The North Carolina "Bathroom Bill"

There has been a great deal of divergence of opinion (to put it very mildly) over HB2, the recent so-called “Bathroom Bill”, passed in North Carolina. The bill prohibited local governments from requiring privately-owned establishments to open their public restrooms to individuals of either biological sex who identify as the opposite sex. 

First, I think that there is a misconception about the law: HB2 does not affect people who have had gender reassignment surgery. Many states, among whom are North and South Carolina, will change an individual’s gender on their birth certificate upon request once the surgery has been completed. Since HB2 refers to the gender that appears on one’s birth certificate, the law does not apply to these individuals.

A second thing that I don't believe a lot of people realize is that the issue does not only cover restrooms, or even just dressing rooms at department stores. It also covers locker rooms. Where one might argue some degree of privacy offered by the bathroom or dressing room stall, in a gym locker room, people are disrobing in full view of each other. But I will discuss this more later.

Thirdly, this is important to bear in mind: the North Carolina legislature passed this bill in response to a Charlotte ordinance requiring privately-owned businesses to open their restrooms to people of either sex. This was overreach by the Charlotte city government, and the NC legislature was acting in response to this. The bill also went further to specify that public restrooms at government-owned facilities (including public schools) would be open only to those whose birth certificates identify them as the appropriate gender; in other words, only those identified as male on their birth certificate would be allowed to use the men’s restroom, and likewise for the women’s restroom. However, the bill does not prohibit privately-owned businesses from making their public restrooms gender-neutral if they so choose, as Target has just announced that it is doing; in such cases, the market will decide whether such policies are palatable or not.

Some of my initial impressions about this debate, before delving further into the issue are as follows: First of all, I find it truly bizarre that we actually are at a point in our society that it is necessary to define who uses which restroom; even more so that it is something that people are arguing about. Secondly, I find the shock and anger expressed by many on the Left that the Charlotte ordinance was not accepted with open arms incredulous; should anyone really be surprised that the thought of opening public restrooms and locker rooms to people of the opposite sex might be upsetting to some people? Thirdly, I find it dismaying that those people who have indeed found the idea objectionable have been branded as “bigots” and “hateful”. Disagreeing with someone does not constitute “hate” or bigotry. If anything, it is the frequently obscenity-laced name-calling coming from some of those claiming the mantle of “tolerance” that qualifies as hate.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. This should have been predictable given the course that political correctness has taken recently, where words are routinely redefined (“hateful” for example now refers to anyone who disagrees with the politically correct view), and non-approved opinions are forbidden. I’ve discussed this culture of “tolerance” (which is anything but tolerant) in a previous post, so I won’t rehash that part of the argument here. However, there are several additional things that bother me about the current debate.

Following are a few of my thoughts as to why the argument for requiring public restrooms to be gender-neutral falls apart under its own weight:

I.  There is no “right” not to be offended.

Seriously, it just doesn’t exist. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are held among the most sacred of rights in American political culture (at least they have been until recently), and so long as we value the free exchange of ideas, being offended is virtually guaranteed for any given person at some point or another.

John Stuart Mill eloquently stated the danger of silencing unpopular opinion in his 1869 essay “On Liberty”:

“…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

If we silence the expression of opinions, even those we find repugnant, we ultimately lose our ability to find truth (which, to some of us, is still important). We can disagree, we can even disagree passionately, but we must never use the law to attempt to force those with whom we disagree into silence in order to avoid being offended. Since nearly any worthwhile speech will offend some person somewhere, the net effect would in essence silence all but the most banal speech (if even that would survive).

Consider further, however, the matter at hand. Pretend for a moment that there is indeed a right to not be offended. A large part of the drive behind gender-neutralizing bathrooms is because, for example, a man who identifies as a woman would be offended by being forced to use the men’s restroom. Therefore, advocates would seek to protect him from being offended by requiring that he be allowed into the women’s restroom. The individual in question is therefore enfranchised because he no longer has to bear the perceived (to him) indignity of using the men’s restroom.

However, as has been demonstrated (again, amazingly, to the great surprise of some), many women object to sharing their restroom with an individual who is biologically male. To put it in somewhat crass terms (for which I apologize, but apparently we are to the point where such depictions are necessary), while some women may not have a problem with this, there are many women who would be very much offended by having a biological male whom she does not know standing up in the next stall while she sits on the toilet with her panties around her ankles. Note again that this law applied to gym locker rooms as well, which does not even offer the meager privacy of a stall. Therefore, the requirement that has been passed to protect one individual from being offended has resulted in the offending of another individual. Therefore, if there were indeed such a right as one to not be offended, the rights of the woman in the other stall have been violated.

In addition to freedom of speech and thought, equality under the law is also one of the sacred rights under our political system. Therefore, the offense to the woman in the other stall cannot be simply disregarded in the rush to “protect” the biological male identifying as a woman from being offended. As such, the policy of requiring public restrooms to be gender-neutral, insofar as it is driven by a desire to prevent offense, defeats its own purpose.

                                                              

II. It sacrifices an established right, the right of privacy, for the imagined right of non-offense.

[I understand that some people do object to the concept of there being a constitutional right of privacy. While I disagree with how it has been applied in some cases (more on that momentarily), I do believe that the Fourth Amendment strongly implies it. However, regardless of whether one agrees with privacy being an “established right”, the point is that those advocating for requiring gender-neutral public restrooms do, and that forms the basis of my argument.]

Let us return to the “woman in the other stall” from my previous example; to make the discussion easier, let’s call her “Nancy”, and the man identifying as a woman “Stan”. Stan has not had gender-reassignment surgery (if you need help visualizing this that means that he still retains his “male parts”). Stan objects to having to use the men’s locker room at the gym to shower and change, so, under the ordinance that Charlotte originally passed, he must be allowed to use the women’s locker room. Nancy is changing into her workout attire when Stan enters and removes his dress at which point Nancy sees that Stan is indeed… Stan. As in our previous example, Nancy is offended, but that isn’t the point here. The point is that Nancy is disrobed, contrary to her wishes and by the force of law, in front of a biological male, and she is likewise getting “the full Monty” from Stan, again by force of law and against her wishes. Her reasonable expectation of privacy from the opposite sex has been violated. Other than in her own home, where does a woman have such an expectation of privacy from male eyes than in a restroom or a locker room? 

This is an important distinction: the Charlotte ordinance carried the weight of law. If it were simply a matter of Nancy's gym enacting a policy to have gender-neutral locker rooms, then Nancy would have the option of canceling her membership and changing to a gym that does not have this policy. But if it is a matter of law, Nancy must either sacrifice her privacy or be forced to not go to any gym at all. This is unacceptable.

                                                                                                                                            

Here is the point: the right to privacy is being in effect minimized by those advocating for gender-neutral restrooms, yet, based on this very same right to privacy, many of these same advocates will argue "my body, my choice" (which is an argument based on the right to privacy) in defense of abortion. 

The Roe v. Wade decision, which declared abortion to be legal (again, I don’t agree with the decision, but that is beside the point), centered on the woman’s right to privacy being balanced with the right of the unborn child to life. The decision stated that so long as the unborn child was not viable (could survive outside of the womb), the woman’s right to privacy took precedence. (Note this is contrary to a statement recently made by Hillary Clinton that an unborn child does not have rights under the law. She clearly has either never read the decision or did not understand it.)

Now, if Stan’s right to not be offended (which does not exist) outweighs Nancy’s right to privacy (which, at least so far as the law is concerned, does exist), then what does this imply regarding privacy rights in other areas, including abortion? In other words, it is not logically consistent for someone to violate Nancy’s right to privacy by insisting that Stan be allowed into the women’s room with her in one breath, then claim “my body, my choice” in the next. You cannot claim for yourself what you deny for Nancy, then berate Nancy for desiring it. Or, to use an old cliché, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 

III. It endangers women and girls.

The kneejerk reaction to this argument that I have seen is to claim that women and girls are in no danger from transsexuals. That is not the point, however. The issue is that gender-neutral restroom policy would open the women’s room to anyone who “self-identifies” as a woman. I suspect it would not take very long at all for a sexual predator to figure out that he can simply claim to self-identify as a woman to gain entrance to the women’s restroom. Imagine not only the danger to Nancy, but suppose Nancy sends her daughter to the ladies’ room at a restaurant alone where she encounters a man who is up to no good. Here is an instance where this happened in Toronto.

Now, one may argue that such things could happen anyway. A male sexual predator could disguise himself as a woman or by some other means clandestinely enter the women’s restroom, as has in fact occurred (one recent example). But does the fact that such abuse could occur anyway justify opening public restrooms to either biological sex? No, it does not, any more than the fact that carjackings sometimes occur at service stations and at traffic lights justifies picking up hitch hikers. Just because the risk of something occurring exists anyway, that does not mean that we “might as well” implement a policy that increases the risk.

My point is that a sexual predator could claim to identify as a woman in order to gain entrance to the women’s restroom to indulge his urges, and, as was pointed out above, this has happened where the gender-neutral restroom policy has been implemented. There does not exist a litmus test that could be used to weed such individuals out from “true” transsexuals (if there were, it would not only be impractical to apply but probably quite intrusive). Essentially, someone need only claim to identify as a woman to gain access, and even this would not be entirely necessary, as there certainly appears to be no monitoring to be sure that men who enter the women’s restroom even make such a claim.

Of course, none of this takes into account the danger that a biological woman entering a men’s room might face. If she self-identifies as a man and proceeds to enter the men’s restroom, she is placing herself in a potentially vulnerable position.

I do find it odd that many of the people advocating for gender-neutral public restrooms are the very ones who have for years painted men as de facto sexual predators. (Michael Crichton provided a brief but very insightful discussion of this in his 1994 novel Disclosure, pp.269-70.) [Also consider the emotional trauma to young children or to women who have been victims of sexual abuse (here is a good article discussing that issue).] It seems odd that there suddenly seems to be no issue with placing women in this kind of environment. Perhaps the drive to (selectively) not offend has supplanted not only privacy but safety as well.

IV. Concluding Thoughts

Of course, this brings up the very important question of enforcement for the “Bathroom Bill”. There is no call or provision for “bathroom monitors”, so, while the bill states that people should use the restroom corresponding to the gender stated on their birth certificate, there is no checking of birth certificates at the door of any public restrooms proposed, and I certainly do not believe that is at all the intention behind the bill. Nonetheless, a man entering a women’s restroom would certainly stand out (unless he were well-disguised), and a woman entering the men’s restroom would likewise be fairly obvious. In fact, this kind of arrangement has persisted in society for quite a long time with very few problems beyond the occasional breach cited earlier or the inadvertent “going in the wrong door”. The issue only arises under the gender-neutral arrangement where a man (any man) entering the women’s restroom becomes legally protected. Who is to say whether he is indeed a “self-identifying woman” or a predator looking for a thrill? And under the politically-correct culture, any challenge to him could be seen as “intolerant” or “hateful”, so the heads up women in the restroom (or locker room) might have gotten, or the challenge that might have prevented a bad situation from occurring, will not happen. 

On the converse, an argument that I have heard from some supporters of gender-neutral public restrooms is that many have probably already shared the restroom with transgender people without realizing it. But this is not a valid argument for making it legally mandated. So far as transgender individuals who have completed the gender reassignment surgery, this is a moot point, since they already have the legal means (at least in NC and SC) to have their gender changed on their birth certificate. Therefore, as noted earlier, these individuals are not affected by the bill; in such a case, a male who has been surgically reassigned as female will use the women’s restroom and vice versa. Therefore, the rule of thumb, as it has always been, remains: people with male parts use the men’s restroom, people with female parts use the women’s restroom. Amazing how much simpler that is than the alternatives being advocated.

Ultimately, I blame this whole issue on a couple of things. As already noted, I blame it on the postmodern mindset and all of its restless drive to redefine everything and its resulting inherent contradictions. But I also blame the fact that we now have a society full of people who respond to issues out of raw emotion to the exclusion of rationality. One consequence of this is that it is the emotional appeal that gets press coverage and that garners celebrity support, like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr canceling concerts in North Carolina over the issue, and some corporations even reconsidering location decisions in response to it.

One thing that needs to be kept in mind, by both sides of the debate, is that everyone should be treated with the appropriate respect (with the obvious exception of predators). Despite how the issue is being framed by many, it is not disrespectful to insist that a person who remains physiologically male should use the men’s restroom and vice versa. The disrespect lies in forcing by law women (and men) who do not wish to use the restroom or to disrobe in a locker room in the presence of strangers of the opposite sex to do so. Until very recently, this was just a matter of common courtesy and good sense. Unfortunately, it seems that neither of these carries much sway nowadays. 

The Furor Over the Confederate Flag

I have no delusion that people are waiting on the edge of their seats to find out my opinion about Governor Haley's decision to call for the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. But I do hope that my thoughts will contribute something to the conversation. My position is (naturally) nuanced. I have neither a strong affection nor repulsion for the flag. In fact, I had ancestors fighting on both sides of the war, so in that regard, I'm almost ambivalent about the flag; that being the case, I believe I can see the sentiment behind both sides of the argument. Maybe that puts me in a fairly unique position to comment on it. Or maybe it disqualifies me. Either way, I'll provide my thoughts and leave it to the reader to judge. 

I regret the timing of the revival of this issue in the sense that, at least for a time, it diverted attention from the nine people whose brutal murder provided the impetus for it. I also regret that bringing the flag into the conversation had the effect of politicizing a very real and personal tragedy. Nonetheless, the issue has been raised and it must be dealt with. I wonder if perhaps dealing with the flag issue is part of the healing process. Either way, I do hope that it can be resolved in a manner that will preserve the unity that has emerged within our state in dealing with the tragedy in Charleston.

Secondly, I want to point out the fallacy that I've seen most prominently since the national conversation has turned to the Confederate Flag. Sadly, there are still those, I hope few in number, who raise the flag as a symbol of white supremacy and hate (those who do so only demonstrate that they are "superior" to no one), but not everyone has this motive. Just because someone supports the flag's presence on the Statehouse grounds does not mean they are a racist. To claim otherwise is, well, intolerant. Before addressing the the flag itself, I wish to deal with this issue.

WHY SOME SUPPORT THE FLAG

One major reason that some southerners revere the flag is that it is a means of honoring their ancestors who fought in the Civil War. The soldiers who fought on either side of the war were not all evil; most were individuals who were called upon by their respective countries to defend their homes. Probably most of the soldiers in the Confederate rank and file never considered their struggle to be about slavery or any other such issue. Obviously, as in any war, some were cruel with cruel intentions, but not all. As in any war, many died, leaving widows and fatherless children, many were horribly maimed, and the rest carried emotional scars with them for the rest of their lives. For their descendants to want to honor their memories is not only understandable, but laudable. Family honor is strong in the South, just as it is in many other parts of the country. We can argue about whether the flag is an appropriate means for them to do that, but the sentiment here is one of honor, not one of hatred.

A second reason for revering the flag among some southerners is because they view it as a symbol of identification with the South. (Before those in other parts of the country dismiss this, all parts of the nation practice similar sectional identification, albeit in different ways and with, obviously, different symbols.) Again, whether this is an appropriate symbol for representing southern pride can be debated, but impugning all who hold this view as hateful or as supporting the negative aspects of the region's history is not correct.

A third reason that some southerners revere the flag is as a symbol of states' rights, which, rightly understood, is not in any way a racial issue; I will discuss this more further down. Yet again, whether the Confederate flag is a good symbol for states' rights can be debated. While I am an ardent supporter of states' rights, I would personally question whether this flag is the best symbol for this purpose. 

SOME HISTORICAL CONTEXT

One historic note that I've noticed a lot of people, particularly in the news outlets, get wrong: the Battle Flag that is the focus of the current furor is not the "Stars and Bars". That nickname refers to the first national flag of the Confederacy; this is what that flag looked like. The flag currently flying on the Statehouse grounds was never a national flag. That, by the way, will be relevant to a point that I will address later.

Some have taken the position that the Civil War was never about slavery, or at least not primarily so. To be sure, there may have been other issues involved (for example, tariffs that disproportionately economically impacted the southern states), but one only need read the Declaration of Causes of the various Confederate states for secession as well as speeches by Confederate president Jefferson Davis (here are two from Davis when he was a US Senator before the war), or numerous other documents from other prominent Confederates to see that slavery was indeed a major issue, if not the preeminent issue, leading to secession and ultimately to war: The states claimed the "right" to determine for themselves whether slavery should be legal within their borders rather than that determination being made at the federal level.

In the century following the end of the war and Reconstruction, former Confederate states practiced the wholesale institutionalized repression of blacks in the form of laws such as Jim Crow, which required racial segregation, and voter suppression laws such as white primaries and the "eight-box" law (which required ballots for separate offices to be placed in the the appropriate box in order to be counted, which was designed to prevent votes cast by blacks, who were largely illiterate at the time, from being counted). Given this history, one can certainly understand why many blacks, and others, view the Confederate flag, which was the banner under which these laws were carried out, with disdain (ostensibly, the flag was first placed above the Statehouse dome by Governor Fritz Hollings in 1962 as a protest against desegregation). 

This gets to why I don't see the Confederate flag as a good symbol for the cause of states' rights. For a century, Jim Crow and similar laws were defended as being within the purview of states: the "right" of the state to determine for itself who within its borders can enjoy liberty and the rights of citizenship and who cannot. This created an unfortunate association in the minds of many between the issue of states' rights and segregation that persists today; the Tea Party for example is frequently panned by the Left as being racist, not because it advocates any racially discriminatory policies, but because they advocate for states' rights (note how a quote by Sarah Palin is characterized in this 2010 article on the Tea Party). Use of the Confederate Battle Flag, the symbol used by the segregationists, as a symbol of states' rights only serves to perpetuate this association.

However, the very purpose behind states' rights (i.e. seeking to preserve the Federalist system established by the Framers of the US Constitution) is to provide a check and balance against the power of the federal government and to diffuse power to the state and local level for one purpose: to preserve personal liberty against the overreach of a too-powerful national government. The idea, as outlined for example by James Madison in Federalist #46, was that such diffusion of power placed government closer to the people where they could have greater influence and thus prevent a distant, impersonal national government from becoming oppressive. Therefore, using states' rights as a shield for laws limiting people of a certain race from exercising their rights of citizenship is completely antithetical to the very purpose of states' rights.

STAY OR GO?

One factor that must be taken into account in this debate is this: There are two flags currently flying over the Statehouse dome (since the Battle Flag was removed to its current location in 2000): the Flag of the United States and the South Carolina state flag. These are flags of sovereign political entities - the nation of which we are a part and the state of which the Statehouse serves as the capitol. These flags therefore have special standing to fly on Statehouse grounds; in a sense, they kind of have to be there. This is why the argument that it would be hypocritical to remove the Confederate flag and not the US flag, which flew over a nation that allowed slavery for much longer than did the Confederate flag, is not valid. The US flag is the flag of our nation. The Confederate Battle Flag is not, nor has it ever been, a national flag, and the nation which it represented on the battle field no longer in exists. As such, while this fact alone does not exclude its being flown on Statehouse grounds (although I did believe this was one reason why it was correct to remove it from the Statehouse dome 15 years ago), the Battle Flag can be removed without regard to the US and SC flags. 

It's a funny thing about how a single symbol can represent vastly different things to different people. Obviously, such things can be taken to the ridiculous extreme: the past few weeks have seen the attempted wholesale scrubbing of all Confederate symbols from the public arena, including the discontinuation of computer games containing Confederate flags by Apple (which partially relented a few days later), or the recent announcement of TV Land's cancelling of "Dukes of Hazzard" reruns due to the image of a Confederate flag on the car used in the program. We cannot erase the past by eradicating all reminders of it, nor should we wish to. Edmund Burke's famous statement seems to apply: "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." 

So the "what's next" concern is certainly a valid concern, but we cannot use that as an excuse not to deal with an issue. So we must be careful keep the current debate on focus. The question at hand is not whether we should scrub all reminders of the past; it is about, and only about, whether the Confederate flag should fly at the seat of our state's government. The relevant question here is not "what does the flag mean to me?", but what is the flag's actual historical meaning and does its flying at the Statehouse constitute official state endorsement, intentional or implicit, of those policies that the flag was used to represent throughout its history? 

Most people are aware of our past sins; all too aware, in fact. South Carolina still bears the stigma of its past in the eyes of many - I believe unjustly so, given the progress that the state has made just during my own lifetime. Sadly, much of the nation is unaware that, regardless of whether the Confederate flag is on the Statehouse grounds or not, the state is now far different from what it was in those days. Perhaps the real tragedy of the Confederate flag's presence there is that it serves to perpetuate this image of the state as a haven for institutionalized racism. This is not the South Carolina that we have seen since the tragedy in Charleston, and it is not the South Carolina that I love and am proud to call my home. This is reason enough in my eyes to justify removing the flag. It is time for our state to move forward to a thriving future, not to linger in a checkered past.

Newsweek Decides that Christianity is Delusional

I ran across this topic yesterday morning and immediately decided that it called for a fairly detailed response. Ergo, welcome to my first blog post of 2015. Happy New Year!

Newsweek's cover story for its January 2, 2015 issue (the online version of the story is dated December 23, 2014) is entitled "The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin", by Kurt Eichenwald. The scholarship in this article is abysmal; it essentially amounts to a hatchet job on biblical Christianity, but his arguments are largely based on uninformed popular misconceptions or superficial reading of various passages. 

First of all, I will begin with one thing that the author does, unfortunately get right: his claim that many Christians are biblically illiterate is true. It has long been one of my greatest complaints that far too many believers in our time have at best a weak understanding of what it is that they claim to believe and why. This failure comes both on the part of the individual, who neglects reading their Bible or studying biblical teaching, and the church, which has by and large fallen woefully short in what I believe is one of its core biblical functions: passing on and preserving sound doctrine. Too many professing Christians have a very superficial faith built on tradition and emotion and not on what the Bible actually says. His criticism in the conclusion of the article that "too many [Christians] seem to read John Grisham novels with greater care than they apply to the book they consider to be the most important document in the world" rings sadly true. I'm sorry to have to agree with Eichenwald on this point, so far as this goes. However, that is probably the only thing from this article upon which I and the author will agree.

Eichenwald essentially presents a laundry list of things that he claims are "wrong" in the Bible, or things that have been misunderstood by Christians. As such, I believe the most effective way to present my responses is with a numbered list addressing each item more or less in the order that it appears in the article. This is a long article, so get some coffee and a comfortable chair... this could take a while. I'll try not to ramble on too much (like I'm doing now).

1. First, two general observations: 

    a.) Aside from the one-sided approach of only citing liberal scholars ("liberal" here referring to theological liberals, not necessarily political)... the few that he bothers citing... and disregarding any dissenting opinions, pretty much all of the author's appeals to "most biblical scholars agree" are put forth without justification and/or are unattributed. (In fairness, I'm not going to go to the effort to get citations for all of my "scholars say" statements, but then I'm not writing for Newsweek.)

    b.) Eichenwald, like many liberal scholars, as well as the so-called "New Atheists", frequently seems to be committing the fallacy of assuming that many of these items somehow escaped the attention of Christians over the many years since the Bible has existed. The Bible is in fact one of the most scrutinized books in modern history. It has been examined by theologians, historians, and rhetorical critics for centuries. Its meaning and historical reliability have been questioned and defended many times, and yet somehow it falls to a 21st century news magazine to provide an expose on how the Bible isn't really what we think it is. Essentially, this amounts to a rehashing of old arguments that have long since been answered or discredited.  

2. Eichenwald starts out by comparing the modern Bible to the children's game "telephone". For those who do not remember this game from kindergarten, telephone is where a phrase is passed around in a circle by whispering in your neighbor's ear, then she whispers the phrase into the next child's ear. By the time the phrase has completed the circle, it usually is completely different from when it started due to little differences in how each person in the circle says it to the next. 

  This is applied to the Bible in that, for centuries prior to invention of the printing press, scripture was hand-copied. This would provide plenty of opportunity for errors to compound, ultimately creating a very different product than the original text. Additionally, Eichenwald claims that this is compounded by the translation process where a translation is made from another translation, so that the modern translations that we use are very divergent from the original text. Without knowing more about how modern translations are made, this sounds like a valid criticism. 

  Where this criticism is wrong is that modern translations, such as the New King James (NKJV), the New International Version (NIV), and the New American Standard Bible (NASB), make use of the earliest available manuscripts in the original languages, thereby avoiding the "translation of a translation" issue, or even much of the potential for copy errors. It appears that Eichenwald is under the impression that modern translations merely "translate" the King James into modern English. This is not the case. Any copy of one of the new translations contains a preface that explains the translation process, which Eichenwald clearly didn't read. 

I should also note here that, while we do not have the original manuscripts of the New Testament, we do have very early manuscripts, some dating to less than 100 years of the originals. There are also references in other literature contemporary with the Apostles that reference the Gospels and other NT books that let us know about when they were actually written and verifying their authorship. 

  Regarding the copy error issue, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (copies of Old Testament texts had been sealed up and preserved in a cave since about the time of Christ) in the 1940s demonstrates that the copy error problem may not be as large an issue as Eichenwald makes it out to be. The texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls (which, incidentally, are also used as source material for modern translations) contain minor differences from later texts due to copy errors, but these do not change the central meaning of the text itself. This provides grounds for some degree of confidence regarding the reliability of the copy process. 

Finally, he is correct regarding the issues involved in translating from an ancient language to a modern language, but, again, this is no new revelation. This is why theology and divinity students are taught biblical Greek and Hebrew in graduate school. (Incidentally, he makes frequent references to the Living Bible when giving examples of where he believes translators got it wrong; he apparently is unaware that the Living Bible is a paraphrase.)

3. Eichenwald's account of the Council of Nicea is essentially a work of fiction. C. FitzSimons Allison gives an excellent account of the events leading up to the councils of Nicea and Constantinople, as well as the results, in what is probably one of my favorite books on theology. Numerous other books, including some that came out following the surge in popularity of the Gnostic writings surrounding the screen adaptation of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code", also address this. One that I have read is by Erwin Lutzer, which, unlike this article, cites its sources. 

4. Next, he claims that certain of our favorite passages in the Gospels were not part of the original text but were "made up" and added to the text by Medieval scholars with an agenda. I'm not familiar with the claim he makes regarding the story of the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel of John, so I will defer addressing that until I've had time to do a little research. 

  However, his second example of the last few verses of Mark is another demonstration of his poor scholarship, because the fact that those verses are not in the earliest manuscripts is stated in the footnotes of many modern translations. I've read discussions of this in several sources, including, if I recall correctly, a pretty simple teacher's guide that my church used when I was teaching a Sunday school class. Eichenwald claims that the book of Mark ends "awkwardly" and excludes several important events following the Ressurrection. In fact, the ending is widely believed to have been lost somehow; scholars are not sure how. It is widely recognized (if not universally accepted) that the last few verses are essentially a summary of material pulled from the other Gospels that were added later. There is no scandal or subterfuge there as Eichenwald claims, because it is widely known; however, there is nothing there that contradicts other scripture. 

5. Just in time for Christmas, Eichenwald next posits that the gospels of Matthew and Luke provide contradictory accounts of Jesus' birth. From this he concludes that the visit of the Magi described in Matthew never occurred (this is kind of a non-sequitor, and he provides no further justification for this conclusion). 

  This claim that the two accounts are contradictory makes no sense when one actually compares the two passages. This type of criticism of scripture is common, however, where two accounts are given for an event. Just because the accounts are different, it does not mean that they are contradictory. In this case, Luke gives a more detailed description of Jesus' birth and the events leading up to it, while Matthew picks up the story after Jesus is already born. Although the popular image of the Manger Scene we display at Christmas shows the Magi standing around the manger with the shepherds, a careful reading of the passage in Matthew indicates that Jesus was between one to two years old when the Magi arrived. The two passages are therefore not contradictory, but simply describe two separate events associated with Jesus' birth and early life. 

  He provides similar criticism of the texts regarding Jesus' trial before Pilate. Again, because the accounts are different does not mean that they are contradictory. One simply provides more detail than the other. 

  Many (I would even say most) instances where this type of criticism is made regarding different scriptural accounts of a single event involve a simple difference in emphasis or perspective. For example, if you asked me about a trip to Orlando I took a few years ago with a friend, I may say that we went to Universal and ate at Bob Marley's; if you go ask my friend what we did in Orlando, he may say we spent a day at Epcot. Our two accounts are different, but they don't contradict. In fact, we did both of these things on our trip. We just each chose to emphasize different things in our account based upon what stood out to us from our perspective.

6. He next points out the seeming contradiction of Jesus being the Son of God and the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah being the "son of David". The reasoning goes: if Joseph was a descendant of King David (as the Gospels say that he was), but Jesus was not Joseph's biological son, then Jesus was not a descendant of David. 

  Unlike some of the other issues brought up in this article, this one is actually a pretty good question that a lot of people, including believers, find themselves wondering about. Eichenwald unwittingly stumbles upon the answer, although he is unaware of it. He points out that the two genealogies given for Jesus in Matthew and Luke trace his lineage back to David. Then he says that it would make sense if Mary were descended from David, because that would then make Jesus a descendant of David. 

  It apparently escaped his notice, however, that the two genealogies are different (I was surprised by this as I expected him to point this out as a contradiction). Both trace back to David, but one has the lineage coming through Solomon, the other is through David's other son Nathan. In fact, the genealogy given in Matthew is Joseph's and the one in Luke is widely accepted as Mary's genealogy (Joseph being referred to as the "son of Heli" probably means that he was the son-in-law). Here is a brief but pretty good treatment on the two genealogies.

7. The two creation account idea that the author posits is another one that is fairly common, so I won't criticize Eichenwald on this one. The thought is that Genesis 1 and 2 each contain a separate and contradictory account of creation. However, actually comparing the two chapters, one can see that the second chapter is essentially a rehashing of certain details from the first chapter (a partial summary of sorts) with some elaboration. For example, in the first chapter, it says that God created the man and woman, but in the second chapter it gives the details of that creation. Another example is that in the first chapter, it says that God separated the waters above from the waters below (I'm paraphrasing), which I interpret as describing creation of the water cycle. In the second chapter, it describes mists rising from the earth and watering the ground (again, a description of the water cycle, although some people interpret that verse differently). I believe that a clear reading of the text justifies viewing the two chapters as complementary rather than contradictory. 

8. The criticism of the account of Noah again shows poor readership on Eichenwald's part. One issue that he finds "strange" is the different number of days given for the length of the flood and for how long Noah and his family were in the ark (Genesis 7-8). If he had given the text a careful reading (taking into account that phraseology for ancient texts is a little different from how a modern text would read), he probably would not have been so confused. The text indicates that the flood water rose for 40 days, it remained on the surface (or at least was not perceived as receding) for 150 days, and that it took a year for the water to recede sufficiently for them to disembark. 

9. From here, he continues on to matters of interpretation and further claims of forgery (including a claim that 1 Timothy was not authored by Paul, which he makes little effort to substantiate, and a rather puzzling claim that the doctrine in 1 Timothy more closely resembles Gnostic doctrine, which is utter nonsense). I won't get bogged down in disputing each of his claims regarding interpretation in this post, because this is somewhat of a digression from the main thesis of the article.

Eichenwald wraps up the article with by claiming: "This examination is not an attack on the Bible or Christianity", but that claim runs contrary to everything in the article that comes before it. This is a work of pure sophistry that makes little effort to conceal its bias. 

The Hobby Lobby Decision

I've seen a lot of discussion about the Hobby Lobby decision, about how they’re against women, they’re denying birth control to women while they still allow similar drugs/procedures for men, how they are imposing their religious views on everyone else, and so forth. I’ll address each in turn. I of course am not involved in any way in Hobby Lobby's corporate operations, so I cannot speak with any authority on what their intentions or motivations were, but I have reviewed the majority opinion from the Supreme Court, which can be read in full (if you have some time and a few brain cells to kill) here. The first four pages of the majority opinion, however (pp.7-10 of the pdf) summarize the court's rationale very nicely. My observations follow:

1. “The case was based on hatred of women or was against women’s birth control”

The question before the Supreme Court focused strictly on four post-conception drugs (RU 486 being an example) that in effect chemically induce an abortion. Other forms of birth control like birth control pills, IUD’s, etc. were not even dealt with in the case. Therefore, the idea that HL and the other companies involved in the suit were against birth control, or even specifically against birth control for women, is false. The challenge to the law was about companies being mandated to finance coverage for abortions; it was not about birth control. Furthermore, the fact that HL is, according to some articles, still covering vasectomies for men is therefore irrelevant. They were not objecting to birth control for women, just drugs that induce abortion. Granted, some people will find the opposition to abortion every bit as unpalatable, but nonetheless, the rhetoric that claims that the case was built around a hatred of women, it was against birth control, etc. is not supported by the facts of the case. 

So far as the blame for any damage done to this provision of the "Afordable Care Act" (ACA) requiring employers provide health care coverage, I say it rests on the shoulders of the lawmakers who passed the law, not on HL et al or SCOTUS. If Congress had not overreached by including these four specific medications, despite knowing at the time that including them in the mandate would be controversial and would probably be challenged in court (there was plenty of talk about it at the time, so much so that policy makers gave in so far as to allow an exemption for religious organizations), then we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now. The birth control provisions, without these four medications, would have probably not been challenged, and the provision would have stood, at least so long as the ACA remained in effect. (I have addressed my issues with the ACA in general in earlier posts; I won't go into them here.)

2. “They are forcing their religious beliefs on everyone else”

This logic is exactly backwards. By mandating that an employer act in a way that violates their religious convictions, under penalty of law, the government was violating the employers’ First Amendment rights. For an individual (or in this case a business) to chose not to participate in a particular behavior is not "forcing" their religious beliefs on others. Forcing religious beliefs on other people is coercing or requiring them by law to participate in behavior with which they do not agree. If anyone was being forced in this manner in this case, it was the plaintiffs, not the employees. 

I think a big problem here is that our understanding of “rights” has become corrupted.  To use the terminology used in the Declaration of Independence, we have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. That means that we have the right to these things unimpeded by others or by the government. (The key word there is “unimpeded”.) We do not have the “right” to require others to enable us toward these pursuits. (The key word there is “enable”.) 

To use an admittedly imperfect example, I am a big believer in the Second Amendment, but my right of self-defense would not justify me to expect that my neighbors be required by law to pool their money to help me buy a firearm. This is a matter of passive vs. active involvement: the government (or my neighbors, except through consensual agreement such as a covenant provision in my deed that says “no guns allowed”) cannot hinder my free exercise of my rights as guaranteed under the Second Amendment. This is passive. But this does not mean that they must take an active role by financing my exercise of those rights. So in other words, my neighbors are not “depriving” me of my rights by refusing to give me money to go to the gun store. In fact, if anything, my requiring them to do so deprives them of some of their own rights. Is this equitable?

Going directly to the matter at hand, a lot of people hold the conviction (it isn’t solely a religious conviction, but for those who believe that way it certainly is a religious matter) that life begins at conception, and that the termination of a pregnancy literally deprives a human being of their life. Many of those who support abortion obviously do not feel this way, but it needs to be recognized that a very large number of people do, and many of them hold this as a religious conviction. Recalling my example above about my neighbors paying for my trip to the gun store, the person who does not wish to part with their own money for Smith & Wesson might object on the grounds that they just don’t like guns, or they might have stronger public policy concerns about the efficacy of allowing individual citizens to own guns, but it most likely will not rise to the level of a religious conviction. So if my neighbor’s rights are violated to some degree by my forcing them to pay for my self-defense needs, would it not be much more true that people with a strong religious conviction regarding abortion would have their rights violated by being forced to pay for the purchase of someone else’s abortion-inducing medication?

So the question at hand is this:  does an employer choosing not to pay for coverage for these medications deprive a woman of her rights? Is active enabling on the part of the employer a necessity in order for the woman’s rights to be honored, or is the employer only obligated in a passive sense, i.e. not actively preventing the woman from having access to these medications? What if taking an active role violates the employer’s religious convictions, thereby violating their First Amendment rights of the free exercise of religion? This was the basic question address by SCOTUS in the Hobby Lobby case. 

The merits of the case can of course still be debated. One thing that I think could be a potential issue in the future is the implications for the legal distinction that exists between the corporation as a legal entity and its owners as individual persons. However, when discussing the more incendiary aspects of the case, it is particularly important to take an informed position with regards to the facts of the case and with regards to what the decision does and does not address. Emotion frequently plays too great a role in political debate, often to the point that facts and logic are left by the wayside. Unfortunately, emotion grips people's attention, and political rhetoric heightens the emotional impact to the point that people become blinded to all else. Feeling strongly about an issue is a good thing, so long as it does not lead to the abandonment of truth along the way. 

Thought Police

I've never watched Duck Dynasty. I don't even have cable. But I have to comment on the suspension of Phil Robertson from the show following his comments regarding homosexuality in an interview with GQ Magazine. 

This is not important because of the show. But it is important because it is indicative of the direction our culture has been moving over the past several years. Political correctness (PC) is the common term for it, but the term hardly does justice to how insidious this trend is. What it amounts to is a speech code -- the requirement that ones speech fit within a narrowly defined range of what is acceptable under threat of vilification, harassment, or in this case possible termination of employment. 

This brings to mind as a case in point the 2009 Miss USA pageant when "celebrity" judge Perez Hilton asked contestant Carrie Prejean her opinion of same-sex marriage. When she answered that she supported the traditional view of marriage, Hilton, apparently shocked at her ability for independent thought, spent the next several days flogging her on his video blog, and the media basically made it their purpose to find whatever information was necessary to destroy her (she eventually lost her crown due to alleged breach of contract and largely fell out of favor with cultural conservatives who had seen her as a potential poster child for traditional values, but the point I'm making is that the media made it their mission to seek out this information in order to discredit her as a means of retribution for stating her views). One imagines the purpose was to make an example of her for the benefit of any who would dare to not toe the party line when it comes to homosexuality or same-sex marriage. 

Apparently, Phil Robertson did not learn from the example made of Ms. Prejean, because he dared to speak his own beliefs, which do not align with the officially sanctioned beliefs, in a public venue. Robertson's statement was not "hateful" (the term frequently used by the PC crowd for any view that they disagree with), it was simply his statement of what he believes to be right. And, by the way, what he said was consistent with what the Bible says about homosexuality. So Robertson is being ostracized not only for stating his own opinion, but for his religious beliefs! 

This is no small matter regarding a television program, it represents a seed change in American culture, where the free exchange of ideas is replaced with the Thought Police, waiting for some non-conforming speech or belief to make itself known so that it can be quickly and mercilessly punished. 

One important thing to note: This is not a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment precludes the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion; the government had no role in the incident with Prejean or with Robertson. This is an important distinction, but it is nonetheless alarming. For those who may disagree with Robertson, that's fine, but when people can be subjected to character assassination and be suspended or fired from work for holding traditional religious views, we are crossing a line in our society that I don't believe we want to cross. And ultimately that would come back to bite all of us, regardless of what side of this particular issue you are on. 

Shameful

The reports of private citizens being inconvenienced or even harassed by federal agents "enforcing" the shutdown have been pouring in over the past few days:  90-something World War II veterans barred entry to the WWII Memorial in DC (or attempted barred entry).  A hotel owner along the Blue Ridge Parkway was forced to shut down during peak tourism season simply because the Pisgah Inn is located along the federally-run parkway, depriving him of his most profitable season and his employees of pay.  Elderly residents of privately-owned homes located on federal land forced out of their homes.  Traffic cones placed along the road outside of Mt. Rushmore to prevent passers-by from even stopping to look at the closed monument.  Park rangers attempt to shut down Mount Vernon, a privately-owned historical site whose parking lot apparently happens to be jointly-owned by the Federal Park Service.  The Grand Canyon shut down, despite offers by Arizona's state government to use private donations to fund the park's operation during the shutdown.  Access to Florida Bay (the ocean!) is cut off to charter fishermen.  

A federal park ranger was actually quoted as saying that they have been ordered to "make things as difficult as possible" for people during the shutdown. The shutdown is naturally going to cause pain for some people -- particularly for government employees, who will have to defer income until a CR is passed, and for contractors, among others.  But the tactics being employed by the Administration appear to be aimed at maximizing the pain from the shutdown in order to gain political points against the Republicans, to whom the president believes he can shift all of the blame for the shutdown, even as he refuses to negotiate to reach a solution and reopen the government.  So confident of this is the White House that an unnamed official was quoted as saying that it did not matter to them how long the shutdown lasts, because "we're winning".  (Naturally, the White House has sense disavowed this statement.)

Perhaps shifting the blame for these bizarre closures onto House and Senate Republicans would be more plausible if these measures were actually mandated by a government shutdown.  The problem is that they are not.  One could understand closing, say, federally-maintained rest areas along the Blue Ridge Parkway (somebody has to clean the toilets), but there is no practical reason why the World War II monument, for example, should be closed to visitors due to a shutdown (in fact, from a fiscal standpoint, erecting barriers and stationing patrols to keep tourists out incurs greater cost than leaving it open), and certainly not in forcing the Pisgah Inn's closure. 

So petty, so despotic, so childish in fact is this behavior by the executive branch, I find it difficult to even characterize it in rational terms. 

In a previous post, I explained how Niskanen predicted that, faced with cuts, a government agency will threaten to cut its most highly-valued service in order to motivate its appropriators to restore funding; in that post, I argued that this characterized the president's behavior in seeking to "maximize the pain" from the cuts associated with sequestration.  The president is doing it again, but this time, due to the much larger scope of services affected, he is able to inflict that much more pain.  We as citizens and voters should not view lightly behavior by the executive branch of our government to willfully increase the pain to private citizens from an already difficult situation.  As Speaker Boehner said, "This is not a... game!"  The president should stop treating it as one. 

The Healthcare Debate, Part Deux

In an earlier (2009) post, I discussed some of the reasons why the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, was the wrong prescription for what ails healthcare in the United States and offered some of my own ideas for a solution. However, it has been awhile, and since things seem to be coming to a head with the current push in Congress to defund Obamacare, it seems appropriate to revisit the issue. 

Because the bill was still in its early stages at the time of my previous post and I was therefore unaware of many of its particulars (and, as then-Speaker Pelosi indicated, many legislators who voted to pass the bill weren't even completely aware of its contents), I didn't foresee many of the effects that impending implementation of the policy has had in the national economy, although I was correct in predicting that Obamacare would result in driving up the cost of healthcare, not in reducing it. 

For example, at the time I was not aware of the employer mandates that are now leading a crush of employers to cut full-time workers and to cut hours to drop workers below full-time levels so as to avoid the added costs.  I also was unaware of the individual mandate that would require individuals not covered under employer plans to purchase health insurance themselves, or the prohibition of insurance carriers exempting existing conditions from coverage. The combination of these factors has meant that thousands upon thousands of workers are seeing cuts in work hours, which means less wage income (don't blame the employers; many of them would potentially be bankrupted by the added cost imposed by the employer mandate which would lead to their workers losing their jobs entirely); this loss of wage income is compounded when the worker, having lost her employer-provided insurance and now covered under the individual mandate, must now pay the full cost of health insurance for her family. To top it off, this hit on the worker's finances is compounded by increases in insurance premiums resulting from increased demand for insurance policies and from insurance companies compensating for the increased risk to them from being forced to cover pre-existing conditions. (Whether you see requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions as good or bad, it does put upward pressure on premiums.)

In short, the result of Obamacare, rather than the promised "affordable" healthcare costs, is higher premiums for nearly everyone, save low-income families whose premiums the program will subsidize (which presents the added problem of the necessity of either raising taxes or increasing national debt), and lower wage income as a result of employer mandates. This is not theoretical; numerous announcements of the cutting of workers and workers' hours have already begun as some are already reporting premium increases. 

Nonetheless, even as Union bosses, who supported the president in the last two elections, have turned on Obamacare due to its expected negative impact on their negotiated health plans, the Democrat-controlled Senate is preparing to vote to push forward on implementation. 

Some have said that this policy should be advanced because it at least represents an attempt to address the problems with healthcare. As I discussed in my earlier post, there are indeed problems with healthcare, particularly in terms of its affordability and thereby accessibility; however, I have never been one to subscribe to the idea that policies should be implemented simply to be seen as "at least doing something" without first, at the very least, carefully considering whether the policy in question will actually address the problem at hand. As we are already seeing, the problem of affordability is not addressed by Obamacare; in fact it is exacerbated by it.