The Bosque Boys

Last week our family gathered in a cabin near Rocky Mountain National Park. One of the things I noticed was the amount of new construction of houses and cabins up in the mountains. No surprise to me that folks would want to live up there full or part-time. The natural beauty almost overwhelms the mind.

But, more people living in the mountains means more human noise, fewer pristine views, more demands for water and for sewage treatment, more pollution including from automobile commutes to Denver or wherever to work. One can imagine a day when congestion has destoyed the attractiveness that drew the people who moved there. Cont.

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Perhaps overlooked due to the Mideast reports is this article reporting that two women have now divorced who were plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case resulting in the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ma.

I don't want to read too much into this one instance, but, I do want to raise a few questions. I do not claim to know much about the lesbian lifestyle or culture, but I do know a little about the gay lifestyle and culture. Among gays it seems that long-term committed relationships are not that common, and, usually do not last a lifetime. My evidence is anecdotal, but consistent enough to make me wonder if same-sex unions intrinsically may have trouble lasting "till death do us part."

Yes, I know that hetersexual couples divorce also, and at disturbing rates. But, since this is a modern phenomenon, I would argue that there is nothing intrinsic in heterosexual unions that works against lasting "till death do us part."

Here is the full text of the President's speech before the NAACP.

I was impressed by the way he placed his specific ideas within the context of America, her past and future, and her good. He addressed a group of Americans as Americans.

I was impressed with his focus on education (including school choice vouchers) and on home ownership. These very traditional ideas when implemented make a tremendous difference in the lives of communities as well as the lives of individuals. He was pushing the American values of good education and property ownership. He also included ownership of wealth such as pension money.

And, I was impressed with his presence: his humor, his honesty, and his ability to be himself in various settings.

This article from Jihadwatch. Under Islamic law one who converts from Islam is liable to the death penalty. Perhaps this recent crackdown in Egypt supports what I've written earlier on the current threat to Islam from evangelical Christianity. As I've pointed out before, we are seeing Muslims convert to Christianity now at a rate unseen before in history.

What is it with Bush 41 & Bush 43 when it comes to China? Why does the Chinese government get basically a free pass on almost everything? See this latest on our China relations. Link from Drudge.

It seems a common assumption by the Adminstration and its supporters that democratic governments are peaceful governments; once most of the world's nations are democracies then we will live in a time of peace and harmony, the lions will lie down with the lambs, swords will be beaten into plowshares, the millenium will have arrived through our efforts at spreading democracy.

Now, I do not think the U.S. should spread dictatorship; and I think that God favors liberty over tyranny or license. But I challenge the thesis that democratic governments necessarily will be peaceful governments for the following reasons:

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A few Wednesday nights ago, as one installment of a summer-long series at church addressing Faith and Reason, the extremely versatile scholar Thomas Hibbs spoke to us regarding the medieveal background of the Galileo affair. Hibbs, Baylor University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture and Dean of the Honors College, brought his expertise in Thomas Aquinas and Augustine to bear on this subject.

My Confession: the discussion of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas (much like classical music) often races ahead of my capacity to comprehend. I am an American history and country music sort of fellow. Having said that, Professor Hibbs offered a crisp presentation, and I walked away mulling over several provocative notions.

In a nutshell in re FAITH & REASON:

1. Affirm truth wherever you find it. Offering Aquinas's treatment of Aristotle as a model, Hibbs encouraged us to engage and learn (even from unlikely sources). Understand before you refute. Ultimately, Faith and Reason cannot conflict, but that does not mean that faith can immediately detect falacies in reason.

2. "Distinguish and then Unite." Distinguish in order to unite. Study biology on its own terms. Be wary of fitting all knowledge together too quickly. Wherever truth is, we ought to pursue it. Christians are people of hope. We hope that all of our knowledge comes together someday in some way.

Crunchy Cons and Community: Hibbs is also a prolific writer and commentator. A few months ago, in re the ongoing discussion on this blog and myriad other places, TBB friend, "Tocqueville," recommended Professor Hibbs's review of Rod Dreher's book, as the "best he had seen."

The review, originally penned for Crisis Magazine, is accessible on this link from DECLARATION FOUNDATION. I concur with "Tocqueville" and recommend the essay; it is brief and well worth the read.

The title of the review offers a succint preview of Hibbs's line of inquiry: Do the crunchies want to save America or the Republican Party or, having acknowledged the short-term irreversibility of civilized decay, do they plan to “retreat behind defensible borders”?

In the end, Hibbs finds no satisfying answer to his question, but offers a friendly analysis of the phenomenon, nevertheless:

"Dreher’s book details a kind of awakening of many Americans from a certain naïveté about the market and popular culture. There is a disconnection, or perhaps a hidden connection, between the material prosperity of our culture and our inarticulacy about what matters. Perhaps there was a time when that inarticulacy did not matter as much; now, it does. Dreher mentions the regular occurrence of well-intentioned parents who hand their kids over to public or private schools and to our popular culture and then end up shocked at the results. The objection is not to the market in all forms, only to the market as infiltrating all spheres of human life, particularly marriage, the family, and the rearing of children."

Hibbs on NRO: I also want to recommend Hibbs's sporadic column (click here for "author archive") in National Review, (although the column appears curiously dormant since March of this year).

Friends and Seinfeld. This comparison of two blockbuster sit-coms caught my eye. I have long argued that Seinfeld represented a brilliantly dark and cynical commentary on American life; Seinfeld seemed in on the joke. On the other hand, Friends offered a vapid and shallow series of endlessly unconnected vignettes, opting for laughs over substance or character development or fidelity to its own history. The joke was on Friends; it was a commentary on modern life, only if viewed from the outside in the context of its own impotency. Hibbs offers his own analysis, which is cogent and compelling.

Thinking Out Loud:

If someone had come to me ten years ago and told me that there were some excess human embryos laying around in a freezer somewhere, the waste product of a completed in vitro fertilization procedure, and we could use those terminal embryos in an experiment that might lead to advances toward curing diseases, I am almost certain that I would have said (without hesitation): "go for it!."

But it is not ten years ago. Unfortunately, I have listened long and hard to nearly a decade of debate, and now I am unflinchingly ambivalent.

I grew up believing that "life began in the womb." "Life begins in the Petri dish" takes some getting used to. After almost a decade, I still wonder: if the embryos are human life, why are we allowing so many to be created and then frozen and eventually destroyed? Isn't that a much bigger problem than experimentation?

But I also hear the voices who are troubled by the larger issues in this debate. I believe in the sanctity of human life. I agree that there are dangerous precedents in what we do here. And I wonder about the long-range implications of the genetic engineering aspect of this process.

In this debate, I have been most swayed by my negative reaction to what the proponents have said. Today on C-SPAN Tom Harkin was trying to explain how "potential human life" was not as valuable as "real human life." Listen to a politician for a while, and you start to realize how fraught with future peril this process (how slippery this slope) really is.

On the other hand, Orrin Hatch and Gordon Smith (two GOP stalwarts of conservatism) are set to vote for the Harkin-Specter bill today.

A few things worth considering:

1. There is no "federal ban" on embryonic stem cell research. This is a debate about funding. Shall we as a community spend our common funds in this particular way?

2. There is too much hype and politicization. Our sick friends and relatives are not being held hostage by this policy decision. No one is going to "get up and walk" in the foreseeable future, if this bill passes and the President signs it into law.

3. Many researchers and entities are working on embryonic stem cells. Big states and other nations are coming up with big dollars to move this along. The federal money is mostly symbolic (and political).

4. It is true, according to reputable opinion polls, that a large majority of Americans favor federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. But that does not mean that a presidential veto circumvents the "political process." A presidential veto is the political process. All the people elect the president, and we expect him to execute the duties of his office to the best of his ability and, as Lincoln said, "with firmness in the right as God gives [him] to see the right."

5. There is precedent for localizing troubling national moral issues. The federal government has often punted on intractable moral questions (e.g., slavery, temperance, sex). A decision not to fund embryonic stem cell research with federal money because of the lack of moral clarity is a compromise not at odds with our history.

Interesting to eavesdrop on the President and the Prime Minister today at the G-8, as they engage in a friendly discussion of the mundane, the personal and the monumental.

For the record: I agree completely with the President's candid assessment of the current Middle East crisis.

The Washington Post has the video and the transcript.

After talking about travel plans, sweaters, trade resolutions and G-8 stagecraft, the conversation turns to Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria and the UN. Here is the best exchange of the conversation (which includes one vulgarity):

Bush: "What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don't like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and [then] everything else happens. You know what I'm saying?"

Sort of, Blair seems to say. They agree on moving the "process" along, and Blair agrees that sending Condi will set the right tone.

Bush (evidently still peeved at Kofi): "See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over."

Blair : "Who, Syria?"

Bush : "Right."

Blair : "I think this is all part of the same thing. What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way, he's [inaudible ] . That's what this whole thing's about. It's the same with Iran."

Bush : "I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen. We're not blaming Israel. We're not blaming the Lebanese government."

In his "Talk of the Town" column in next week's New Yorker , posted today online, Hendrik Hertzberg attempted to debunk the conservative claim that the challenge to Joe Lieberman was a "liberal inquisition" connected to the Iraq war.

As proof of his point, Hertzberg hangs his case on reminding us that Joe Lieberman made two fatal mistakes in the last decade: 1) he was not sufficiently supportive of Bill Clinton during the impeachment crisis; and 2) Lieberman did not forego his seat in the Senate in 2000 (while running for VP), which meant if his ticket had won (which it did not), the Senate would have been controlled by Republicans (unless Jim Jeffords defected to the Democratic caucus, which he did).

In addition, Hertzberg calls Lieberman "sanctimonious and hypocritical" for his moralism, reminding us that the Senator divorced his wife while his children were teenagers.

Pretty tough. The long knives are out. I am beginning to wonder if reconciliation will be possible, if Joe survives.