* “From the ridiculous to the sublime” — Virginia Postrel on the transition from Rick Warren to Aretha Franklin.
* President Obama has mentioned non-believers in his address: “We are a nation of Christians and Jews, Hindus and Muslims and non-believers.” (per Legal Times).
* “Stop Being the Narrow Party“: Rudy Giuliani on what the Republican Party needs to do next, on David Frum’s website (launching today) NewMajority.com.
Noreen Malone at Slate reports on the varying practices of some early Presidents, notably that conservative fellow, John Quincy Adams:
According to official records kept by the Architect of the Capitol, Teddy Roosevelt is the only president who wasn’t sworn in using a Bible; he took a rushed oath of office in 1901 following the assassination of William McKinley. However, it’s rumored that LBJ was sworn in using a Catholic missal aboard Air Force One after Kennedy’s assassination. John Quincy Adams, according to his own letters, placed his hand on a constitutional law volume rather than a Bible to indicate where his fealty lay. Franklin Pierce “affirmed” rather than swore his oath on the Bible, reportedly because of a crisis of faith following his son’s death. There are no known inauguration Bibles for presidents John Adams through John Tyler; in fact, there’s no concrete evidence that those early presidents used a Bible at all for the oath.
Many readers will already be familiar with that lively secularist redoubt at ScienceBlogs, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where Ed Brayton often crosses swords with creationists, WorldNetDaily, and a wide assortment of other religion-inspired groups and publications ranging from Focus on the Family to Scientology. I’m not sure what Ed’s own politics are, but I’ve tended to classify Dispatches as at least secular-right-friendly, since it’s relatively low on the sort of gratuitous preassumed leftishness one meets with in many such enterprises. If you’re not already familiar with Dispatches this makes a good time to check it out, if only because of the variety on display: Ed has just returned from a vacation during which six (!) guestbloggers stepped in to fill his shoes. Among the six was friend of this site Jon Rowe, who posted twice on the role of religion as a possible underpinning of legal rights, and whose farewell post, here, ended with an enormously controversial semi-appreciation of George W. Bush, along with less controversial tributes to this site and to Tim Sandefur. And another was Reason investigative journalist and police-abuse specialist Radley Balko, some of whose contributions can be found here (federal subsidies to police), here (“mild” defense of cop in BART shooting — did someone mention controversy?), and here (Drug War).
There’s no rule that says secular conservatives have to be libertarian (or anything approaching that state of belief), and indeed for any number of reasons they do not (the good Mr. Hobbes comes to mind), but I was, nevertheless, struck by this passage from Matt Ridley’s much-commented upon (and terrific) London Spectator piece on Charles Darwin:
“Ideas evolve by descent with modification, just as bodies do, and Darwin at least partly got this idea from economists, who got it from empirical philosophers. Locke and Newton begat Hume and Voltaire who begat Hutcheson and Smith who begat Malthus and Ricardo who begat Darwin and Wallace. Before Darwin, the supreme example of an undesigned system was Adam Smith’s economy, spontaneously self-ordered through the actions of individuals, rather than ordained by a monarch or a parliament. Where Darwin defenestrated God, Smith had defenestrated government.”
Food for thought.
Walter, the debate about whether taxpayer-funded vouchers should be able to be used in schools attached to one religious denomination or another has been going on for years. My own inclination has been to think, with reservations, that the answer is yes. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that the increasingly diverse nature of religious belief in America is going to add yet another complication to this controversy, one that might cause me (FWIW), and perhaps others, to change their mind.
If such vouchers can be used to pay the fees at, say, Roman Catholic or Evangelical schools, logic dictates that they could also be used for schools associated with other faiths, such as Islam. That’s fair enough, I reckon, but that in turn raises the prospect of taxpayer funding for some schools where the Koran might dominate the curriculum to a degree that takes what is being taught very far from the educational mainstream. What, I wonder, would voters make of the idea of taxpayer-supported madrassas, or, for that matter, schools affiliated to some of this country’s wilder Christian sects? Not so much, I reckon.
The answer, theoretically, would be to insist that all voucher-eligible schools meet certain objective tests (a certain number of hours of math, science and so on), but quite how those tests would be drawn up and policed in the light of the First Amendment makes one wonder if this would be in any way practicable.
Catholic schools are in steep decline, their enrollment having “steadily dropped by more than half from its peak of five million 40 years ago”, according to a New York Times account. Among the better-known reasons: 1) nuns and priests who once staffed teaching positions have retired and their ranks have not been renewed in the near-total absence of new American “vocations”; 2) as urban Catholics suburbanized over the past two generations, Church officials for various reasons did not choose to follow them out by establishing suburban schools in large numbers; 3) having fully entered the mainstream of American life, Catholics are less drawn than previously to separate institutions. The Times article adds another, perhaps less familiar reason: while 15 percent of children from Catholic families currently attend parochial school — down from roughly 50 percent in 1965 — only 3 percent of Hispanics choose parochial schools, especially significant since that group will soon comprise a majority of American Catholics.
The policy angle on all this, of course, is the perennial agitation for “school choice” in the form of vouchers or tax credits for parents who pursue private or religious education. My impression — it may be wrong — is that the school-choice issue cuts across both believer-unbeliever and libertarian-traditionalist lines on the Right. Scratch a policy activist in the school choice movement, in my experience, and you will very often find the sort of Milton Friedman conservative who is libertarian-tinged, secular, or both. On the other hand many other conservatives are deeply skeptical of the voucher idea, above all because of the fear that it will extend state control over religious and private schools and thus make them more like the public. And this second group definitely cuts across both religious and lib-trad lines: it includes many libertarians of a sort more “hard-core” than Friedman, some Old Right types, and many of the more strongly orthodox or otherwise religious traditionalists.
Another way of looking at it is that the cause of school vouchers got left behind in the culture wars: the Colsons and Neuhauses, Dobsons and Bauers either never supported it as a cause at all, or chose not to put it on their list of prime demands. What do the rest of you think?
I watched Bill O’Reilly’s show last night on Fox News. The Big Mick was going on about how the successful ditching of that plane in the Hudson River, and the rescue of all on board, must have been a miracle.
I’d be curious to see O’Reilly’s mailbag on that. Somewhere out there in TV-land there must have been someone watching who’d lost a loved one in a plane crash. That person would surely have been thinking to himself: “Wait a minute here, pal. My wife was as worthy of life as anyone. She was a loving wife and mother, a patriotic and hard-working citizen. Why didn’t she deserve one of these miracles your God hands out so capriciously?
Don’t religious people understand that when they talk like this, they are implicitly insulting people? This planeload of people was deserving of God’s attention and a subsequent miracle, but that one wasn’t? Why?
And above and beyond that, to the point Heather has made at least once: If God is so darn capricious in His judgments, how exactly is life with Him different from life without Him? The randomness of events like this doesn’t prove there is no God, but surely it proves that there might as well not be.
Per Peter R. Henriques at History News Network, an oft-told tale about George Washington’s first inaugural oath of office is a “myth that should be discarded“. (h/t: Ian Geldard on Twitter). And I don’t even need to page Jonathan Rowe since I see that he has it already.
