Alabama Tracks

I recently took the plunge in the Facebook realm and reconnected with some old school friends. Of all the people I found, David is probably one of my most intriguing friends. He always has interesting questions and today he asked a doozy based on this article

My problem is that while I am convinced that the reasonable accomodations Frankie has come to advocate seem like the proper policies to pursue–I think his analysis on how to get there is flawed. Similarly, while I am still convinced that abortion is murder, I don’t want to become John Brown or Scott Roeder; but I can’t find an intellectually satisfying reason for why I shouldn’t be.

There’s just something about these kinds of questions that draws me to them like a moth to a flame. Sometimes you get burned but it’s sooo pretty… So this may be a practice in self immolation but I think that Frank and David have some points that could stand more discussion than the tiny little box Facebook gives you. So, rather than eat up David’s wall with my ramblings, I turn here where I have room to stretch my legs.

If you’ve not read Frank’s article, it is probably one of the most feckless articles I’ve ever read. Frank used to be a Christian and now, not so much. The article is a mocking mea culpa about how he and “other Christians” are really responsible for the murder of one George Tiller. Tiller was probably one of the most vocal and active abortionists in the country, going so far as to abort up to the moments before birth. He was murdered at his church by a deranged gunman who had dealings with a pro-life group. There’s no indication the group had anything to do with the shooting.

Given Frank’s choice of platform, I knew it wasn’t going to be a friendly article but I was downright stunned at how well postmodernism had grabbed him. His assertions are that the “religious right” is largely a hate filled group, “pro-life” is really another way of saying “kill abortionists”, and that the primary objection to abortion is largely due to late term abortions, which have a nasty way of producing byproducts that resemble human anatomy. David’s question seems to be how to rebut this without turning into a raving lunatic.

The best place to start is with the assertion that the “religious right” (read Christianity) is a group with “hate-filled rhetoric”. If this were true, shootings like this would be common. Furthermore, I don’t think Frank was all that much into the Bible. The biggest hole in Frank’s assertion is that, to be a Christian, you can’t run around spewing hate, much less arbitrarily executing people you don’t like. I mean, Christ himself said that the law was summed up as loving God and loving your neighbor. You can twist the Bible all you want but you can’t wring hate from its pages with an objective reading. Ravi Zacharias put it best when he said that you can’t judge ANY philosophy on its extremes. People will take pretty much anything and twist it to their own bent. Furthermore, how, then, does he explain the massive outpouring of things like charity, or love? Why would people filled with hate condemn this action as just as wrong, if not worse, than the actions of Dr Tiller?

Then there’s the issue of murder. Since murder requires intent, let’s simplify it for the sake of discussion. When is it justifiable to kill another person? The two basic answers (for the sake of this discussion) are in wartime combat and when another life is in eminent danger. To reach the point where you are committing murder like, say, Paul Hill, you have to twist several ideas to reach justification. The most common are that the subjects of abortion, being murdered themselves, make it some form of defense and that it is the “will of God”.

The latter is one that cannot be addressed in any fashion except to say that, when a man has convinced himself he is carrying out God’s will, he is capable of anything. To the former, it is madness to run around executing people doing things you disagree with. In essence, they would become gods unto themselves in the same way that various shooters around the country do. Once you are your own moral authority with a gun, you become an arbiter of death, meting it out as you see fit and ending it only when someone (perhaps yourself) questions (or is about to question) the basis for that authority.

It’s also important to note that, in some ways, the media feeds this. I saw Paul Hill as an attention junkie. People paid a LOT of attention to him after an abortion shooting in the late 80s because he was one of the few kooks who defended  the shooter. It wasn’t too long after the limelight faded that he took up arms himself and got it back and once again  just before he was executed. He fed on the attention and if you look at the interviews you can see it.

The last assertion is that the primary objection to abortion comes from late term abortions.

The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping.I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It’s the late term abortions that horrify most people.

Not entirely. He’s right about Roe v Wade, and I think that Liberals will, at some point, have to come to terms with the fact that the judiciary can’t make sweeping reforms that elected officials are too scared to. But abortion is a deeper issue that what trimester we’re talking about. Christians, and the “pro-life” stance, declare that all life is sacred. Period. The “pro-choice” stance is that only some life is precious. What few on the Left like to discuss is what is a plain truth elsewhere: they want to be the people to choose. This sounds far fetched until you read statements like this recent one from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice (emphasis mine)

Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way.

That the NY Times saw no problems with such an idea only compounds the horror. It makes perfect sense when you consider that abortion is a fig leaf for things like eugenics. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, held similar views (abortion clinics in black neighborhoods, forced sterilization for mental retardation, etc). Abortion erodes the conscience. It tells us that some people shouldn’t be here, that they are mistakes the universe made and we can fix them with a simple procedure. If we get government funding for it, we can make “them” go away quicker. Given that abortion is largely unregulated (few people, if any, are prosecuted for violating abortion laws), there’s no telling just how far this can go. Tiller was probably just in it for the money. Heaven help us if others are in it to get rid of “you”.

So who is responsible for George Tiller’s murder? The man who pulled the trigger. It’s not Frank, nor is it Christianity, nor a book nor an organization (although that makes for a better story). Frank can sleep better knowing his confession was unnecessary.

Many years ago I read a book by the late Larry Burkett entitled The Coming Economic Earthquake (out of print so not easy to find). If you’re not familiar with him, it founded Christian Financial Concepts which eventually merged with Crown Ministries. Larry had cancer and knew it was time to step aside. His cancer claimed him in 2004. He was a Dave Ramsey voice long before even Dave was.

I say all of this because I’m glad he never got to see a day his predictions may very well come true. That link was written eight years ago about a book now published some eighteen years ago. Keep that in mind as you read on.

If you’re not familiar with the word trillion, one trillion written out looks like this

1,000,000,000,000

Or, put another way, one trillion is one million squared, or a million sets of one million. Obama has us spending over $3,000,000,000,000 and he’s not only not broken a sweat, he’s not slowing down for trifling questions like “How will we pay for all of this?” Out expenditures may well be beyond $5T by the time this is all done.

Social policy no longer scares me (and that should scare you). Abortion? Can be undone. Fairness Doctrine? Reversible. But this loan (make no mistake about what it is) is not reversible. And what it is going to do to you (yes you) should scare you.

One of Burkett’s major cautions was against the Fiat Standard.  That means that the money in your pocket, bank account, etc, has value because the US Treasury says it does. There is nothing beyond what the Treasury says to back this up. Once upon a time, the US Dollar was backed by gold and silver found in places like Fort Knox. This is what Ron Paul was on about in his presidential bid. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing out of hand but it lets the US tinker with the value of the Dollar by controlling the supply. This is what made Allan Greenspan such a powerful man.

The problem comes when any government gets into monetary trouble. So let’s say the US owes you $1,000. They could, literally, print some up and give it to you. Not a big deal. But let’s say they did that for everyone in the country. Free $1000 to everyone! Sounds good, right? But consider that there’s 350M or so Americans. So that would be $350B in new currency running around. What happens next is called inflation. Inflation happens when the buying power of currency falls. This happens naturally over time. But when the government prints money to pay debts you get hyperinflation. This is a bad thing. A VERY bad thing.

Germany did just that at the end of WWI. They had to repay France and England so their leaders figured they would print some up and hand it over. But France didn’t buy it. They took Germany’s coal mines and all the profits from them. But Germany had all this extra currency laying around. So you got hyperinflation. Imagine a world where a loaf of bread costs $1000. That really happened in Germany. The exchange rate between the US Dollar and the German Doich Mark before Germany’s economy collapsed was 1 trillion to 1.

Unsurprisingly there was a revolt in Germany because the average working guy didn’t get any of the currency and yet had to make do with the same wages that bought less and less until they might as well have been paying him in dirt. People starved and the country ground to a halt. The result of that revolt brought a man named Adolf Hitler to power.

So why type up all of this now? Well, consider for a moment that we’re overextended as a country. Not by a little bit but by well over $1T. Now consider what Burkett wrote eight years ago, after the Clinton era ended (emphasis mine).

I felt that our national debt and annual deficit were out of control and would eventually bring our economy to its knees, creating an economic collapse of historic proportions. Although I did not say that I thought the economy was going to drop in any particular year, I did feel that if we did not change our ways we would experience a huge economic crisis sometime after the turn of the century.

The reality is that neither the Democrats in power, nor Barak Obama, are dealing with the economy. Instead, we’re watching wholesale passage of every liberal spending plan ever dreampt of. What was in the $787B “stimulus” bill? Nobody can really say for sure yet. Certainly almost nobody read it in its entirety before passing it. And we have Bush’s folly of the $700B “bailout” where nobody knows where that went either. In fact, some of its largest recipients have come back for more. Then there the $410B earmark, er, spending bill. And now Obama wants Universal Healthcare and mortgage bailouts to boot. Is there no end to this?

Obama ran on the platform of change and many people voted for just that. No more wars with potential draft. No more “war on terror”. Maybe even no more economic gloom and doom. But we might have just saved our children from fighting in a war that’s pretty much over anyways only to put them on the hook for what may be the largest political fraud ever. Even if we held a new election tomorrow (we’re only 45 days into the Obama presidency), much of this is already law and being done as I write this. Everyone will be paying higher taxes soon in the form of energy taxes and bad energy policy and that’s just the start of this menagerie. If inflation surges (and I suspect it will soon) then all bets are off. If the Chinese (the larget buyers of Treasury Bills, basically a government bond) call in their markers then we’ll be so far up a creek even a paddle factory won’t be able to pull us back.

Pray for our country. Pray this madness ends soon. Pray that someone stands up to this and that we at least make it until 2010, where politicians feel some accountability for this foolishness.  It’s just not social policy at stake anymore, it’s freedom.

The rich rule over the poor,
and the borrower is servant to the lender.
Proverbs 22:7