
Huckabee simply listed to a number of kinds of union which were not the traditional one-man-one-woman form. He did not "directly equate" each of them with all the others; he simply argued that when you open the door to one non-traditional form, you will end up opening it to others also. I'm not asking you to agree with his argument, but let's first be honest about what was said.
Let's say I'm on a fruit-only diet, and ask a friend to pick up some fruit at the store. He suggests he'll get me lima beans. Annoyed, I say: "Look, I don't want any vegetables, meat, milk, Froot Loops, or even protein powder. I only want fruit." Did I just equate, say, vegetables and junk food? Did I "directly equate" Foot Loops with meat? Please! This is a very simple matter of English usage, but even a law professor I respect seems incapable of parsing a relatively simple sentence once his religious beliefs get involved.
Also note that Huckabee does not say, as the questioner put it, that his "goals [is] to bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible." Instead, his answer is he doesn't "think it's a radical view" to believe marriage should be limited to one man and one woman. He does not say he's doing it because of the bible, he answers by pointing out his view is well supported by the entire rest of the culture, not to mention our nation's history.
Yet Greg Sargent claimed that Huckabee had just told us "the Constitution should be subjected to Biblical standards" and Bainbridge echoes it and takes it one further, implying that might also mean Huckabee is into "Christian reconstructionism"! Why must these people be so dishonest?
Again, I'm not criticizing their worldview. I'm just shocked they apparently can't honestly relate the content of a sentence or two.
Misunderstanding the Constitution
Unlike Professor Bainbridge, I'm no legal scholar, but I do know enough to understand why the argument above (which he doesn't invoke directly, but seems to be the usual approach, so I mention it) is flawed. Thomas Jefferson pointed out that Congress, in voting doesn't agree to principles, only actions.
Let's say that there's a law saying we need to cut pollution and you and I both support it. I support it because I believe the book of Genesis tells me to take care of God's creation, you support it because Al Gore told you the world would end if you didn't. The law passes.
Did Congress just establish the book of Genesis as our controlling belief system? Or the rantings of Al Gore? No, Congress simply passed a law that the majority found acceptable. It didn't validate the rest of Al Gore's beliefs and wishes, nor did they just validate the rest of the bible.
Such paranoia also suggests very little confidence in their fellow Americans: the narrative seems to be that once you allow a "fundamentalist" Christian into office, we'll suddenly be living in the Old Testament, wearing robes and stoning everyone who bothers us to death. (As if Christians generally lived that way in their own private lives!) They seem to forget that laws have to pass both houses of Congress (meaning they must be generally acceptable to the American people), the presidency, and -- oh, not to mention -- judicial review.
Finally, on this point, their rhetoric seems to end up implying that things are objectionable mainly because they're found in the bible. That definition of "marriage" matches with the bible! Well, then, that belief smacks of fascism! (As if the USA has been a fascist theocracy for the last 200+ years, and we just didn't notice it.)
Bainbridge's Tenuous Links
Bainbridge draws a parallel between this situation and Ron Paul's:
Just like Ron Paul needs to disavow the racists and whack jobs in his entourage, Huckabee needs to clarify his relationship with the Reconstructionsts. Right now.
As an example of a "Reconstructionist" group, Bainbridge cites Vision America. I don't know a thing about them, but from their list of issues (follow the link), they appear to run the standard gammut of religious-conservative causes: opposing the killing of Christians in Iraq, judicial activism, embryonic stem cell research, keeping the definition of marriage, etc.
And it's rather extreme to imply that such beliefs are as odious as overt racism.
Bainbridge quotes First Things at length about Rushdoony, and one Gary North, but never draws a link between the beliefs mentioned there and Huckabee. Nor does he explain (nor provide links documenting) how "Vision America" is supposed a Christian "Reconstructionist" organization.
As Hugh Hewitt points out:
That's right. Defending Huck. Me.
Because Stephen Bainbridge is off the rails, not Huck.
Huck called for amendments to the Constitution to protect life and traditional marriage. These are mainstream, conservative positions. He is not a "reconstructionist" Christian, as even a casual glance at his decade of governing in Arkansas shows. Professor B's tortured string of cites never delivers anything remotely connecting Huck to "reconstructionism," and implying otherwise is just imagination.
Disagree with Huck on economics, but his positions on life and marriage are mainstream GOP positions, repeatedly endorsed at the ballot box across the country.
I feel the same way. I strongly dislike Huckabee, but it pains me to see a normally rational, moderate person (whom I generally like) seem to fall off his rocker in this fashion.
I think everyone decided that the staying rails and rocker were passé a while back. ;-)
It's quite amazing how we have what seems to be a growing epidemic of "fill-in-the-blank" Derangement Syndrome, usually manifested on the left. (Though the right has had it's fair share as well, though there's usually less foaming at the mouth, and much less likely to lead to a despotic regime.)
In terms of Vision America, the only thing I've found on their website that even starts to connect them to the Reconstructionist/Theonomist/whatever movement is the title of the book "In Defense of Mixing Church and State." It's also a dead link, so we can see it's a well orchestrated conspiracy that's rigging things and setting up Huckabee to overthrow the constitution, because Bush failed in his job to set up a large government spending theocracy.
*sigh* Here I was thinking that Huckabee was insincere and pandering, which was the problem.
Critics who have pointed out that Huckabee appears ignorant of polygamy are right, of course. My essay isn't a defense of Huckabee. But in so say, Huckabee's only wrong about history.
In contrast, his critics show themselves deficient in reading, memory, and reason -- problems far more damning than an ignorance or amnesia about specific facts of history. You can correct the first problem, the second is incurable.
But Jawa Report seems to show the same ignorance he criticizes in Huck:
Taken at face value, Huck's comment is an exposition on the definition of the word "marriage"--but if this is really what it is, it's nonsense. The word "marriage" itself extends back hundreds--but not thousands--of years. Last time I checked, human history extends back millions of years.
He's correcting Huckabee's flawed version of history (which ignored polygamy) with an even more flawed version of history (which ignores ancient marriage entirely!). And, last I checked, human civilization does not go back millions of years.
(He's arguing that since ancient people didn't speak English, they wouldn't have had a concept of "marriage" (since that's an English word!) (No kidding, he's really saying that.) I suppose they couldn't be "civilized" either, since that's also an English word, thus defeating his own argument. ;-))
If we were to morph his actual words into a discussion of something akin to some ancient and universally-accepted "concept" that is today embodied in the English word "marriage"...
Suddenly, the idea of a "concept" which transcends the current language is so odd odd and unusual it requires scare quotes.
... this idea is also nonsense. The concept of a lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous pairing has certainly existed in a variety of human cultures, but at no point in human history has this idea ever been any kind of universal rule across humanity.
Right: contra Huck, in primitive cultures, men tended to screw anything in sight and collect women like Lego. Huckabee may not understand this, but those who make this point are usually saying that primitive man in normative, and thus implying that modern Western civilization needs to go.
It's fine to take Huckabee to task for his ignorance of polygamy. But let's not display even more ignorance (such being grossly mistaken about the of the age of human civilization) in the process.
But that's the thing, Huckabee didn't have to be ignorant of polygamy. The vast majority of human existence did have most people having one wife. It's not like polygamy was the norm, and it was exceptional, and, while illegal given some legal codes, still practiced by the wealthier. After all, women were a valuable resource.
All in all, people taking Huckabee to task for his 'ignorance of polygamy' are 1) reading too much into his statement, especially for a politician, and 2) usually more ignorant of history themselves. People are holding him to a higher standard than they hold most other people to in his statement. I mean, read frikin' Wikipedia people...
At the same time, even within societies which allow polygyny, the actual practice of polygyny occurs relatively rarely. There are exceptions: in Senegal, for example, nearly 47 percent of marriages are multiple.[6] To take on more than one wife often requires considerable resources: this may put polygamy beyond the means of the vast majority of people within those societies. Such appears the case in many traditional Islamic societies, and in Imperial China.
At very least, you have to admit the de facto definition of marriage involved one wife.
At very least, you have to admit the de facto definition of marriage involved one wife.
I don't mean to be blunt, but I'm flagging a potential "word game" in play here. By "de facto definition" you seem to mean that the "definition" is defined by the most common practice. And, if only for practical reasons, even in polygamous cultures, most men could only afford one official wife. Therefore "marriage" "meant" (was defined as) one only one wife, even in the large number of cultures where the word implied no such limit.
If that's your argument, then it strikes me as a verbal sophistry. (Which also appears not to notice that that "de facto definition" would also include allowing sex with pretty much anything other than one's wife.) If that's not your argument, then correct me, and my apologies for misunderstanding.
(Certainly, I agree that most men in historywere probably only married to one woman. But that doesn't tell us anything about what the word was defined as allowing, how people viewed it. And the whole question here is how people define things -- we don't look to the rate of high divorce and admit that marriage now "means" adultery and many serial partners. So perhaps it would be good if we clearly separated out "typical practice" from "ideal meaning." What's being changed here is ideal meaning, not typical practice. "De facto" gay men can "marry" right now, and have been able to as long as they could make pledges and draw up contracts. And the "de facto" meaning won't change if we allow "gay marriage" since the vast number of marriages will still be one-man-one-woman.)
Either way, in a large number of cultures, "marriage" has implied no such limit. India, Africa, Israel, the Americas -- these cultures allowed multiple wives. And even in those places were marriage meant one wife (China, Greece), there was no serious (if any) stigma associated with having sex with other women. (Or men, for that matter. Indeed, quite to the contrary: the Greeks seem to have preferred anything, including young boys, over their actual wives.)
The current understanding we have, where society (at least used to) official believe marriage implies a one-man-one-woman relationship (where sexual behavior outside is frowned upon) is unfortunately rare, and, according to some, was quite revolutionary.
No, I'd allege that everything else going on here is sophistry, and dissecting Huckabee's quote way too bloody much, especially since he's not a bleeding anthropologist, he's a politician.
First of all, if we wanted to get technical, we'd have to start finding cognates of the word marriage, or we end up back at the Jawa post. A google search to bolster the point since cognate in a non-linguistic sense was a Latin degree of relation. In addition, I'm arguing about the goodness and presence of what we call marriage throughout history, not the particular definition of these cognates. Given what passes for a 'marriage' in Shi'a law, it's obvious that the words don't mean what they think they mean. ;-)
Huckabee seemed to be trying to express the normative and good nature of one-man-one-woman marriage in what he said, and taking a Biblical standpoint, if that's what God defined marriage as it's supposed to be, well, it's been that way for all of history. Granted, most philosophers would say that it's almost a Platonist or Berkeleyish view, but it works in that framework.
You're right in the sense that de facto may *not* have been the best way to approach the argument. Yes, all these cultures did all kinds of depraved things, and I'm way too familiar with the copious writings about them.
However, in Huckabee's (and, as well, my) world view, there is a holy model of marriage, that comes from God, and has endured throughout history, and has existed as a primary example, and despite the fact that it has been distorted, etc., it always still seems to be around in some form, somewhere.
So all in all, perhaps using common sense in interpreting the words of a politician is what's called for.
No, I'd allege that everything else going on here is sophistry, and dissecting Huckabee's quote way too bloody much...
First, I'd point out in the article above I agreed with Huckabee, and defended him. So you were opposed to that?
Beyond that one excerpt I didn't quote Huckabee at all, and only obliquely mentioned his mistaken belief that polygamy wasn't an historical marriage form. Is that what you call "dissecting"?
And, all that aside, when did you suddenly start thinking it was wrong to look closely at what people say?
Finally, on your charge of sophistry: Please be specific. What did I write which was intellectually dishonest, or even just appeared to be? I was clear and precise in my charges to you (and completely open to the idea I was simply misunderstanding you), please be at least as specific in return.
First of all, if we wanted to get technical.... using common sense in interpreting the words of a politician is what's called for.
I couldn't agree more: I strongly believe we should use the ordinary meanings of words as we, or those who use them, would understand them. I don't want to get technical.
That's what bothered me so much about your attempt to create this notion of a "de facto definition", which seemed to mean nothing more than "practice" -- but which also seemed to be an attempt to say a word was "defined" as something as long as most people did it a certain way.
But in terms of asking what other cultures thought "marriage" meant, it was Huckabee who was talking about that (see below). I don't see how you can truthfully accuse me of doing something dishonest by simply answering his statement on his own terms.
... especially since he's not a bleeding anthropologist, he's a politician.
(1) Again, the thrust of my criticism was directed against the same people you just complained about. But I also felt compelled to admit when the people I'm arguing against had a valid point. I'm don't know why that infuriates you so.
(2) You don't have to be an anthropologist to be aware of polygamy. (Especially if you feel compelled to publicly expound on historical practices of marriage!) And you only have to read Jesus's sermons to notice that marriage didn't mean "one man and one woman for life" (as Huckabee insists) to the Jews who lived in Jesus's time.
Huckabee seemed to be trying to express the normative and good nature of one-man-one-woman marriage in what he said...
I have no disagreement with his intentions, which were undoubtedly to defend marriage. I only disagreed with his statements. (And yours, in response to my rather mild admission of error on his part.)
... if that's what God defined marriage as it's supposed to be, well, it's been that way for all of history...
I agree that "God's marriage" has always been "God's marriage" though all of history. Nor do I disagree with your statement that have always been a few people married in a manner of which God would approve.
But: Why are you bringing this up? If that's what he had been saying, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Do you think I disagree with your views on this? I agree with you. Why are you bringing it up as though I've said otherwise, or would believe otherwise?
But Huckabee wasn't teaching or talking about Gods's view of marriage, or what he thinks the bible says on the subject. (And thus neither was I.) He was doing the exact opposite: trying to show secular reasons why one-man/one-woman marriage should be preserved as the normative definition in our country.
Read the context yourself: He is being asked if he's trying to "bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the bible" on marriage and abortion. In response, Huckabee attempts to distance those arguments from the bible, by appealing to human understanding across time and the globe:
I don’t think a person has to be a person of faith to say [that abortion is bad...] And the same thing would be true of marriage. Marriage has historically, as long as there’s been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life. Once we change that definition, then where does it go from there?
Please note: he's talking about human definitions and understandings, what it "meant" in "human history" -- not God's view of the matter. Had he been saying God has always had an ideal for marriage, as you seem to be implying, I wouldn't have disagreed.
As it is, he's simply wrong in his statement here. I don't understand why that has to be such a controversial thing to note.
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I think everyone decided that the staying rails and rocker were passé a while back. ;-)
It's quite amazing how we have what seems to be a growing epidemic of "fill-in-the-blank" Derangement Syndrome, usually manifested on the left. (Though the right has had it's fair share as well, though there's usually less foaming at the mouth, and much less likely to lead to a despotic regime.)
In terms of Vision America, the only thing I've found on their website that even starts to connect them to the Reconstructionist/Theonomist/whatever movement is the title of the book "In Defense of Mixing Church and State." It's also a dead link, so we can see it's a well orchestrated conspiracy that's rigging things and setting up Huckabee to overthrow the constitution, because Bush failed in his job to set up a large government spending theocracy.
*sigh* Here I was thinking that Huckabee was insincere and pandering, which was the problem.
Posted by: Michael Zappe on January 18, 2008 12:19 AM