Piling On (Me) Part I

My apologies for not writing about this sooner, but Gene Vilensky and Lukas Halim have both responded to my response to Lukas on the YFP blog.

First, Lukas: I'm not sure he read my post very carefully, because he repeatedly attributes to me passages that I cited from a William Saletan article. He's unintentionally right about "international" being the key word in Bush's rejection of an "international truth standard." The truth standard that Bush (or any other president) has to pass is of course an international standard---because (and I'd be shocked to see YFP contributors disagreeing with this point) truth is an objective property, and the truth about weapons in Iraq is the same for the president of France as it is for the president of the United States. But the word "international" itself can function as a glyph for "those anti-American foreigners," an epistemically direct and non-semantic articulation by which the president created a false dichotomy between patriotism and ontological realism. In other words, the processes by which beliefs can be reliably justified are the same in France as they are in this country, and any attempt to suggest otherwise for political purposes is cynical, naked xenophobia.

Lukas wants to know how I square my contention that neither Bob Jones III nor Charles Colson are fringe figures within the evangelical right with Colson's condemnation some of Jones's views as unrepresentative of evangelicals. Very simply. Both men being within a broadly (or even narrowly) understood mainstream of the political evangelical movement is perfectly compatible with one of them claiming that the other is out of the mainstream. QED.

Lukas is also interested in the reasons that I object to Colson's assertion that "the election victory was God 'giving us a chance to repent and to restore some moral sanity to American life.'" I'm somewhat flabbergasted that it's my outrage that's controversial. Colson is saying that one of the candidates in the presidential election was, in effect, anointed by God, and that his victory is divine mercy. Well, dammit if that doesn't make opposition to the administration rather futile. Moreover, for the record, I would not be comfortable with Lincoln's election victory being described as "God's way of giving us a chance to repent of the sins of slavery?". The corollary to such a statement, for one thing, is that the victories of the antebellum pro-compromise presidents were God's way of protecting the South's peculiar institution. And that Millard Fillmore's ascendancy to the presidency was God's way of letting Catholics know (have I got Lukas's attention yet) that they weren't welcome in these United States.

Finally, Lukas wants me to provide an example of the sort of NR article on stem-cell research that I said would make me wretch. Gladly. Robert P. George's column from July is easily the vilest thing I've yet seen written on the subject. I can elaborate if asked to do so.