HOLY FIRE BLOG

It‘s true; Santa‘s absconded. He‘s gone. (See, "Why Santa Took Off the Cowboy Boots", previous post, this blog).

Execs at GM and Chrysler realized this sometime around midnight Sunday (March 29,2009) when they expected to hear him shinnying down the chimney with another $22 billion in his sack.

Instead, GM‘s CEO Rick Waggoner‘s walking papers bounced down the chimney like a lump of very hard coal, caromed off the grate, and slid into the stocking Waggoner had left hanging by the chimney with care. Waggoner is now looking for work.

Chrsyler‘s CEO Robert Nardelli seems to have squeaked by with nothing more than a empty stocking (relatively speaking; Chrysler actually got another $6 billion and 30 days to shape up and complete a merger with Italy‘s Fiat or they‘ll be shipping out for sure in a forced bankruptcy. UPDATE: Chrysler reported reaching a deal with Fiat on Monday within hours after Washington issued the ultimatum).

Who would have thought? Just a few months back it seemed Washington was Detroit‘s Santa Claus for sure; but in fact I think we got it right in the previous post: Santa‘s no match for the USA‘s free wheeling cowboy economy.

So with what is left of his reputation in hand, word was he may have run for part‘s unknown. Who wouldn‘t be concerned with getting away before every boy and girl in the world came to think that everyday was Christmas; and that Wiis and X-Boxes now belonged in Cracker Jacks boxes because big fat bank accounts making video games seem like trinkets were the new Christmas goody to be handed out; and these had nothing to do with being good; in fact, the badder you were—with other people‘s money, anyway—the more Christmas cash you could get in January, June, or July, or any other month of the year? But now…?

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus; he is just not spending much time right here right now. Last seen landing in Amsterdam, we can‘t be sure the Dutch let him stay. Worried about ING asking for more money, the Dutch didn‘t want to get too close to the fat jolly fellow until his stained reputation as a front for Wall Street with an office in Washington could be rehabilitated.

Santa assured them he had discarded the cowboy boots; that in fact he had been snookered into wearing them in the first place; that he much preferred the reindeer and elves to cattle and cowboys; that he disowned all affiliation with the American cowboy economy.

But the Dutch are a hardheaded lot. So it may be that due to unease in the Netherlands Santa will just head back to his digs at the North Pole and stay there out of sight until December 24th rolls around. And then maybe he‘ll return to work but stick to kids and candy and stay out of high finance and big business.

What this means, of course, is that GM and Chrysler will just have to prove to Washington‘s satisfaction that they can be profitable somewhere down the road without frequent visits from Santa.

Anyone see a problem here? "Washington" and "profitable" in the same sentence equates with gobbledygook; they are as alien to each other as pro wrestling is to competition.

So the obvious question surfaces like flotsam from an overflowing storm drain: did Santa really leave Washington on his own or was he spirited away by Secret Service on instructions from the White House getting advice from Treasury: get that dude out of here so we can salvage something from the AIG debacle in the mind of the public by coming down hard on GM and Chrysler?

In fact, "The moves [to demand more of GM and Chrysler] also reflect growing criticism of government bailouts," one source notes.

Another adds, "The Obama administration, perhaps reflecting public sentiment outside Michigan, has shown less patience with the auto industry than with other troubled sectors."

But why?

Well, some think that Washington wouldn‘t know a real profit from a pencil because politics assumes compromise based on polls, pork, and promises with the nearest thing to a profit being the next election with a return to office.

So Santa, right now you are a liability, a drag on the campaign trail. Sorry, Big Guy. That red is just too noticeable; and the beard—a dead giveaway. Later, dude…

The point is politics is at work as usual in Washington in the guise of greater accountability. One wonders why if Washington now is willing to let the automakers slide into bankruptcy to insure future profitability, they didn‘t apply the same firmness to the financial sector. The difference seems deeper—or should I say shallower—than ideology or party affiliation, as if a Republican versus Democrat thing; it seems rather that the earlier giveaways to the finance guys were as political as are the current takeaways (a euphemism for giving less) from the auto guys, which simply means that everyone had, and now has, votes in view. The firestorm stirred among the voters by the AIG bonus boondoggle sealed the automaker‘s fate.

And Santa‘s fate, too. The idle chatter is we just cannot have the guy around attracting more attention to the cash cow roaming free in D.C.

Why, everyone will be queuing up with their hands out. "Please sir, may I have some more?" is a phrase best left buried in a Dickens‘ book where it belongs—on a dusty shelf in the deepest recesses of a book depository in London, if at all possible. Heavens! It is just too risky to remind folk that Oliver Twist‘s Fagin might have invented AIG had he lived long enough; and A Christmas Carol‘s Scrooge surely would have held a majority share in the firm. It is just best that morality plays be left to kiddies and Christmases.

But there goes Santa, too: an upright, outstanding, moral guy become a symbol of Washington handouts using taxpayer money to cover losses driven by Wall Street‘s greed and Detroit‘s ineptness. Not cool, man; not cool. Even if Washington politics have no more to do with morals than profits, they have everything to do with the polls. Which means Santa has to go…

It has nothing to do with who you really are, Bro; but everything with what you remind us of. If these latest signals from the White House ring true, Christmas may be un-PC in Washington for quite some time to come.

Let us hope so.

Peace, Big Guy! By the way, red is your color. Green is just…well, you know.

"Now Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! On, Cupid! On Donner and Blitzen! To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall! Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"

Posted by paul at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Multiple choice quiz: why did Santa sleigh into Amsterdam this week without cowboy boots anywhere in sight?

Because:

• the boots weren‘t his; they didn‘t fit, and his feet hurt;
• they are an affront to reindeer décor;
• the Dutch have taken a dislike to all things cowboy;
• Santa is just plain tired so he went to work for ING (Internationale Nederlanden Groep) on loan from AIG (American International Group);
• all of the above; or, none of the above.

Clue: headlines that didn’t make it into the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant on Monday, to wit, "Santa Claus Conscience Corrals Cowboy Economy?" The paper did report that "ING Chief Executive Officer Jan Hommen said he had made a ‘moral appeal’ to the top 1,200 employees to return their variable bonuses earned last year."

Shades of AIG! Santa has defected to the EU (European Union) for sure! But folk in Brussels are not polkaing for joy just yet—they are sniffing around for the cowboy boots.

The fallout from U.S. taxpayers‘ outrage over bonuses paid to the AIG execs who led the giant insurer into near-default has reverberated globally and shaken the Dutch Finance Ministry to is core. So the Ministry has made a "moral appeal" for the return of "300 million euros (about 409 million U.S. dollars) in bonuses [paid] to about 40,000 staff members last year." These bonuses were paid AIG style even though ING "posted a net loss of 729 million euros (about 996 million dollars) for 2008 and has planned 7,000 job cuts."

In fact, the Dutch losses seem like chump change, mere "walking around money," less than a billion U.S. dollars compared to AIG‘s hundreds of billions in losses (when you combine losses from credit default swaps with the larger losses from AIG‘s Investments division ).

And maybe this is why Santa defected, sans the cowboy boots.

Let me explain.

Back in 1879 one fellow famously opted for Santa being an essential part of America culture, writing that "Yes, there is a Santa Claus;" he is one ray of that "eternal light with which childhood fills the world." That settled the issue for most Americans until AIG came along. For many Americans AIG extinguished that "eternal light." Now it seems, Santa is trying to defect to the Dutch.

It is just easier for Santa to appeal to the higher sensibilities of the wishful thinking he symbolizes in a culture where a paltry billion dollars seems worth quibbling about. Why go on beating his head against the cowboy culture of Wall Street? The Street had not a qualm about rolling the dice with credit default swaps that placed, not a mere billion, but hundreds of billions of dollars of other people‘s money at risk.

Did I say they lost the roll? They shot craps in a way that no one in the history of Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, or the back alley ever has.

So after more than a century of trying to be hopeful and influence the cowboy culture of Wall Street with peace, joy, and love, even a wishful thinker like Santa is for sure tired. Feet hurt, Santa? You bet!

In fact, he took off the boots right after AIG‘s Edward Liddy assured Congress that U.S. taxpayers were legally responsible to pay the bonuses, even if doing so was morally and ethically reprehensible; goodbye smiley-faced conscience, hello lawless legality—for how can you have anything legal in a lawful sense apart from a conscience rooted in law? Well, ask Santa last seen chasing after a KLM Royal Dutch flight taking the North Pole route to Amsterdam. He and the American mindset are just no longer compatible.

As stated above, Santa got into the loop back in 1897 when Francis Pharcellus Church, an American journalist turned editor at the New York Sun, assured all of New York, America, and the world that in spite of callous, cold-hearted, calculating, cynical, skeptical, money-grubbling materialists, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." And everyone knew that "If you see it in the Sun, it‘s so!"

Church assured us in writing that "Santa Claus…exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist…there is a veil covering the unseen world which not…all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding…"

Except greed, deceit, and callous disregard for the wellbeing of investors, taxpayers, and a gaggle of other folk who neither invest nor pay taxes but may end up homeless and hungry due to the evil creative genius of high rollers who invented credit default swaps. Neither the poetic wishful imagery of Church nor the ‘supernal’ Santa Claus he proffered has a snow ball‘s chance in the hot place when Wall Street gets warmed up. When the Street is hot—well, makes a red devil turn green with envy as "love and generosity and devotion" to anything but money go bye bye.

"A cowboy economy" is how Kenneth Boulding described such frenzied greed. He coined the phrase back in the 1960s when describing an ‘illimitable’ economy symbolized in America‘s "‘illimitable plains’ and the ‘reckless and exploitative’ behavior of American economic activity." While he had harm to the environment mainly in view – egregious strip mining, deforestation, etc – clearly by extension Wall Street fits the critique.

The New American Plainsmen Foraging Pioneers are Wall Street‘s minions run amok. They remind one of fearless cowboy wranglers with Gatlin guns itching for the slaughter of a few billion buffalo, Native Americans, and prairie dogs thrown in for good measure. While we‘re at it, wouldn‘t hurt to strip a few billion acres of American backyards of shade trees, swings, and lawn chairs to make way for the cattle…

It just seems to many of us that a new breed of cattle baron has taken the helm of too many outfits on Wall Street. Illimitable, unregulated, scheming inventiveness in new ways to gamble with other people‘s money drives their evil genius. In turn, the barons are hailed by the drovers—in the manner of Jim Kramer, if Jon Dailey has his head on at least half straight—who corral the strays and keep the main herd in line with their stock picks.

Thus it is that Marty Robbins‘ “Whoppie ti yi yo! Get along little doggie, it‘s your misfortune and none of my own” sung to the cattle, has been replaced with the likes of AIG‘s mantra, "Get along little dummie, it‘s your misfortune and none of my own; we‘re too big to fail but we sure stuck it to you," sung to the unsuspecting taxpayer.

Such is the new U.S. cowboy economy; in the face of which the morality of a Santa Claus conscience based on wishful hope does not stand a chance: all the wishing in the world about ‘supernal beauty and glory beyond’ where Santa Claus frolics with "faith, fancy, poetry, love, and romance" will not reign in Wall Street greed—for Wall Street, Washington is the only Santa Claus there is, every child‘s dream be damned. Indeed, the clearest signal that there‘s a new sheriff in town, and that the real Santa had best skedaddle for parts unknown, is that the American dream has become a Wall Street playground for an economy of greed in which the fat get fatter and the rest get flattened in the stampede. So much for "moral appeals" in America.

They tell us (with President Obama backing them up as of this morning 3/24/2009) that there is not a legal thing can be done about the recent egregious bonus payments. (Fifteen of the top 20 employees at AIG who received bonuses have agreed to give them back—a refund that totals about $50 million—but only in the face of overwhelming public pressure and threats from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo). Most of Wall Street excesses apparently fall into this lawless hole. If so, maybe it is so just because there is not enough moral substance in the American conscience to have been sure in the first place (before throwing billions of dollars around like leaves in the wind) that we matched the have to of law with the should do of essential morality for guys like AIG‘s cattle barons who have not a clue about ethics and morality. It follows that perhaps we let the Street slide into a sewer of greed because the burgeoning cowboy economy became the consumers own kind of Christmas Tree with Santa spreading goodies under it many thought were free because plastic and sub-prime loans just made it feel that way. So if the conscience happened to prick us from time to time, we quickly salved it over with wishes for goodness, rightness, and happiness forever and ever and ever as we rode one of the longest hot streaks in the history of the American economy right into the ground. Even if we did stay on till we began to think money grew on elms and cottonwoods as well as the evergreens of Christmas and it could be Christmas time all year, just a little honest scrutiny of what was driving the fantasy on Wall Street would have shown that ‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night’ was bound to turn into a nightmare.

Indeed, Santa is not hanging around. Legalities aside, he has fled to the moral appeals issued by ING‘s CEO Jan Hommen. "A spokesman for ING said on Monday it had launched a ‘moral appeal to management to hand in bonuses for 2008.’ So now we will see. Is there really "nothing else real and abiding" in the world other than the hopeful conscience of Santa Claus? Is there anything real enough in mere fanciful wishes that the ING people will be morally up to handing their bonuses back? Is the goodwill wishful thinking broad enough and deep enough in Holland to surmount the legal obstacle that there, too, there is no lawful requirement that anyone give the bonuses back?

Well, we will see. The Dutch are no dummies; for this reason they are inspecting the Santa Claus spirit that just emerged in Amsterdam very carefully: is this big fat dude dressed in red wearing cowboy boots? Is he not maybe a spy sent by Wall Street to infect the Dutch Finance Ministry with the cowboy fever? Is not all this "moral appeal" stuff really a ruse to divert attention while ING turns Amsterdam into its own Santa Claus? Why did Santa take off those cowboy boots anyway? Did he?

Posted by paul at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The national uproar over a near quarter billion dollars in bonuses ($220 million total in a couple of installments reported by AP on Wednesday, March 18) paid to executives of failed AIG (American International Group) intensifies daily at this writing. The latest—and perhaps the most succinct—expression of outrage comes from a mid-western Senator who suggests the AIG execs commit hara-kiri, ritual suicide known in Japan as the ultimate apology for failure.

While Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley did not refer directly to hara-kiri, he clearly meant the taking of one’s own life as a matter of honor originating in the era of the Japanese Samurai. In fact, Hideaki Noguchi, vice-president of H.S. Securities in Japan was the last Japanese exec to even come close to traditional hara-kiri. He committed suicide by slitting his wrists missing his belly—the hara-kiri sweet spot—by at least a few inches; and he did the deed on the Isle of Okinawa in a capsule hotel at a Japanese resort missing by about 1000 miles the Tokyo Stock Exchange where the fruits of his failure were mostly felt. That occurred in 2006. More recently, in 2007 a Japanese Minister of Agriculture hung himself in the face of criticism about misused funds. There is no evidence that anyone suffered much from his misdeeds.

So AIG execs—what about it?

Plenty of people have suffered from your misdeeds—unless of course you can show to the public you missed work that day the credit default swaps were handed out?

Oh yeah, and before you grab that sword we should note that Senator Grassley clarified his comments. He doesn’t really think you should do the hara-kiri number. He‘s after an apology sincere enough to make a difference in how we all look at you: pretty much with the evil eye right now.

Should we feel differently?

At issue here is a question of conscience: the public is outraged that AIG execs do not have one healthy enough to refuse the bonuses paid for by the American taxpayer without having been asked when it is the graciousness of the American taxpayer that enables them to keep their jobs in spite of the most horrific financial meltdown in history. No taxpayer believes that these same execs did not contribute to the meltdown; every taxpayer wants to know where they live. No, we’re not going to press for hara-kiri; we just want to see what a guy looks like whose conscience has gone missing.

Admittedly, America seems to be just the place for untethered consciences; they break free from their moorings every once in awhile. Barry Madoff‘s was last seen running down Wall Street headed for Broad as Barry picked the pockets of Jewry‘s most notable philanthropies. But why is this? How is it that Barry could keep the scheme going for two decades to the tune of 50 plus billion dollars, and when it is over smile, say sorry, and expect his wife to keep vast millions of dollars of the fruit of his chicanery? How is it that AIG execs do not even say sorry, but rather expect to be rewarded for their chicanery? Where is at least the closure of a hara-kiri scenario?

Actually, it‘s chasing after that conscience last seen turning left on Broad. Veered right, but right just seemed too—well, you know. If hara-kiri is the ultimate public expression of an inner anguish, it demands an appropriate inner anguish prior to achieving public finality. Such anguish is not the product of Wall Street; inner anguish as an appropriate expression of betrayal of public trust is not compatible with Wall Street as Madoff bears witness: himself the product of Wall Street, the darling of NASDAQ, ego, greed, and deceit trumped inner anguish everyday for more than 20 years and by all accounts would still be winning the day had not reality caught up….

The difference in a culture where hara-kiri brings finality even when greed has had its say is that, unlike America, one‘s conscience is as much a public as private concern. The ultimate disgrace in a hara-kiri culture is to have the inner anguish of one‘s private conscience exposed, which exposure is assumed as a matter of course when one betrays the public conscience.

It follows that Japan did not invent Wall Street for good reason: too much public conscience not enough private ego.

Of course, where private conscience ends and public conscience begins is a matter of debate; that Japanese culture creates a public conscience dominant enough that it drives private ego to hara-kiri is to western sensibilities weird. But that AIG execs with overblown egos should out of hand expect to be richly rewarded for turning Wall Street into their private gaming room with the public covering their loses is not just weird but wrong. It shows just how deeply and how long private and public consciences have been buried in private egos, greed, and deceit.

If this awful scenario playing out in Washington and on Wall Street right now does not shock us into reclaiming what has gone missing then we deserve what lies ahead. Hara-kiri is private suicide in a public manner; but there is also public suicide in a private manner.

This nation has no guarantee of its liberties or prosperity beyond the ability of our conscience to root out and rule over the stupid arrogances of Wall Street run wild, the financial abortions performed without permission on all of us by idiots with egos but neither brains nor conscience at firms like AIG. If we cannot recover for them that conscience gone missing we‘ll be like the kid in the AIG commercial standing at the foot of his parent‘s bed saying, "I can‘t sleep. I‘m worried about this family‘s financial future." His father‘s now ironic answer, "Buddy, we‘re with AIG," will be our deserved destiny. We‘ll not be tucking ourselves back in bed with Buddy; but taking all our Buddies by the hand, we will be discovering firsthand that there‘s always room for more lemmings in hell.

Posted by paul at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you caught the live broadcast (March 4) of the California Supreme Court hearing oral arguments for and against California’s Prop 8 you witnessed the pageantry of political expediency and moral equivocation in motion. At the same time, there emerged from the blur of posturing a barely clear thematic overlay of sincere people flailing about for a solution like a drowning man grabbing at fistfuls of air wishing to catch a life preserver that wasn’t there.

In the end, political posturing won the day; there was just nothing real to hold onto.

The Court signaled that it probably would uphold Prop 8, while not invalidating gay marriages already on the books; in short, it will offer a convoluted decision leaving a conundrum in place—whatever that may mean!

But this is just the point. The Court bore witness to its own loss of meaning as a symptom of a larger social malaise: the essence of what it means to human escapes us.

That it is not crystal clear that gay marriage is an abomination to God, an affront to humanity, and a denial of the fundamentals of humanness is proof of a societal darkness leaving us as ignorant of ourselves as an orangutan is of table manners. Impulse, appetite, and opportunity remain our constant companions in darkness, hounding ghosts of a civility that once was, making a mess that makes even the biggest monkeys proud but leaves humans retching their guts out in a gutter along a trail to nowhere.

Not civil enough any longer to know what humanness is, let alone have the courage to state it clearly, the Court grasps at what is merely momentarily opportune—the will of the voters— to avoid saying what should be stated clearly: that marriage is more than impulse, appetite, and opportunity—hormones, hunger, and a handy partner—which is what raw sexual drive is, hetero or homo. Marriage requires the richness of—dare I say it?— pure human sexuality, not in the sense primarily of holy but just untainted, unadulterated, and organic: human sexuality in its natural state forming an integral element of the whole; human sexuality serving its vital role distinguishing male from female in a vital union from which marriage springs.

Given this, contrary to vulgar opinion, marriage is neither polygamous or gay. As argued (in part) in previous posts, the natural state of human sexuality in its essence is bipartite monogamy. Marriage, then, becomes the visible, tangible, legal, and societal expression of human sexuality consisting of male and female in an exclusive union. It follows that when you pervert marriage you pervert what it means to be human.

Courts may never say this; by the same token they undercut all they do say about humanness, from human rights to hate crimes because apart from correctly defining the essence of humanness in marriage they have no definition of anything human; they can only lump us together with the orangutans and monkeys, applying impulse, appetite and opportunity as an imitation of the rule of law in what is in fact a lawless society.

There is more than one way to pervert this humanness, of course; and so-called “gayness” in itself does not, anymore than singleness does. One can be fully human and gay (if for the sake of argument we grant gayness), as one can be fully human and single; in which case, the very act of refraining from sexual intercourse fully reflects one’s humanness in reverence for the meaning of the sexual act. But one cannot be fully human and engage in sodomy, adultery, fornication, or other sexual perversion straight or gay. The moment one engages in sex outside the natural state as defined by God one jumps into the food fight with the orangutans and monkeys, running from civility, denying what it means to be human, and rejecting one’s own essential identity.

We will come back later to argue God-ness. Here—so that we do not talk past one another—we merely note in the reference above "as defined by God" the futility of engaging in sensible conversation about this or any other subject apart from God as the ultimate reference point for such a conversation. If God is not in the conversation with us, then conversation can be no more than a utility for self-deception, manipulation, and obfuscation in the name of proving anything or nothing. In short, apart from God in the conversation we talk nonsense. Witness the California Supreme Court in session, March 4, 2009. (or see, Dallas Willard on Correspondence Theory of Truth, or see Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer)

The point here is humanness is more than impulse, appetite, and opportunity no matter how good these may feel at any given moment or even continually; animals follow impulse appetite and opportunity, humans do not. Humans corral these, rule over them, and in doing so, rule all else; when this understanding is lost, human dominion is, too.

Created in the image of God as male and female, as male and female humans should rule the creation; to the degree that they do not we see chaos reflected in something amiss in the basic moral structure of what is real. Notice, I did not say in the basic "physical" structure of anything. Without going into issues beyond the scope of this post (we will take them up later), the creation cries out for moral guidance that can be rendered only by humans fully human: orangutans and monkeys cannot fill the bill nor can humans acting like them. God set the table of creation for humans with manners derived from moral sensibilities; apart from these moral sensibilities a feast becomes an orgy as manners morph into raw appetites run amok. Humans alone can supply the moral guidance fully reflecting humanness to all of creation and in so doing keep things on course, as it were, applying restraint to keep desert in its place as the accent to essential nutrition.

Part of this moral guidance should be to celebrate the equal value found in gayness (granting gayness as a matter of self-definition) that rules over impulse, appetite, and opportunity by refraining from sexual relations as in celebrating singleness that does so. In this, gayness and singleness can both speak to marriage guiding it back to the essential ideal too often lost. If we admit that mere union of male and female is no guarantee of ongoing humanness as reflected in God’s intent; and that although joined together, male and female too often find themselves at a table with the orangutans and monkeys having followed the deceitful lie of impulse, appetite, and opportunity into the gutter; then whether manifested in neglect, abuse, settled-in boredom, or divorce, when heterosexual marriage ends up on the rocks it is as much a witness in its own way of the loss of pure humanness as is the drive for gay marriage. Celibate singles, gay or straight, have something to say about this.

You may argue that divorce is an accommodation of a human condition as Jesus stated (e.g., Matthew 19:3-12); and that there can be circumstances where divorce is not merely justified but required. By the same token, one might argue that gay marriage is an accommodation to avoid same-sex promiscuity. So what is the difference? Merely that the whole matter turns on the meaning of the sexual union of male and female becoming one flesh; even in marriage this essential meaning can be so obliterated that sexual union becomes a lie and reconciliation is neither desirable nor justified: that to honor the meaning of the male-female sexual union divorce is required. On the same grounds it follows that gay "marriage" by definition is impossible because same-sex union obliterates the meaning of it: gayness, like singleness, can honor marriage and the essence of humanness only in celibacy; but in doing so, can legitimately serve as beacons of light shinning into the fog of confusion clouding broken marriages.

Whatever the finer points of this argument, and whether you agree or disagree, a couple of things come clear. One is that we who oppose gay marriage should be just as passionately for healthy heterosexual marriage. It just comes down to the fact that keeping marriage healthy is as important as keeping gays from it. The primary issue is not to protect marriage; but in protecting marriage to honor and celebrate what it means to be human beings bearing God’s image before the whole of creation. Orangutans cannot do this because they have no will to alter organic sexuality. Without table manners, they are without moral sensibilities, and procreate but do not create; that is their natural state. Bearing God‘s image we take giant leaps beyond mere procreation to create things both wonderful and awful. Altering organic sexuality, the natural state of you and me as part of a greater whole, is one of these. Some have done it and insist that we all join in. But like tinkering with a time bomb, there are consequences. So we have to ask: what will be the outcome? Blowing somethings to kingdom come is right in order. Blowing up other things entails blowing us up too. Traditional marriage is one of these. Even orangutans have more sense. Messy as they are, not one has been accused of self-immolation.

Posted by paul at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The previous post on this Blog ended as follows:

• "But also, this seal of approval is based on the value rising out of celebrating the differing roles. There is no greater threat to human value than forgetting, ignoring, or deliberately blurring the differences…."

In fact, I recommend you go to that post, "THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE GUY WITH GALS," and read it before you read this. You will find it by scrolling down or following a link in the column to the right. But doing so is not essential. This post will make sense either way; but that post adds flavor.

At this writing tomorrow—Thursday March 5, 2009, to be exact—the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for and against California‘s Prop 8—the ban on gay marriage.

The issue is inflammatory enough to have sparked demonstrations, debates, and open hostility. GOD HATES GAYS, shouted one sign at a recent fracas on a local college campus, even as a professor of law decried Prop 8 as an affront to the fundamentals of human justice. It is only fair, he argued, that gays be allowed to marry—and he meant each other: same sex marriage equals justice in his world.

But not in God’s world.

Of course, neither in God’s world does anyone wave signs selling hatred as a virtue.

One error on both sides of the issue is to elevate raw human will to the level of supposed noble causes: to blame one‘s own hatred of gays on God, for example; or to exalt one‘s own sentiment about gays to the level of justice, on the other. Both are arrogant expressions of rebellion against God, replacing God’s will with human opinion. Neither have anything to do with what God really thinks of gays.

To discover that you have to follow the curious case of God and gays in the Bible…

Now, it will do no good to say, "Yes! The Bible says God hates gays," on the one hand; or "Baloney! The Bible is irrelevant," on the other. Both responses are fruit of a common seed: ignorance of the Bible.

The Bible "has the ring of truth," said J.B. Phillips upon close enough examination of it to produce his widely-used paraphrased Bible.

The Bible is true because "it is true to what is," said Dr. Francis Schaeffer upon examining the major world philosophies in light of the Bible.

The Bible claims that God is speaking from its pages. If he is, the Bible makes perfect sense while making sense of the world; if he is not, then nothing makes sense....

The curious case of God and gays really is this simple. Has God spoken? Then let us hear what he says. Has God not spoken? Then there is no such thing as justice because you lack a yardstick to tell what justice is.

It follows that the very pursuit of a definitive decision on gay marriage assumes a morality, an inherent justice written into the cosmos that we can discover; problem is you cannot call such inherent justice something like "human rights" and think you have dispensed with the Bible, for you have merely made a circle around the wagons and are back to human opinion. What are human rights? Either there is some clear mark of morality and justice apart from human opinion or there is not; and if there is, you will look high and low to find it apart from the Bible; so start turning pages as you read carefully and listen to what God says.

This does not mean to find proof texts about God and gays; you might find those aplenty but will not grasp one of them truly apart from grasping first the high value God places upon his good creation. God made things a certain way on purpose—because he is good and chooses goodness for the crown of his creation, man as male and female (see Genesis 1:27).

Here is the curious thing: God clearly calls man male and female—the basic unit of humanity is a pair, man and woman in union most clearly expressed in sexual union where they literally become one flesh. Male and male cannot express this union; female and female cannot express this union. The effort to do so is clearly against nature, a violation of the natural order and it doesn’t take rocket science to explain why. Sodomy is no more two becoming one flesh than stuffing a potato into a Volkswagon’s tail pipe makes the union German potato salad; that you can do both does not make either other than what they are in fact—a clear departure from the recipe.

But the case gets more curious: why call sodomy marriage? If it seems clear enough to so many that God‘s intent in nature of man as male and female in sexual union is that they be one flesh, and that this is what humans have for millenniums called marriage, why the drive to upend this and make what is clearly not one flesh one flesh? And why call this justice, as if sodomy were the equivalent of marriage? Why is it unjust to call sodomy, sodomy and marriage, marriage?

Because the ultimate goal is neither same-sex marriage or justice but an overwhelming, obliterating, blatant denial of God‘s goodness. Sodomy is a denial of man as male and female. It thus denies the most basic aspect of God’s goodness in creation, God‘s making of man in his own image as a community of distinct persons with essential differences joined as one in a union of love.

By the same token, as a God of loving goodness God cannot hate gays; but for their own good and that of his creation neither can he allow gays, straights, or in-betweens to slander his goodness.

The ideal of man as male and female in union as one flesh means the basic unit of creation is a community of love purposefully incorporating essential physical, emotional, and psychological differences; the differences are essential to the union of two and foundational to God’s purpose in creation, which is not just survival of the fittest—which denies the validity of sodomy— but a joyful celebration of the differences in a union of love in the presence of God. God calls this good, those who share in it know it is good, and nature concurs.

Whether the California Supreme Court will concur is another story. But in any case, the Court cannot pass judgment on God‘s goodness, and thus can have nothing to say about true marriage whatever it may say about sodomy as the equivalent. Such is the curious case of God and gays. "Let God be true and every man a liar," is how the Apostle Paul put it; and did so bluntly, I may say.(Romans 3:4).

Posted by paul at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey, ladies—and guys, too—here‘s one for you: while the Bible, and by association the Christian faith, is often accused of being patriarchal and sexist, the curious case of the guy with gals spills the beans on all the accusers.

They are just plain wrong and are themselves the ones playing the sexist game. I should know; because I, too, like the fellow in the Bible am a guy with gals.

Hold on…guy with gals?

Lest someone take this the wrong way and think we are running a rumor mill about the pastor‘s harem let me clarify what I mean…?

First, as to "sexism:" as used here sexism labels an array of attitudes and actions by which a supposed male dominated society devalues femaleness. Nowhere, we are told, is this more glaring than in the Bible; and in the Bible, a fundamental biblical institution tells the tale most clearly—in marriage a woman takes her husband‘s name. The idea of Mary Smith becoming Mrs. John Doe comes from the early biblical account of Eve being called "woman for she was taken out of man" (Genesis 2:23). How sexist can you get?

Well, without going too deeply into the theology of matrimony, suffice it to say that when read in the simple context of what is real, the early Genesis account refutes sexism by placing equal value on maleness and femaleness as unique compliments of being human. While fulfilling different roles, man and woman in union comprise the fundamental unit of humanity, not man or woman in isolation. It is the drive to isolate that produces sexism, whether the impetus rises in feminism or patriarchy.

The foregoing cries out for pages of explanation, but I resist; and I dare to because the Bible‘s case against sexism comes out most clearly in interesting ways where least expected; as in the curious case of the guy with gals...

His name was Zelophehad.

If there ever was a guy who could have charged society with sexism, it was this guy. His biblical identity has been entirely consumed by the women around him…talk about reverse discrimination! Anyone who dares charge the Bible with sexism regarding women must adequately explain this curious case. Of course, they must explain other things, too; such as Joseph being called "the husband of Mary," (Matthew 1:16), tantamount to being Mr. Mary! Other examples abound; but here we‘re mostly concerned with Zelophehad‘s curious case.

His name surfaces nine times in Scripture, most of his story being told in a staccato-like rhythm in short passages squeezed between Numbers 26:33 and 27:11; he is mentioned again in Joshua and Chronicles, but always with a common theme, the women around him! Perhaps the Chronicles passage best sums up the potential for hanging a feminist label on those writing about him (from a patriarchal point of view): in a genealogy featuring the exploits of sons of mighty warriors, as almost an aside in (yawn) "oh, yeah" fashion the writer remembers that "[a]nother descendant was named Zelophehad, who had only daughters" (1 Chronicles 7:15).

No getting around it. He was the guy with gals; that was his legacy. No macho exploits tagging along, no sons with sword and shield on great white steeds bearing his posterity into the sunset. In every single place he is mentioned he is the guy who had no sons, only daughters.

He had five; I have three so there is sort of a common bond. More importantly, firsthand I can bet that he had a deeper understanding of the biblical value of femaleness than the average guy.

Now, were the Bible a sexist book it would have to gloss over Zelophehad‘s story, put a spin on it, enhance it with some macho detail from his life. Instead, it tells the story as a matter of course emphasizing the guts, gumption, and wisdom displayed by his daughters upon their father‘s death. To wit, they courageously entered the fray over what would happen to his inheritance. Since by law inheritance passed from father to son and there was no son…?

The gals stepped up to claim what had belonged to their dad. Under purely patriarchal law such a claim would be disallowed. But Israel was not a patriarchy; it was a theocracy in which God’s wisdom, grace, and justice were supposed to prevail; and while patriarchs may be sexist, God is not. So the gals got their dad‘s stuff—his land!

Interestingly, their legal argument that won the day was not that they should be treated like men, the "sameness fallacy" of modern feminism; but rather that the very essence of the male-female union comprising humanness in its most basic unit of completeness demands equal value for both roles because they must (and do) differ. Their essential value lay in their essential difference.

"Why should our father’s name disappear from his clan because he bore no son?" they demanded to know (Numbers 27:4). He bore daughters; does that make him less valuable than if he had born sons? Importantly, they did not argue, we are the same as sons; but rather, they argued, our daughterliness is of equal value.

In short, that Zelophehad had fathered five daughters was no less meaningful to God and the cosmos than that Jacob 400 years before him had fathered twelve sons. Value resides in the meaningfulness of being a creature bearing God’s image; and this requires that we always remember that "God created man in his own image…male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27).

So the curious case of the guy with gals makes its way into the Bible: it does so not because Zelophehad had only daughters, even if five, a goodly number; but because the daughters knew who they were and asserted their inherent value to God and society. In doing so, they literally changed the practice of civil inheritance law in Israel, and today still upend fallacious charges of sexism against the Bible. From their case forward God‘s seal of approval on equal treatment under the law has been irrevocable even if and when society ignores it.

But also, this seal of approval is based on the value rising out of celebrating the differing roles. There is no greater threat to human value than forgetting, ignoring, or deliberately blurring the differences. Zelophehad‘s daughters clearly understood this, proving beyond all doubt that, son or no son, this guy with gals had been man enough to appreciate women enough that they could appreciate themselves, too!

Posted by paul at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)