Obedience and Other Forbidden Words

If offered a choice between being famous and being wise, most college kids would look at you like you’d lost your mind. No contest. Fame trumps wisdom, every time.

I submit there is a reason we lack wisdom. We are afraid of legitimate authority. In fact, many in our culture question whether any authority really is legitimate. Therefore, we have no concept that obedience can be a virtue. As a matter of fact, obeying your parents can be the simplest and most straightforward way of gaining wisdom.

Obedi-phobia is a cultural and personal disaster. Don’t bother looking it up: I just invented it. Obedi-phobia means a pathological fear of obedience to legitimate authority.

What is legitimate authority? Everyone who knows more than I can be a legitimate authority on that subject. Parents are legitimate authority figures over their children. The Law, in our Anglo-American tradition, exercises authority over us all, because the law is made through the participation of large numbers of people, in a reasonably transparent process. Americans obey the law, not because some Dear Leader says so, but because the Law says so. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, people obey God, not because God is a cosmic bully who will punish us if we don’t. We obey God because we believe He loves us and has our interests in mind.

Here is how obedi-phobia hampers our quest for wisdom.

The ancient Greeks called prudence “practical wisdom.” Prudence did not mean, doing whatever you can get away with, as it now means in political parlance. The Greeks considered prudence the virtue of doing the right thing at the right time in the right amount, even when this can’t be deduced from general principles. Prudence shows us the difference between courage, a good thing, and rashness, a foolish thing. Seen in this light, the Greeks regarded prudence as the queen of the virtues, that held all the others together.

Prudence requires experience with actual people in actual situations.

Experience shows us how to recognize the difference between a sincere complement and groveling flattery. Experience teaches us how to distinguish between joyful spontaneity and idiotic self-indulgence.

But children have no experience. By definition, at the beginning of life, it is impossible to have accumulated the store of experiences that would allow a person to be genuinely prudent.

So, how can the young acquire prudence or practical wisdom? As Dennis put it on his show, the relatively pain-free method is to listen to what other people have to say, or to observe other people’s mistakes. The painful method is to jump off the cliff to see for yourself whether gravity really works for you, or whether gravity is just a cynical plot by old people to suppress the exuberance of youth. In the first two cases, the young person acquires wisdom by learning from the experience of other people.

There is an even simpler alternative: The child could obey his parents. (Gasp!)

Jennifer Roback Morse
Townhall

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/
JennniferRobackMorse/2006/02/06/185299.html

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Censorship by Firing Squad

In the current uproar over the cartoons of Mohammed, printed in a Danish newspaper, and eventually in other European papers, I have some sympathy for Muslims, who believe it is blasphemous to create images of Mohammed. In one of the twelve cartoons, Mohammed tells dead suicide bombers he has run out of virgins to give them as their reward. Another showed him in a bomb-shaped turban. But the political barbs are almost beside the point. Even positive images of Mohammed are offensive to Muslims as too close to idolatry. It is not just extremists and street crazies who are complaining about these cartoons. Muslim moderates and professionals are upset too.

If millions of people think their faith is compromised by illustrations of a particular religious figure why not just drop the illustrations? Columnist Charles Krauthammer once wrote that in America “pluralism works because of a certain deference that sects accord each other. In a pluralistic society, it is a civic responsibility to take great care when talking publicly about things sacred to millions of fellow citizens.” Defending free speech in the 1989 Rushdie case, Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic took a different and harder line.  He said, “It was blasphemy that made us free. Two cheers today for blasphemy.” That was a voice of the secular intelligentia that doesn’t hold much sacred, dismissing the concern of supposedly backward people who do.

John Leo

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/johnleo
/2006/02/06/185301.html

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Judicial Confirmation and the “Mystery Constitution”

A Review of Judge Charles Pickering’s Supreme Chaos

Many Americans have looked at the judicial confirmation process, the vicious disparagement of exceptional men and women who have given their lives to public service, and wondered in dismay, “How did it come to this?”  Supreme Chaos answers that question, and offers some solutions to bringing back the Constitutional standard. 

Supreme Chaos could only have been written by someone who, like our Founders, loves and understands the right of self-government and the rule of law and principle; it should be read by everyone who wants to do the same.  Supreme Chaos should be part of every home library and used as a text in every government and citizenship class.   The US Constitution was written by thoughtful men who loved and understood legal principle and the right of self-government and articulated it for ordinary citizens could understand.   So also is Supreme Chaos.  It is as easy to read as a newspaper — and more logical, tracing the history of Constitutional thought and principle to demonstrate clearly what our Founders intended and how those principles should be applied.

Judge Pickering tells the story as only one who has survived the strife of ideologues could, but it is more than his personal story.  It is the compelling story of our unique political compact at risk because of partisan ideologues who have forgotten that our Constitution was the result of months of debate and negotiation among the best legal, economic and political minds of the time, by men determined to keep power in the hands of the people, who considered deeply the implications for posterity.  They wrote our Constitution to limit the power of government by keeping any one branch (not party) from gaining too much power.   

The fundamental principle at stake is:  does the Constitution mean what it says and say what it means, or can a minority use any means to make it up as they go to force through policies that the people have not permitted through their elected representatives? 

Judith Niewiadomski

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/books_entertainment/
reviews/JudithNiewiadomski/185284.html

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Dissolving Marriage

Canada, you don’t know the half of it. In mid-January, Canada was rocked by news that a Justice Department study had called for the decriminalization and regulation of polygamy. Actually, two government studies recommended decriminalizing polygamy. (Only one has been reported on.) And even that is only part of the story. Canadians, let me be brutally frank. You are being played for a bunch of fools by your legal-political elite. Your elites mumble a confusing jargon to your face to keep you from understanding what they really have in mind.

Let’s try a little test. Translate the following phrases into English:

1) Canada needs to move “beyond conjugality.”

2) Canada needs to “reconsider the continuing legal privileging of marriage and other conjugal relationships.”

3) Once gay marriage is legalized, Canada will be able to “consider whether the legal privileges and burdens now assigned to marriage and other conjugal relationships can be justified.”

4) Canada needs to question “whether conjugality is an appropriate marker for determining legal rights and obligations.”

[Answers: The English translation of #1,# 2, and #4 is: “Canada should abolish marriage.” The translation of #3 is: “Once we legalize gay marriage, we can move on to the task of abolishing marriage itself.”]

This argument was very publicly made to Canadians in 2001, when the Law Commission of Canada published its report, “Beyond Conjugality.” But nobody got it. Everyone noticed that a government commission had backed same-sex marriage. But few recognized, grasped, or could bring themselves to take seriously, the central thrust of Beyond Conjugality: that after the legalization of same-sex marriage, Canadian marriage itself ought to be abolished. (For more on this, see my article “Beyond Gay Marriage”)

Martha Bailey, Queens University law professor and chief author of the now infamous report advocating the decriminalization of polygamy, played an important organizing role in the Beyond Conjugality project (translation: the “Abolish Marriage” project). In 2004, Bailey published an article, “Regulation of Cohabitation and Marriage in Canada,” arguing that, after the legalization of same-sex marriage, Canadians would be able to turn their attention to the more urgent business of abolishing marriage itself. (That article is the source of items #2, #3, and #4 above.) So it is hardly surprising that Bailey has now called for the decriminalization of polygamy. What’s that you say? How does legalizing polygamous marriage advance the cause of abolishing marriage? Canadians, I’m going to have to spell it out for you in a way that Martha Bailey and her friends on the Law Commission of Canada will not.

It’s like this. The way to abolish marriage, without seeming to abolish it, is to redefine the institution out of existence. If everything can be marriage, pretty soon nothing will be marriage. Legalize gay marriage, followed by multi-partner marriage, and pretty soon the whole idea of marriage will be meaningless. At that point, Canada can move to what Bailey and her friends really want: an infinitely flexible relationship system that validates any conceivable family arrangement, regardless of the number or gender of partners.

Stanley Kurtz
National Review

http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200602030805.asp