The future of religious liberty in America

From a speech by First Things editor Dr. R.R Reno.  Good read published in Imprimis, from Hillsdale College:

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY is being redefined in America, or at least many would like it to be. Our secular establishment wants to reduce the autonomy of religious institutions and limit the influence of faith in the public square. The reason is not hard to grasp. In America, “religion” largely means Christianity, and today our secular culture views orthodox Christian churches as troublesome, retrograde, and reactionary forces. They’re seen as anti-science, anti-gay, and anti-women—which is to say anti-progress as the Left defines progress. Not surprisingly, then, the Left believes society will be best served if Christians are limited in their influence on public life. And in the short run this view is likely to succeed. There will be many arguments urging Christians to keep their religion strictly religious rather than “political.” And there won’t just be arguments; there will be laws as well. We’re in the midst of climate change—one that’s getting colder and colder toward religion.

Recent court cases and controversies suggest trends unfriendly to religion in public life. In 2005, a former teacher at Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Redford, Michigan, filed an employment lawsuit claiming discrimination based on disability. The school fired her for violating St. Paul’s teaching that Christians should not bring their disputes before secular judges. The subsequent lawsuit revolved around the question of whether a religious school could invoke a religious principle to justify firing an employee. The school said it could, drawing on a legal doctrine known as the ministerial exception, which allows religious institutions wide latitude in hiring and firing their religious leaders. It’s in the nature of legal arguments to be complex and multi-layered, but in this case the Obama administration’s lawyers made a shockingly blunt argument: Their brief claimed that there should be no ministerial exception.

The Supreme Court rejected this argument in a unanimous 9-0 vote. But it’s telling nonetheless that lawyers in the Justice Department wanted to eliminate this exception. Their argument was straightforward: Government needs to have broad powers to address the problem of discrimination—in this case disability—as well as other injustices. Conceding too much to religious institutions limits those powers. Why should the theological doctrines of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, or of any other church, trump the legal doctrines of the United States when the important principle of non-discrimination is at stake? It is an arresting question, to say the least—especially when we remember that the Left is currently pushing to add gay marriage to the list of civil rights.

Concerns about the autonomy of religious institutions are also at work in the Obama administration’s tussle with the Catholic Church and her religious allies over the mandate to provide free contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. After the initial public outcry, the administration announced a supposed compromise, which has been recently revised and re-proposed. The Obama administration allows that churches and organizations directly under the control of those churches are religious employers and can opt out of the morally controversial coverage. But religious colleges and charities are not and cannot. To them, the administration offers a so-called accommodation.

The details are complex, but a recent statement issued by Cardinal Dolan of New York identifies the key issue: Who counts as a religious employer? It’s a question closely related to the issue in the Hosanna-Tabor case, which asks who counts as a religious employee. Once again the Obama administration seeks a narrow definition, “accommodating” others in an act of lèse majesté, as it were. The Catholic Church and her allies want a broad definition that includes Catholic health care, Catholic universities, and Catholic charities. The Church knows that it cannot count on accommodations—after all, when various states such as Illinois passed laws allowing gay adoptions, they did not “accommodate” Catholic charities, but instead demanded compliance with principles of non-discrimination, forcing the Church to shut down her adoption agencies in those jurisdictions.

Cardinal Dolan’s statement went still further. For-profit companies are not religious in the way that Notre Dame University is religious. Nonetheless, the religious beliefs of those who own and run businesses in America should be accorded some protection. This idea the Obama administration flatly rejects. By their progressive way of thinking, economic life should be under the full and unlimited control of the federal government.

Religious liberty is undermined in a third and different way as well. For a long time, political theorists like John Rawls have argued that our laws must be based on so-called public reason, which is in fact an ambiguous, ill-defined concept that gives privileged status to liberalism. In 2010, Federal District Court Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Proposition 8—the ballot measure that reversed the California Supreme Court’s 2006 decision that homosexuals have a right to marry—citing the lack of a rational basis for thinking that only men and women can marry. “The evidence shows conclusively,” he wrote, “that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples.” He continues by observing that many supporters of Proposition 8 were motivated by their religious convictions, which—following Rawls—he presumes should not be allowed to govern public law.

This line of thinking is not unique to Judge Walker. The influence of Rawls has been extensive, leading to restrictions on the use of religious reasons or even religiously-influenced reasons in public debate. In striking down Texas sodomy laws, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that moral censure of homosexuality has “been shaped by religious beliefs.” The idea seems to be that moral views historically supported by religion—which of course means all moral views other than modern secular ones—are constitutionally suspect.

Here we come to the unifying feature of contemporary challenges to religious freedom—the desire to limit the influence of religion over public life. In the world envisioned by Obama administration lawyers, churches will have freedom as “houses of worship,” but unless they accept the secular consensus they can’t inspire their adherents to form institutions to educate and serve society in accordance with the principles of their faith. Under a legal regime influenced by the concept of public reason, religious people are free to speak—but when their voices contradict the secular consensus, they’re not allowed into our legislative chambers or courtrooms.

Thus our present clashes over religious liberty. The Constitution protects religious liberty in two ways. First, it prohibits laws establishing a religion. This prevents the dominant religion from using the political power of majority rule to privilege its own doctrines to the disadvantage of others. Second, it prohibits laws that limit the free exercise of religion. What we’re seeing today is a secular liberalism that wants to expand the prohibition of establishment to silence articulate religious voices and disenfranchise religiously motivated voters, and at the same time to narrow the scope of free exercise so that the new secular morality can reign over American society unimpeded.

Read the rest here

Perhaps it is the presidency and not the president that should concern us most

Movement conservatives are so fixated on the current occupant of the White House that they often miss the forest for the trees.  To be sure, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented crescendo of weakly constrained presidential power over the past five years, but it didn’t start there.  Through war-making and nation-building, congressional dereliction of duty, free-wheeling virtually autonomous executive agencies, creation of massive government programs, federal encroachment upon formerly state prerogatives (like education), mushrooming regulatory apparatuses, corporate-government partnerships, entitlement spending, extra-constitutional means and procedures, vast new unchecked appointment powers [read: czars], explosion in claims to executive privilege, executive agreements, and executive orders, the expansion of executive branch power has been developing for decades, regardless of the occupant or his party affiliation.  There is simply real truth to the argument made by the apologists for Mr. Obama’s latest scandals — that the executive branch is too large, too autonomous, too impenetrable, too unwieldy, for any single individual president to control.  Political Scientists who study the American Presidency have empirically documented this trajectory for some time — a process called “institutionalization” (see for instance: Howell, William.  2005.  “Unilateral Powers: A Brief Overview.”  Presidential Studies Quarterly 35: 417-439; see also The Expanding Power of the Presidency, a book review of Mitchel A . Sollenberger and Mark J. Rozell. The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution).

Ironically, the “handicapped president” argument the Obama administration is currently making provides a strong case against the rising power of the presidency as an institution; a case traditionalist conservatives have been making for decades.  In Slate, John Dickerson sees the irony:

It must get confusing in the IT department at the Associated Press: Are you talking about the hackers who hacked our Twitter account or the Justice Department hackers who hacked our phones? Monday, the Associated Press reported that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months of records of phone conversations by its reporters. Meanwhile, the Washington Post revealed that the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups was more widespread than first reported. Someone at the IRS also leaked information about conservative groups to ProPublica. The Environmental Protection Agency may also have made it easier for environmental groups to file Freedom of Information Act requests than conservative organizations.

 

The Obama administration is doing a far better job making the case for conservatism than Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, or John Boehner ever did. Showing is always better than telling, and when the government overreaches in so many ways it gives support to the conservative argument about the inherently rapacious nature of government. 

 

First let’s get our terms straight. Conservatives are not the same as Republicans. The former believe in a philosophy which stays roughly fixed and the latter belong to a party that occasionally embraces the philosophy but deviates when necessary to win elections, pass legislation, and follow the selfish aims of those who are in office and want to remain there. Conservatives argue against the expansion of government, whereas Republicans sometimes enlarge it to please their constituents or themselves. Republicans also sometimes botch foreign policy operations and spin themselves silly in their aftermath, which is why the Benghazi revelations are left out of this grand unification theory.

 

Though some of these scandals will allow Republicans to score points in the daily tally of who is ahead and who is behind, there is a larger benefit to conservatives that goes beyond the fall in the president’s approval ratings or the boost Republican Senate candidates may get in 2014. Those outcomes rely on further adjudication of these issues. It may turn out that President Obama had nothing to do with any of them. It could simply be rogues in various agencies. Or, maybe President Obama orchestrated the whole kaleidoscope of wrongdoing on the White House whiteboard. You don’t have to embrace either of those theories to see that it’s much easier to agree with the conservative notion that government is a mess. We have enough evidence of that already.

 

Conservatives argue that the more government you have, the more opportunities you will have for it to grow out of control. That is why my frequent correspondent Charles Flemming cheers every story I write about Washington gridlock. He wants less government, so he’s fine if it does nothing.

 

Another conservative correspondent points to economist James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work studying economic incentives in government. His argument was that politicians are not benevolent agents of the common good but humans acting in their own self-interest or for a special interest. “If there is value to be gained through politics,” Buchanan wrote, “persons will invest resources in efforts to capture this value.” Since Democrats and Republicans alike are sinful, each side will find ways to work that is self-interested, rapacious, and boundary breaking. Keep the government small to limit the damage. 

 

Whether these scandals are the result of base motives or a desire to act for the greater good, the eventual result is the destruction of individual liberties. Your IRS comes down on you because you have the wrong ideology or, in the name of protecting the citizenry, the Justice Department starts listening to your phone calls.

 

The confluence of these moments of government overreach may not swell the ranks of conservative clubs, but it could have an effect on policy. As Sen. Lamar Alexander has long argued, conservatives believe not only in limited government, but limitations to sweeping acts by government. Large comprehensive bills like the proposed immigration reform and the Obama health care plan lead to too many unintended consequences. Alexander quotes Irving Kristol, who called himself a “policy skeptic.” His skepticism is rooted in what appears to have happened at the Justice Department, IRS, and EPA: Big sprawling government inevitably gets out of hand. Seventy-three percent of the public already says they distrust the government, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

 

A general distrust of government most immediately threatens comprehensive immigration reform. House Republicans prefer a step-by-step approach, which is gaining support. Supporters of a comprehensive approach must convince skeptics that the government will enforce the strict limits on illegal immigration that are part of the deal. This government? Obamacare is already the law of the land, but as Republicans try to dismantle it they will be assisted by front-page stories about government incompetence and overreach as the program starts getting implemented this fall.

 

This moment may allow some insight into the views of those who opposed gun control legislation. During the debate over background checks, three Republicans senators who ultimately voted against the Manchin–Toomney compromise talked about “paranoia” among some gun owners about a national gun registry. The government would never go that far, these GOP senators believed, but their constituents did. Liberals pointed out that the Manchin–Toomey legislation had provisions that would have increased penalties for any kind of gun registry. They argue that rules were in place to discourage excessive behavior. Conservatives saw it a different way: The excessive behavior is inherent, so no rules will discourage it. 

 

Not every conservative saw nightmares of a national gun registry, but if you are already skeptical of government solutions and Manchin–Toomey would have done nothing to prevent the massacre that gave birth to it—as its authors admitted—your inherent distrust of government would make you unlikely to support it. A law that is out of sync with the problem that gave rise to its creation will undoubtedly get out of joint in its implementation. 

 

If these scandals are indeed affecting the ideological landscape, this is bad news for liberals. It’s not just that the opposite ideology is getting some help from government bunglers, but the media is exacerbating the problem. Liberals believe that there is a role for government to play in mediating market failures, and there are plenty of stories of areas where the safety net is thinning as a result of sequestration—from cancer treatments to Head Start to Meals-on-Wheels—where government should step in. But those stories get lost in the scandal coverage of an administration, making it look like conservatives fundamentally understand something that liberals do not.  

Robert Nisbet on the origins and dangers of political communitarian monism

Chapter Three, Monism and Pluralism, of Brad Stone’s intellectual biography of Robert Nisbet is one of the most enlightening reads I’ve had in a long time.  And since I remember things by writing them, here’s the summary:

Robert Nisbet, the great sociologist who championed communitarian pluralism over against communitarian monism, places the rise of modern liberalism with its ever expanding welfare state and total reduction of society to the individual and the state, firmly upon the intellectual footing of Plato first and then especially Rousseau (he throws Hobbes in there for good measure).  How so?

First, we must understand Rousseau’s paradox, as Pierre Manent explains it: “On the one hand, society is essentially contrary to nature, on the other, it comes nearer to conforming to nature only insofar as it imposes the greatest unity possible on its members, identifying with everyone and the whole – short, only insofar as it changes man’s nature.”  The solution to the problem of society is a political community of unprecedented extent and power.  Man is free or back to nature, only in the context of “complete surrender to the omnipotent state.  The state is the liberator of the individual from the toils of society” (Nisbet’s words).  For Rousseau, society splinters and fragments the elementary and unified soul of natural man, the modern remedy for which is the general will (and its agent, the State).  Rousseau here is basically saying that man is born free, and then is enchained by civil society (church, family, custom, tradition, local associations) producing inequality and reduced liberty.  The solution is to appoint a great leveler as well as a single object of everyone’s allegiance and devotion, the State.  Then, natural inequalities of status, liberty, etc. would be eliminated.  Other social loyalties only compete with the State and are therefore unhealthy for man as an individual.  “Cults and intolerance cannot be tolerated, Rousseau says.  Nothing should compete with the sovereignty of the state.”

Of particular note, Rousseau insisted that Christianity is just such a problem for man’s freedom and equality. He wrote, “the dominating spirit of Christianity was incompatible with [State driven human equality]… the interest of the priest would always be stronger than that of the state.”

So both Hobbes and Rousseau imagined “an ideal commonwealth containing individuals and the state, without communities or intermediate associations to mediate between them.”  That is what Nisbet refers to as communitarian monism.

Against that political philosophy is the one Nisbet defends and the one most associated with the thought of Edmund Burke, communitarian pluralism.  Burke wrote against Rousseau’s entire program.  “His attack on the French Revolution sprang from precisely those principles that had underlain his defense of the American colonists and the people of India.  These principles were rooted in Burke’s profound belief in the superiority of traditional society and its component groups and associations, as well as what he regarded as its inherent organic processes of change, over centralized political power”  Whereas Rousseau believed that one could not love the whole society and work towards its good while showing partiality to particular elements within it (cults, neighborhoods, even families), Burke held the opposite view.  No Frenchman, he argued, will ever love the whole country with one heart when all local ideas and identities are eradicated.  Instead, he “will shortly have no country.  No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square measurement…. We begin our public affections in our families.  No cold relation is a zealous citizen.  We pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections.  These are the inns and resting places… The love of the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.”  That is, the love of the whole depends upon this subordinate partiality.  Burke argued that the ultimate consequence of the French Revolution, wholly unlike the American Revolution or Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, was to create “the organic moleculae of a disbanded people.”  To disband the little platoon (civil institutions) is to foster “weakness, disconnection and confusion.”  To cast away the “coat of prejudice,” which “renders man’s virtue habit,” leaves individuals with nothing but naked reason, “skeptical and puzzled,” unable to act in moments of decision.  According to Nisbet, it was the “rationalist simplicity” of the French revolutionaries that Burke feared and despised most because of its destructive effects upon the plural social order.  Without tradition and mediating institutions, we have, Burke said, what Tocqueville would later call “individualism.”

Another consequence of the eradication of prejudice and particularistic affections Burke observed among the revolutionaries was the “new-invented virtue” – universal benevolence.  Burke had nowhere better to look for the problems with this notion than Rousseau himself, as a person.  Rousseau turned over all five of his illegitimate children to a state-run foundling home, exhibiting constantly “the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence, whilst his heart was incapable of harboring one spark of common parental affection… He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation (state to citizen), and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings.  Rousseau justified these decisions, Nisbet notes, by appealing to Plato’s idea of true, primary, and ultimate citizenship.

Burke predicted that when the full program of Rousseau is implemented, the results will be catastrophic, wiping out intermediate institutions in the name of liberty and equality and brotherhood, but society will be destroyed by the creature of its own making.  He wrote, “the government, be it what it may, will immediately degenerate into military democracy; a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.”

Nisbet also pointed to Tocqueville, in addition to Aristotle and Burke, as a great champion of communitarian pluralism.  Tocqueville was acutely aware of the state empowering dangers of rampant individualism.  Individualism creates a void filled by a centralized authority that enervates and stifles initiative.  “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.  That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood…”

Nisbet goes on to describe what the five conditions necessary for the preservation of liberty within democracies according to Tocqueville.  First, there must be a division of authority in society.  Individual rights are obtained through diversification of authority, “not merely the overall structure of authority in America but also each of the several major institutions in American life, including religion, economy and political government itself.”  Second, the presence and appeal of local institutions is essential.  “How can a population unaccustomed to freedom in small concerns learn to use it temperately in great affairs?”  Third, freedom is advanced through the American federal system, which separates the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial) from one another but also the two levels of government (national and state).  This division of authority is designed to prevent the consolidation of power from the hands of a single individual or institution [we are seeing the utter dismissal of this principle today with the rise of the modern presidency, circumventing at every turn both the other branches and levels of government, as well basic constitutional procedures].  Fourth, there must be freedom of the press, “essential for an idea to be planted in enough minds for people to form associations of sufficient size to address important causes.”  Finally, there must be the freedom [and flourishing] of association.  Tocqeville was struck by the number of civil and political associations in America and their vitality, rendering a heavy-handed state unnecessary in his view.  “These associations were essential to overcome the inherent weakness of individuals within democracy and to defend against the centralization of power.  In short, voluntary associations simultaneously combated the twin evils of individualism and democratic despotism.”

To this, I would add that the most basic and essential social institution, the nuclear family, is the most important buffer from suicidal and socially destructive individualism as well as the massive welfare state that such individualism inevitably produces.  Perhaps its recent disintegration just couldn’t have been foreseen in the day of Tocqueville, but elsewhere Nisbet saw it coming along with the statism that ensues.

Amazon link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Nisbet-Communitarian-Traditionalist-Thinkers/dp/1882926692

The Obam Synthesis Under Siege – Ross Douthat

From Ross Douthat at the NYT:

The true ideological inclinations of the Obama White House can be endlessly debated, but slightly more than halfway through this presidency I think it’s fair to make the following generalization: Obama has governed as a business-friendly social democrat and an aggressive social liberal, as a hawkish interventionist when intervention seems cheap and easy (drones, missiles, etc.) and a cautious realist when it doesn’t, and as a surprisingly vigorous defender of presidential prerogatives across a variety of fronts. A few weeks ago, I characterized Obama-era liberalism as featuring “an imperial presidency, a corporatist economic policy, and then a libertarian turn on almost every social issue,” and while that line misses various nuances and complexities, as one-sentence summaries go I think it’s pretty good.

It’s also useful for understanding why the last few weeks have been so rough for this White House. Obviously they’ve been difficult because scandal has piled on scandal: The resurfacing Benghazi affair, the news that the Internal Revenue Service took a disproportionate election-year interest in conservative activists, and now the revelation that the Department of Justice secretly seized two months worth of phone records for Associated Press reporters as part of a highly aggressive leak investigation. But it’s also because the details of the scandals raise uncomfortable questions about the particular policy synthesis that Obama has pursued — and they’re getting traction at a time when other high-profile stories, from the debate over the Oregon Medicaid study in wonkland to the trial of the late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell over in culture-war territory, are raising similarly uncomfortably questions on other fronts.

In the case of Benghazi, as Tim Carney points out, you have a story that’s ultimately about an administration trying to downplay the resilience of Al Qaeda and the messiness of post-intervention Libya, lest those realities sow election-year doubts about the success of the White House’s entire light-footprint, drones-and-bombs approach to counterterrorism and the Middle East. In the case of the I.R.S. and Justice Department imbroglios, you have two stories that don’t need to have direct links to the Oval Office to remind people of the kind of abuses that that imperial presidencies tend to generate. (It’s also striking that both the new Benghazi revelations and the I.R.S./DoJ scandals came hard hard on the heels of Rand Paul’s filibuster, which was arguably the first moment when the Obama administration faced a significant political challenge on questions of executive overreach.)

Meanwhile, whatever spin you put on the Oregon Medicaid study, it was a real-world test of the administration’s signature domestic policy initiative whose results clearly didn’t live up to liberal expectations, and it’s given skeptics of Obamacare perhaps their most statistically potent ammunition at a moment when the new health care law is about to face the test of implementation. (Which, of course, involves new responsibilities for … the I.R.S.) Likewise, while the implications of the Gosnell case are open for debate, it’s the first occasion in a while when social liberals have clearly been forced on the defensive — and the first high-profile story in Obama’s entire presidency to throw his own radicalism on abortion into sharp relief.

Obviously his White House faced major challenges all across its contentious first term. But it was rare for the administration to see its attempt at a new left-of-center synthesis challenged and undercut across multiple fronts at once — on foreign policy and civil liberties and domestic policy and social issues. Journalists no doubt talk too much about narratives and storylines, but they do matter, and having all of these stories in the wind at once is significant, in part, because it threatens to rewrite the public’s understanding of what Obama-ism represents. The president wants to be seen, and works to be seen, as a pragmatic, data-driven steward of popular programs who’s leading a wave of social progress at home while keeping us as safe from terrorists as any Republican tough guy could. But the current mix of headlines suggests a very different take on the same record — in which Obama embodies a “new” progressivism that’s too comfortable with executive power and too eager to conduct foreign policy from 30,000 feet, too cozy with powerful interest groups and too wedded to a dysfunctional welfare state, and as far outside the mainstream on social issues as any of the right-wingers it likes to define itself against.

Whether this alternative narrative actually takes hold with the public and press remains to be seen. But the last few weeks have clearly made it more credible, and an easier sell to the unconvinced, than all the slings and arrows of 2012 campaign.

Original link: http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/the-obama-synthesis-under-siege/

What justice requires in the marriage debate

From Charles Capps at the Public Discourse (excerpt):

Historically, societies have addressed the problem of child-rearing by institutionalizing, in the law as well as civil society, the integration of conjugal intercourse with long-term commitment, comprehensive sharing of life, and, in at least some societies, sexual exclusivity. Up until recently, the term “marriage” referred unambiguously to this institution.

In our society, this same institution also became associated with certain privileges, including an exemption from the estate tax. The problem, according to advocates of redefining marriage, is that it seems unjust not to grant some of these privileges more broadly.

Just how broadly, of course, may vary from privilege to privilege, and in some cases may be a matter of dispute. Some, for example, argue that we shouldabolish the estate tax altogether (I would be inclined to agree). What is important here is the general claim that at least some of the privileges currently associated with marriage fall under the heading of what is owed in justice to (at least) all who cohabit and commingle their assets.

Suppose for the sake of argument that this claim is true. If so, proponents of redefining marriage are right to challenge the status quo. The policy aim of guaranteeing fair treatment under the law to those who cohabit and commingle their assets applies to a population that is broader than the population to which the aim of integrating conjugal intercourse with long-term commitment, comprehensive sharing of life, and sexual exclusivity applies. As a result, a policy instrument tailored to achieve the second aim is doomed to be too narrow as an instrument for the first.

What proponents of redefining marriage miss is the fact that this problem will always remain as long as a single policy instrument is tasked with achieving both ends, for the simple reason that it cannot be tailored to both simultaneously. This is why simply expanding the scope of marriage to include same-sex couples is an inadequate solution. Far from being fitted to both policy aims, marriage redefined in this way would be fitted to neither: It would be at once too narrow and too broad.

It would be too narrow because it would continue to exclude polyamorous groups, as well as couples in a platonic relationship—bachelor brothers, say—who live together, care for each other, and share property. Yet who would say that the fairness of the estate tax levied on Edith Windsor hinges on whether she engaged in sexual acts with her longtime friend and roommate?

It would be too broad because same-sex couples cannot engage in the kind of activity that can result in conception, and hence there is no need for social norms that integrate sexual activity between persons of the same sex with an arrangement suitable for raising a child.

Indeed, redefining marriage would likely hamper its capacity to achieve the child-centric need at stake in the debate. Precisely insofar as they persuade us to conceptualize marriage in terms of shared living generally, proponents of redefining marriage will have rendered it incapable of shaping attitudes toward any particular kind of shared living. Yet to protect the wellbeing of children, the institution of marriage must set apart the particular kind of shared living best suited to child-rearing from the range of alternatives so as to promote it as an ideal among those who choose to engage in conjugal intercourse.

The best response to the two needs at stake in the marriage debate is to acknowledge that both are important and craft a solution that fits the contours of each. This does not require defining out of existence the only legal category whose purpose is precisely to integrate the kind of act that can result in conception with the kind of environment best suited for a child’s development. Instead, it merely requires disconnecting from marriage any privileges currently associated with it that are in fact owed in justice to a population broader than those who can become biological mothers and fathers.

In this way, not only could marriage continue to play its normative role in addressing the second policy aim at stake in the debate, but any injustice in tax policy, or policy regarding hospital visitation, could be eliminated for everyone, not just romantically involved same-sex couples.

The truth is that each of these policy needs is too important to be given short shrift. Reinforcement of the conjugal definition of marriage in the law combined with comprehensive reform in areas such as the estate tax would address both. Unfortunately, redefining marriage in a way that eliminates its child-centric focus, combined with denying fair treatment to those whom the new definition continues to exclude, would address neither.

Does it matter if Adam was a real person?

From Steven Wedgeworth at Calvinist International (excerpt):

We return to our main question, and we offer this unreserved thesis: The historicity of Adam determines the public nature of our religion. If Adam was a historical individual, then the Bible makes authoritative claims about all of humanity and indeed all of the cosmos. It can, at least in theory, be falsified, and it is thus a legitimate topic of dialectical discourse. It is rational and not a retreat to commitment. If Adam was not a historical individual, and if instead the Genesis account is a sort of mythical story which was employed in order to make a uniquely religious point, then Christianity is necessarily rendered merely metaphorical, expressing truths of the human condition through symbols. The Bible in this case is no longer an authoritative account of human origins, history, and final destiny. It no longer addresses all men in all places and times, but rather expresses one faith-narrative that seeks to convey a meaningful but wholly internal truth.

Put more simply: if Adam is mythical, then so is redemption. While it does not follow that if Adam is mythical, then the historicity of Jesus must also be denied, it does follow that if Adam is mythical, then the historicity of Jesus as Second Adam must be denied. And Christianity is founded on Jesus as Second Adam.

In order to support this claim, we must first define our terms and conversation. We are not here concerned with the age of the earth. That study is certainly important and rewarding, but it is not our immediate question. It touches only indirectly on our concerns, but nothing we say here depends upon one position or the other in that field. We are not even dealing with Genesis chapter 1. It is conceded, nearly by all Christians, that the events of Genesis 1 are presented in a stylized form, with chapters 2–3 retelling the same events from a different perspective, in a somewhat different fashion. We could, in theory, set chapter 1 completely aside, and Genesis 2–3 would still provide us with sufficient exegetical material for our question. And so for this argument, neither the “literal six-day” position, nor the Day-Age Theory, nor the Framework Hypothesis, nor the Analogical-Day Theory is necessarily determinative. We are concerned only with the historicity of Adam, whether he was a real and singular person from whom all human beings descend and whose actions are the cause of all sin, suffering, and death.

In addition to explaining the origin of sin and death, the opening chapters of Genesis explain the foundation for human society. Genesis 2:18–22 makes much out of Adam’s initial lonely condition, his relationship to the animals, and then the rationale for the creation of woman. In Christian theology, this last issue is typically included under the language of “creation ordinances.” But if these ordinances are not actually related to creation, as it happens, then the nature of their moral claim falls as well. They are simply “ordinances,” not “creation ordinances.”

This Eden situation, described as occurring in real time and space and affecting all subsequent world history, must be dealt with in all discussions of evolution and human origins. To simply dismiss it, while perhaps making the scientific investigation easier, does not actually satisfy the exegetical or theological questions. Such a move does not even take the questions seriously. And as we will see, both spiritual and temporal claims are dependent upon the answers to these questions.

Read the whole thing here

Westminster Larger Catechism Questions 165-167

Q. 165. What is baptism?

A. Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, wherein Christ hath ordained the washing with water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,[1058] to be a sign and seal of ingrafting into himself,[1059] of remission of sins by his blood,[1060] and regeneration by his Spirit;[1061] of adoption,[1062] and resurrection unto everlasting life;[1063] and whereby the parties baptized are solemnly admitted into the visible church,[1064] and enter into an open and professed engagement to be wholly and only the Lord’s.[1065]

Q. 166. Unto whom is baptism to be administered?

A. Baptism is not to be administered to any that are out of the visible church, and so strangers from the covenant of promise, till they profess their faith in Christ, and obedience to him,[1066] but infants descending from parents, either both, or but one of them, professing faith in Christ, and obedience to him, are in that respect within the covenant, and to be baptized.[1067]

Q. 167. How is our baptism to be improved by us?

A. The needful but much neglected duty of improving our baptism, is to be performed by us all our life long, especially in the time of temptation, and when we are present at the administration of it to others;[1068] by serious and thankful consideration of the nature of it, and of the ends for which Christ instituted it, the privileges and benefits conferred and sealed thereby, and our solemn vow made therein;[1069] by being humbled for our sinful defilement, our falling short of, and walking contrary to, the grace of baptism, and our engagements;[1070] by growing up to assurance of pardon of sin, and of all other blessings sealed to us in that sacrament;[1071] by drawing strength from the death and resurrection of Christ, into whom we are baptized, for the mortifying of sin, and quickening of grace;[1072] and by endeavoring to live by faith,[1073] to have our conversation in holiness and righteousness,[1074] as those that have therein given up their names to Christ;[1075] and to walk in brotherly love, as being baptized by the same Spirit into one body.[1076]