At that time, the Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather; for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed.
When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. Jesus said to them, “Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
And they reasoned among themselves, saying, “It is because we have taken no bread.”
But Jesus, being aware of it, said to them, “O you of little faith, why do you reason among yourselves because you have brought no bread? Do you not yet understand, or remember the five loaves of the five thousand and how many baskets you took up? Nor the seven loaves of the four thousand and how many large baskets you took up? How is it you do not understand that I did not speak to you concerning bread?—but to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then they understood that He did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
Interpreting the signs of the time was a pastime when I was young. Those were the very late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Hal Lindsey had published The Late Great Planet Earth and we were all reading the newspapers trying to see how close the clock was to the return of Jesus Christ in glory. The secularists had their own Doomsday Clock, but it was a clock either to nuclear destruction or environmental devastation. Since some of Hal Lindsey’s interpretations included meteorites hitting the Earth and nuclear warfare, you could end up with all three Doomsday Clocks being a possibility. Actually, I look back with a certain fondness to those days. While misguided at times, our idealism was pure, our commitment total, and we saw the soon-coming of Jesus Christ. That was over 45 years ago. Soon-coming is a relative term. Yet, while I believe he could still come tomorrow, I am no longer trying to forecast the times or the seasons. Or, to put it in the way of the Scriptures above, I am no longer looking for a sign from heaven.
And yet, if you look at the Scripture above, when Jesus is talking to his own disciples, he promptly brings up signs. And, he brings up the big ones, the feedings of five thousand then of four thousand, with massive amount of leftovers. So, the issue is not signs themselves, otherwise, why would Jesus promptly cite a sign when he has just warned about signs?
More than anything else, it had more to do with the attitude of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Their doctrine was keeping them from interpreting correctly the ministry of Jesus Christ. In fact, you can see in other places that the Pharisees claimed that Jesus cast out demons by the prince of demons. In another place, rather than believing the Virgin Birth, they ask him, “Then they said to Him, ‘Where is Your Father?’ Jesus answered, ‘You know neither Me nor My Father. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also.’ … Then they said to Him, ‘We were not born of fornication; we have one Father—God.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do.'” Frankly, if you read this passage carefully, they call Jesus a bastard and he returns the favor by calling them demon-children.
The problem with the attitude of the Pharisees and Sadducees is that they were going to process everything they saw by their already-formed ideas of what was true. That is, they were not willing to consider any other possibilities, nor were they willing to listen to anyone who might have something important to say. They already knew that answers and were not willing to allow anything to change their answers. This is the opposite of being so open-minded that your brain falls out. It is being so closed-minded that you cannot even see what is in front of your face. We see a lot of that attitude going around today. Whether it is conservatives who label anything with which they disagree as fake news, or deride the “mainstream media” as plotting against this country, or whether it is the far-left, who salivates over theories that lead to the impeachment of President Trump, we are encountering closed mindsets all over this country at this time.
The difficulty is how to maintain a view that is open-minded enough to read the times and the seasons, yet how to maintain a view that is cautious and prudent enough to not let one believe in almost any theory, regardless of its validity or probability. From the Obama-is-a-socialist-who-wants-to-subvert-this-country to the anti-vaxxers to the Trump-is-a-secret-nazi-who-is-going-to-bring-back-the-Klan, we are inundated in unbelievable and weird theories. Somebody recently committed suicide who was loosely linked to the Clinton camp, and one acquaintance on Facebook promptly stated that this was yet another Clinton family murder. The fact that this would require a cover-up of massive proportions through the years, a cover up so large that certainly during the Republican years there would have been some type of investigation, never seems to have crossed this person’s mind. The lack of evidence is evidence. The improbability made it probably. It is a type of illogical madness.
In the field of theology, I would argue that Scripture, Ecumenical Councils, and Holy Tradition are sufficient to keep us roughly on the straight and narrow. Notice that I said roughly, not perfectly. But, I am willing to argue that the Protestant Reformation, and its sequelae, is a good example of what can go wrong if one departs from the counsels listed above. However, I have no good advice for the secular arena. Until such a time as people are willing to submit to some canons of reasonableness, rationality, validity, etc., I see no hope for change, anymore than Jesus saw any hope of change in the Pharisees and Sadducees. When every news and editorial source, except the ones that explicitly back you, are considered to be deliberately lying, then there is no hope of seeing another opinion as valid and maybe even true. When every good deed done by someone you oppose is seen as a deliberate attempt to mislead, or done to hide some misdeed, then there is no difference between that attitude and the attitude that called the casting out of demons as something demonic.
Only if we decide to follow the advice of Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 is there any hope of change. There Saint Paul tells us that:
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Unless we learn to NOT think evil of those whom we oppose, unless we are willing to believe the best of our opponents, unless we are willing to hope for the best, and put up with some of the blowback from those we oppose, then there is no real hope that we will break out of this wrong way of thinking. Unless we learn those things, we will simply be the same people as the Pharisees and Sadducees were, unthinking and tied to their doctrine to the place that they were willing to call good as being evil. And, all too many of us are already doing that.
I’m pretty tired of the “both sides do it” nonsense. Yes, you can find fringe leftists who believe or promote nonsense. But they are precisely that — fringe. Whereas the same sort of nonsense is the mainstream view of the right. Facts are irrelevant and the wildest conspiracy theories are promoted on their insular propaganda outlets and by those holding power, up to and including the President. Most Democrats and Independents I know are aware of the right-wing propaganda, at least enough to understand its broad strokes, because they choose to stay broadly informed. On the other hand, broad number of otherwise reasonable, intelligent people on the right not only believe blatantly untrue propaganda, but in many cases aren’t even aware of reality in the sense that they don’t even know what they believe is simply factually untrue. I’ve witnessed it time and again. “Everyone they know” and “everything they hear” reinforces their demonstrably false belief. Propaganda is employed because if the right environment can be created, it works. It really is as simple as that.
And no, people do not broadly believe that “Trump-is-a-secret-nazi-who-is-going-to-bring-back-the-Klan”. Rather, Trump in particular, but with the active cooperation of many of those in power in the GOP, is overtly and openly following the authoritarian playbook in a basically undisguised effort to establish an kleptocratic (enriching the Trump family) authoritarian single party state. Trump personally would also likely to see his family entrenched at the center of that state. I doubt he has the ability to achieve that goal, but who knows. He can certainly profit immensely from it even in the short term.
That is not some wild conspiracy theory. There’s very little hidden or secret about it. It’s being widely and openly (at least for now) discussed by people in academia and journalism who have studied authoritarian states and how they operate. There’s no magic that prevents the same thing from happening in the United States. And it’s an open question at this juncture whether or not the effort will succeed. Personally, I would really prefer not to live in an authoritarian state. And I definitely don’t want my children and grandchildren to live in one. Realistically, as moderately affluent whites, we’ll be insulated from the worst of it, at least for a while. I’ll do what little I can do as an individual to influence the result. And, of course, I will pray. I will pray most for those who are now being harmed by encroaching authoritarianism and by those who will be harmed first as it grows and worsens.
Nor do most people believe Trump is “secretly” trying to bring back the Klan. White supremacy never really left this country at all. It evolved and lived a little more quietly in the systems and structures of power for a few decades, but it has certainly flamed back to life full bore now. Trump isn’t secretly anything. He is openly and overtly bigoted and racist and has been his whole life. He was openly racist on the campaign trail. And that’s the “plain speaking” most of his voters liked. It’s why whites were the only group in which he won a majority. As President, he has openly installed overt white supremacists in positions of influence and power and pursued actively racist goals. Again, there’s nothing secret or hidden about it. He’s doing it right out in the open.
And that’s fine with the people who support him. It’s exactly what they want.
It’s important not to call good evil. But it is also wrong not to name evil for what it is when you are confronted with it. And the radical right wing in our country is suffused with evil today. There’s no other name for it. Moreover the GOP *is* the radical right wing. As social scientists have demonstrated pretty clearly, Democrats have hardly moved as a group on issues since the 70s, remaining basically a center left party, while in the last 20 years Republicans have swung hard to the right. They appeal to the worst instincts in people and so far their base has responding accordingly and with apparent glee. They no longer have to “hide” their true feelings and beliefs under the oppression of “political correctness”.
Hmm, do we have strong opinions?
I think each side has some short memories of how they behaved when they had some measure of power. It was during the prior presidency when some cake makers could not say that they objected to making a cake for a marriage with which they had deep religious objections. It was during the prior presidency when a group of nuns were told that they could object to paying for abortion and/or birth control, but they had to file special paperwork. When they contended that the special paperwork would still make them complicit, they were threatened. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the cake case. They have already ruled in favor of the nuns in the other case. We tend to forget that the left–also–is quite willing to impose as needed, under the guise of giving people their rights (just like the right does).
The many cases over the years concerning religion in the public sphere show a complete and total intolerance by the far left for any expression of religion in the public sphere, to include moral objections to certain laws, etc. In the field of science, though I quite strongly believe in climate change, nevertheless, from Gore to others, there has been an explicit expression of the thought that anyone who disagrees with their conclusions must be removed from their offices and their chairs in colleges and universities, a not very tolerant stance.
I could go on, but as I said, memories are short. I am against President Trump. But, I also fear any possibility of some of the not-fringe-left people taking over. I want to vote for progressives who are not involved in identity politics and repression of those with whom they disagree.
I’ll start with your last statement first, since it appears revealing to me.
You do know that “identity politics” is basically the term used to describe the large-scale Civil Rights movements that formed in the second half of the 20th century. While there are many places to ready about it, plato.standford.edu has the advantage of being online. And this is an actual academic resource that’s cited broadly, even in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. Philosophy is always a developing and ongoing conversation, but this does not represent mere online opining from random groups. It’s the sort of work that requires serious engagement.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/
So those railing against “identity politics” are actually railing against the gains made in the last half century by formerly marginalized and oppressed groups. And that has been clearly revealed across multiple studies now published of Trump voters. The unifying, most significant factor was not economic. It was not a matter of faith. (Trump is an odd figurehead to choose to spearhead Christianity or really any religious faith.) No, the number one reason people voted for Trump was out of “cultural anxiety”. They felt this was no longer the country they once knew. They felt they were losing their place in this country. They feared being marginalized and losing their voice. As I noted, it’s been widely studied now by multiple organization, polling groups like Pew and PRRI as well as academic institutions. And there’s broad consistency across most of them. If you cite specific studies, people tend to believe you’re cherry-picking the ones that agree with you. I generally find it’s better for people to do their own research if they are willing to do so. And given that Trump’s voters were overwhelmingly white, their cultural anxiety flowed directly from the limited success those “identity politics” movements have had in reducing structural and systemic white supremacy in the United States.
“The End of White Christian America” by Robert Jones is an excellent and deeply sourced exploration of that anxiety as well as the religious aspects of the systems that supported “White America” through much of our history, though I doubt he predicted its explosive and destructive death throes.
So yes, I strongly support the efforts in the movements collectively described under the philosophical umbrella of “identity politics” in their goals of eliminating systemic oppression, addressing the deep and broad harms imposed on entire groups and communities, and promoting equal treatment under the law. And I generally find it telling when someone tries to use the term in a pejorative manner.
But now on to the specific examples you cited as some sort of proof of “abuse of power” under center-left authority. Both of those are, in fact, legal questions best settled in the courts, where they are indeed being settled. And your framing of them is … a little odd. In fact, since you are conflating abortion and birth control, I’m not even sure which of several cases you’re referencing. I’m also not a lawyer and don’t track them all closely. I have observed, from a direct perspective, the ways such issues can be worked through cooperatively. Here in Austin, the Seton hospitals alongside the City of Austin have worked together to provide an alternative to our for-profit hospitals and to provide care for the poor. This paper provides a good summary of the working arrangement. It’s never not been controversial, to both conservative Catholics and more leftist liberal groups, but it has largely worked and achieved the goals both the Daughters of Charity and the City of Austin desired.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2886734/
I am also aware there were a number of cases under the ACA defining the boundary between religious institutions and provisions of the law. Many of those were the result of adopting the conservative philosophy of primarily relying on private insurance for non-poor working class families, and a mix of individual and employer-provided private plans at that. In countries where health care is a public good to one degree or another (and contrary to a lot of simplistic sloganeering from some on the left, that’s hardly done solely or even primarily through a “single-payer” system) the portion that is not elective is the same largely across the board. It’s publicly funded and everyone receives the same set of options. (More or less. No system is perfect.) In those countries, basically much of the rest of the world, at least the industrialized world, a religious institution is not directly providing the public good so that question comes less into play. Since contraception was included in the baseline services required in all plans by the law, the question then arose about religious institutions that either self-funded a health care plan (which I believe applies to the Daughters of Charity for their employees, whether they are actually nuns or not) or purchased a group health care plan on the private market for their members or employees. I know there were cases to resolve that aspect of the law. I gather at least some of them have been resolved. That’s hardly an abuse of power of any sort. It’s the normal functioning of the application of law in a civil society. And such things tend to get worked out.
I haven’t paid much attention to the cake makers so can’t say much specifically. However, the basic principle is straightforward. In its decision, authored by a conservative justice (in fact, I believe Anthony Kennedy wrote all the major civil rights decisions affecting the LGBTQIA community) the Supreme Court applied the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law (14th Amendment) in Windsor (the case before the “gay marriage” one, for which he also wrote the majority opinion) to LGBT individuals as a class. That has specific legal implications. Among those are the prohibition of discrimination against protected groups in “public accommodations”. Public accommodations fall into two groups, government owned and operated and privately owned and operated. Privately owned public accommodations include all those that offer certain goods or services to the public — including food, lodging, gasoline, and entertainment. Why are those considered “public accommodations”? It’s a two-fold answer. They offer their goods to the public, but they also rely on public good created within the society and through public funds in order to offer those goods for sale. They rely on public infrastructure, benefits they might receive in the tax code, regulatory protections, and other public goods.
Unlike the new ACA, where the line between public good and privately provided became more blurred than it had been, there’s really no legal question about how the 14th Amendment is applied. The cake makers were as guilty of violating the law as they would have been if they had refused to bake a cake for a interracial couple or any other protected group, even for “deeply held religious convictions”. Now, SCOTUS can certainly alter the scope and application of the 14th amendment at any time to any group. They upheld segregation and Jim Crow for many, many decades. Women only gained equal right to have credit in their own name in the 70s. So they can certainly decide in the future to restrict its application to LGBT members or even strip the protections from them entirely. But there’s no legal confusion under existing law. The cake makers simply want a different standard applied to them. I agree with SCOTUS, as does a majority of our country today, so any “victory” they might achieve will likely be short-lived, assuming the rule of law is maintained. But again, the application of the law (in that case by SCOTUS not any politician, Democrat or otherwise) and challenges to that application are part of the normal operation of a society under the rule of law. Are you advocating for autocracy? It’s pretty much irrelevant who was President at the time in that instance, unless said President was willing to overturn the rule of law and ignore it. I do agree that Trump appears happy to take that course at any time. We’ll see.
If you have an example that actually supports your premise and can withstand scrutiny, I’ll be happy to consider it. As I said at the outset, I’m aware that an often vocal leftist fringe exists. But they are precisely that — a fringe. Most importantly, they wield no actual power. The GOP, on the other hand, has become indistinguishable from the radical right wing in this country. Many of its powerful members are openly part of that group. I’m not sure the radical right has ever been a fringe in this country, but it has pushed so far into extreme territory today that “evil” is as good as any other word to describe its collective actions.
Well, two things, one is that you may not know that I was a board member of the Alabama chapter of the ACLU several years ago and the second you do know, which is that I am a Latino. Now being a Latino does not exempt me from being conservative, since most Cubans are. But, being a board member of the ACLU does mean that I am unlikely to be buying into conservative ideology.
However, we all know that any term can have an original meaning and come to mean something else. Post the last election, there have been various articles from the Democratic side in which identity politics has no right-wing meaning attached to it. It is the difference between saying that handsome means that it fits well in the hand and handsome means that some male looks good to our eyes.
For instance, a more recent definition of identity politics is, “a tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad-based party politics.” Notice the emphasis on exclusivity and the moving away from broad-based party politics. Nothing in there speaks to any particular ethnic group. It is under this definition that i am functioning, not your definition. This is the more recent connotation of the phrase.
In November of 2016, the article https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html?_r=0 was published in the New York Times by a professor from Columbia, who has lectured at Yale, Oxford, and at the Weissman Center in Israel. He argue for an end to identity politics and was promptly virulently attacked by several progressive publications for the same think you mentioned, supposedly giving in to “white” politics. However, he does make some persuasive arguments for why the way in which politics have been handled by some progressives has actually been counterintuitive to the democratic process.
The Nation, a known liberal/progressive magazine published a four person debate on the issue in December of 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-is-the-left-without-identity-politics/.
So, the term identity politics is undergoing a certain reconfiguration. To continue to equate it purely with white conservatives is to miss the ongoing debate in progressive circles.
You are, however, correct that the line between public and private good has become blurred, even in progressive circles. The USA Supreme Court is taking up the bakery case and took up the nuns’ case because of the blurriness that has arisen in more than one area. More important is that what has arisen is the failure to achieve compromises. This actually endangers our democracy.
Almost every one of the rights that we have in the Bill of Rights is conditional. The right of a free press is limited by the prohibition against deliberate and malicious untruth. Freedom of speech is limited by libel laws, inciting to riot, false accusations about a fire in a theater, etc. The right to bear arms is limited to reasonable laws, such as preventing them in a justice building, etc. Freedom of religion is a current battlefield, as is equality of treatment. Those two rights are in current conflict, in fact, they are in serious conflict.
They are not the only rights in conflict, but they are two of the major ones. Equality of treatment is crucial to our culture, in particular because of our racial history. But, at what point does that conflict with freedom of religion? Could separation of Church and State become a tool that destabilizes that part of the Bill of Rights that deals with freedom of religion? There is reason that the USA Supreme Court has begun to take up some of those cases, and it is not merely that there are more conservatives on the court. It is the recognition that there is the possibility of an imbalance between public and private good.
Now here is the other reality. Look back at what you wrote. Despite the articles in progressive media, you quickly dropped the white race card on me, not knowing my actual background. Then you dropped the Jim Crow and segregation line on the Supreme Court. In other words, you quickly deployed a supposed nuclear pre-emptive strike that would destroy any who might argue against your opinions by classifying them are really only being secret white thoughts.
So, here is my question for you. What makes you any different from the right-wingers that use the same type of argumentation in order to demean and diminish anyone with whom they argue? The ones for whom everyone who disagrees with them is simply another leftist liberal socialist.