Civil Commotion

Bruce Gerencser, a former pastor, points out that the entire Christian idea of the atonement is crazy.

Imagine that you owed First City Bank $1,000,000 and had no way to pay the debt. Imagine that I went to the bank and paid your debt in full. Awesome guy, right? But what if the bank refused to accept my payment on your behalf unless you stripped naked, ran through the streets of your city, and told everyone that you were a low-life, dirty, piece of shit who doesn’t pay his bills? Only after you humiliated yourself before your family, friends, and community would the $1,000,000 payment be credited to your account. Would you do this?

You would think — Wouldn’t you? — that the Creator Of The Whole Big Universe could have come up with a better scheme for settling His differences with His Beloved Children, and done a better job of communicating His thoughts?

Bah. You’ve got to be out of your mind to take this stuff seriously.

Lawyers associated with Mueller’s Russia investigations are telling the New York Times exactly what every sentient, thinking adult in the universe suspected: The Barr summary grievously misrepresents the report.

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

The only really interesting question is this: Why do people who ought to know better continue to associate with Trump and, inevitably, soil themselves? The man is, like, some kind of living, ambulatory trigger for latent psychopathology.

Here’s one for the genealogists to puzzle over: A male, same-sex couple in Nebraska are the proud, brand-new parents of a baby girl conceived from the egg of one of the mens’ sister, the sperm of one of the men, and carried to term and delivered by one of the mens’ mother.

Grandma, 61, gave birth to own granddaughter
so her son and his husband could be dads

[ … ]

Married dads Matthew Eledge and Elliot Dougherty said the birth of their daughter was possible thanks to the women in their life, Eledge’s mother and Dougherty’s sister.

Eledge’s mother carried and delivered their baby. Dougherty’s sister donated eggs to conceive.

His mother said through all the testing, she kept expecting doctors to say she wasn’t fit to be a surrogate.

“But the doctors said there is absolutely no reason you can’t go full term,” she said. “‘Everything is in our favor,’ they said.”

Some thoughts, in no particular order.

• My very first thought when I heard of this was, “Hoo-boy — the Baptists ain’t gonna like this.”

  What do you know? Albert Mohler, who thinks that marriage is animal husbandry and denies that marriage has anything to do with building satisfying lives together, doesn’t like it at all.

  One final thought on this issue, we have to remind ourselves that the Christian worldview says that every baby is to be welcomed as a gift to humanity. This little girl who is no doubt cute and beautiful is to be welcomed as that gift, and the moral status of the child is never in question given the circumstances of conception, gestation or birth. That is a dignity that is given to us by our creator. this little girl, who like every little baby who has ever been conceived is made in God’s image is to be welcomed and celebrated for herself as God’s gift.

  But the Christian worldview also tells us that the means whereby this gift has been given, they are not all equal, they are not all legitimate, and they are not all to be celebrated. If you see the media coverage and you see a picture of this little girl, you are unlikely to be tempted to smile and you should smile. The birth of any baby is a reason to smile. Christians understand why. But at the same time, Christians understand that we rightly smile at the child, but we cannot rightly smile at the circumstances, the technologies, the relationships and the structures that have brought that child into being. Not every sexual act, not every reproductive act is equally valid. Not every sexual relationship or romantic relationship is equally valid.

• So far as I can tell, this is the culmination of mature technologies strung together in an unusual way. That is, harvesting, fertilizing, and re-implanting eggs has been going on for a long time, and so has surrogacy. With respect to technology, there’s nothing new here.

• What does the birth certificate say? Is the same-sex couple listed as the parents from the get-go, or does the surrogate immediately surrender the child in a private-placement adoption? What are the mechanics of transferring the child to the same-sex couple and designating them as the parents?

  I assume that somebody was smart enough to have a lawyer superintending all this. I really don’t know the answer to any of those questions, though, so I’m just curious.

• Some kill joy is bound to point out that there are tens of thousands of homeless children in the United States, and ask why one of those couldn’t be adopted? As the adoptive father of a child with an extremely rare cardiac dysfunction, and who has earned his bona fides with uncountable hours in hospital waiting rooms, I have to admit I have some sympathy for that point of view. But … no matter. They wanted a child who was in some sense “their own,” or at least a child with a rightful place on the family tree — even if genealogists will spend another decade or so figuring-out where that is — and they have that right. Congratulations, Dads!

• No harm, no foul; I am not seeing a moral issue here. Who, after all, has been harmed? The odd circumstances of the child’s birth practically guarantee that she will be the target of juvenile teasing — especially from the children of Pious folk — and those poor dads are going to be swarmed by interested busybodies, mom and sis, who second-guess everything they do. But all of that is just the normal wear and tear of life and probably not worth worrying about.

Most important, I think, is that this is a good example of the way that technology has upended norms, with the result that we now live in a world that most of us are unprepared to even think about — and, worse, a great many of us have a theological perspective that is wildly inadequate for, and hostile to, the world in which we actually live.

And we are at just the beginning. Automation, in particular, has already begun to effect permanent structural changes in work, and those changes are going to continue for a long while, with corresponding implications for the organization of society itself.

By even the dismal, dishonest standards of The Donald, this is an amazing series of tweets.

The first time a Republican uttered the words “repeal and replace” — notice, replace — the undergirding premise of the ACA had been accepted: the government has a responsibility to make affordable health care available to every citizen. Once the premise of Obamacare had been accepted, it was a fight over the details of how, not whether.

There is plenty of room to fight over whether, and there is plenty of room to fight over how — but the Republicans conceded the ‘whether’ half of that conversation and then, in bad faith, refused to discuss the ‘how,’ refused to discuss the inevitable corrections and repairs that would be required for such a huge, sprawling bill.

Now, the First Felon wants to eliminate the ACA outright today, and offers a promise to provide something better in 21-months, though no Republican knows anything about a plan.

It isn’t likely to happen under the government of a corrupt fraud like Trump, but Congress should focus on repairing the ACA, not re-inventing it.

The Great Man of the Masses. The recipe for what the masses call a great man is easily given. In all circumstances let a person provide them with something very pleasant, or first let him put it into their heads that this or that would be very pleasant, and then let him give it to them. On no account give it immediately, however: but let him acquire it by the greatest exertions, or seem thus to acquire it. The masses must have the impression that there is a powerful, nay indomitable strength of will operating; at least it must seem to be there operating. Everybody admires a strong will, because nobody possesses it, and everybody says[Pg 333] to himself that if he did possess it there would no longer be any bounds for him and his egoism. If, then, it becomes evident that such a strong will effects something very agreeable to the masses, instead of hearkening to the wishes of covetousness, people admire once more, and wish good luck to themselves. Moreover, if he has all the qualities of the masses, they are the less ashamed before him, and he is all the more popular. Consequently, he may be violent, envious, rapacious, intriguing, flattering, fawning, inflated, and, according to circumstances, anything whatsoever.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human; §460

This is as good a précis of the Trump cult as you’re likely to encounter. And recall that William Jennings Bryan, another amoral and self-serving demagogue, was known as “The Great Commoner.”

More and more, I am convinced that the great divide in American life is not on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, any of those familiar and barbed hooks; it is education and experience of the world beyond the neighborhood.