Positive Liberty

I just get so sick when I think that my own government is doing things like this. Here are the words of Malcolm Nance, a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant:

Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents…

On a Mekong River trip, I met a 60-year-old man, happy to be alive and a cheerful travel companion, who survived the genocide and torture … he spoke openly about it and gave me a valuable lesson: “If you want to survive, you must learn that ‘walking through a low door means you have to be able to bow.’” He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know including the truth. They rarely stopped. In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist Monk, a Catholic Bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French. He remembered “the Barrel” version of waterboarding quite well. Head first until the water filled the lungs, then you talk…

There is No Debate Except for Torture Apologists

1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.

2. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.

Call it “Chinese Water Torture,” “the Barrel,” or “the Waterfall,” it is all the same. Whether the victim is allowed to comply or not is usually left up to the interrogator. Many waterboard team members, even in training, enjoy the sadistic power of making the victim suffer and often ask questions as an after thought. These people are dangerous and predictable and when left unshackled, unsupervised or undetected they bring us the murderous abuses seen at Abu Ghraieb, Baghram and Guantanamo. No doubt, to avoid human factors like fear and guilt someone has created a one-button version that probably looks like an MRI machine with high intensity waterjets.

3. If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives.

This from the same people who encourage us to support our troops.

This is the technique that Vice President Cheney has called a “very important tool” and a “no brainer” in defending the nation. Yet its victims will confess anything. Its other practitioners have included the Khmer Rouge, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Spanish Inquisition — while it has been universally condemned by impartial human rights groups, by those who have endured the treatment, and even by the U.S. State Department.

Do I look forward, somehow, to being ashamed of my government? No. Am I ashamed of it? When it does things like this, absolutely I am. Loving this country, and loving what it stands for, calls for nothing less.

Ron Paul’s pet issue — gold-backed currency — makes Josh Claybourn really uneasy:

Paul’s monetary policy reveals certain limits to my libertarian leanings. I understand his position and the justification for it, but I just don’t buy it. A Paul presidency would bring about a tremendous number of positive changes, but this one - one of his favorites - I can do without.

My comments below the fold.

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Chris Rodda has a new post at Talk2Action debunking another major Christian Nation myth, this one about Thomas Jefferson. The claim is that Jefferson tried to bring a bunch of Calvinist theologians from Switzerland to the US to establish a seminary. Sometimes it’s claimed that he intended to use this as the basis of the University of Virginia. She begins with D. James Kennedy’s version of the myth:

Jefferson “wanted to bring the entire faculty of Calvin’s theological seminary over from Geneva, Switzerland, and establish them at the University of Virginia.”

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Antonio Agnone was raised to believe that every American has a duty to serve his country in some capacity. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a soldier in WW II, Antonio was commissioned as a Marine officer upon finishing his undergrad work at Ohio State. He would lead his own unit in Iraq where, as a combat engineer, it was his job to keep his men safe from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), those deadly implements responsible for more than 80% of the combat deaths in that war. Many is the time, he recalled Thursday night, when he crouched over the ground, warning his men to stay back as he painstakingly disarmed a booby trap. In a sane world, there would be little to detract from such acts of bravery. But in the real world, his many acts of heroism will, in the minds of some, forever be tainted by one simple fact: Antonio Agnone is gay.
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Founding era documents often invoke the concept of “Nature” (as in natural law and natural rights or the laws of Nature and Nature’s God). To properly understand its usage, one must know how the Founding era defined “Nature.” Put simply enough Nature = Reason. This is how the most learned modern scholarly authorities understand the concept. For instance, in Novus Ordo Seclorum, conservative historian Forrest McDonald — who read every single document from the Founding era — stated the Founding era defined “natural” as “discoverable by reason as opposed to revealed by God.” (p. xi.) Or as John Locke put it in his Second Treatise on Government: “The State of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason…is that law….”

God may have played a role in “giving” the natural law. But nonetheless, when dealing with the rubric of “Nature,” the means of discovery is man’s reason. What God revealed through Nature, man’s reason discovered. Or as John Adams put it: Continue Reading »

Last week my Dad and I saw Gordon Wood speak at the James Madison Program at Princeton University on the Founding Fathers.

Of course I paid close attention to his comments on the religion of the Founders when that question was asked. He avoided the term “Deist” — a term he had once used — and instead opted for “proto-unitarian.” This shows he’s paying attention to the evolving understanding in scholarship that shows the key Founders were not strict Deists like Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen. The term “unitarian” has to be qualified because it is associated with a particular Church of which only John Adams (and his son) were members. And even with Adams’ Church, though it preached unitarianism as of 1750, it didn’t officially become “Unitarian” until the 19th Century. Jefferson, Madison, and Washington were all theological unitarians who were formally members of the Anglican/Episcopal Church, which held to a Trinitarian creed. Besides theological unitarianism, these Founders also believed in theological universalism, syncretism, rationalism. So if we want a common term to describe the religious beliefs of the 5 key founders — the first four presidents and Ben Franklin — “proto-unitarian” might do, as well as some others, for instance “theistic rationalism.” Continue Reading »

Commenter Explicit Atheist writes,

Anti-pollution laws, anti-fraud laws, etc. are also “liberty infringing and litigation encouraging laws”. I don’t think the liberty to discriminate when conducting commercial business or employment based on race, creed, gender, etc. is a liberty worthy of any more respect than the “liberty” to damage the environment or cheat potential and actual customers. These are not victimless crimes, they are all crimes with real victims and don’t belong in the category of protected liberties.

To me there is much that is both right and wrong in this.

First of all, libertarian political theory holds that we should ignore victimless crimes and punish only those crimes that have actual victims. But these crimes certainly include fraud and, yes, pollution.

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This week saw the birth of my parents’ first grandchild, my nephew, James F. Rowe III.

Here is Mom and [her grand]Baby:

And here are the three James F. Rowes:

A blurb taken from my First Things Briefly Noted book review on James H. Hutson’s The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations is now featured on the back cover of the newly released softcover edition. I’d like to thank Princeton University Press and First Things Magazine for the honor. Check it out at a Barnes and Noble or Borders near you.

The statics of cow tipping: An engineer determines that it takes at least two people to perform the legendary prank, and possibly more.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia cites zoologists saying it’s impossible, because cows sleep lying down, not standing up. But that didn’t stop a legislator from trying to ban it:

In 2004, a Florida legislator proposed a ban on “cruelty to bovines”, which while not specific to cow tipping, included language that would apply to cow tipping: “A person who, for the purpose of practice, entertainment, or sport, intentionally fells, trips, or otherwise causes a cow to fall or lose its balance by means of roping, lassoing, dragging, or otherwise touching the tail of the cow commits a misdemeanor of the first degree.”[4] The statute did not ultimately pass into law, however.

…even for people like this:

They shook their fists at God and said, “We don’t care what God says, we will issue our legal brief to support gay marriage in San Diego!” Then Mayor Jerry Sanders mocked the Christian vote and signed off on this rebellious legal document to support same-sex marriage. And then the streets of La Jolla under the Mt. Soledad Cross began to cave in.

They shook their fists at God and said, “We don’t care what the Bible says, We want the California school children indoctrinated into homosexuality!” And then Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the heinous SB777 which bans the use of “mom” and “dad” in the text books and promotes homosexuality to all school children in California.

And then the wildfires of Southern California engulfed the land like a raging judgment against the radicalized anti-christian California rebels.

How low will we go?

Why won’t they listen?

Why won’t they stop their madness?

The Bible says that in the last days, the nations will rebel against God until He can’t take it anymore.

Was it all worth it? Were the few years of sexual immorality worth the eternal destruction and earthly chaos it brought?

How low will we go?

A big part of why I care about religious freedom is simply because it gives morons all the rope they need to hang themselves. This is one thing that’s great about a free society: People like this can show their true colors, and we can see them for who they really are — hateful, vindictive… and small.

(As my co-blogger has noted, SB777 does nothing like what certain of its opponents claim. Read it yourself.)

Method One:

The nation’s centralized watch list has grown to include 755,000 names suspected of having terrorist ties, resulting in nearly 20,000 positive matches of persons against the list in 2006, according to a new report from Congress’s investigative reporting arm. Since the list is now used in nearly all routine police stops and for domestic airline travel, Americans made up the bulk of those matches.

The Government Accountability Office’s report was presented in a hearing to the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, causing senators to express concern about the size and effectiveness of the list.

How much administrative and airport security hassle must be endured before these measures become a de facto punishment, and before these people become de facto convicted of a crime by administrative fiat? I’m not saying it’s happened yet, but it’s definitely a question worth asking. At some point, these people are facing a civil penalty, no more and no less.

Method Two:

Like a hunter using a duck call, Shannen Rossmiller invites the online attentions of would-be terrorists by adorning her e-mail with video clips of Westerners getting their heads cut off.

“They get pumped up when they see beheadings. For them, it’s like rock videos,” Rossmiller said. “I always give the appearance that I am one of them.”

Appearances deceive. At her Montana high school, Rossmiller was a cheerleader — a farm girl whose slight frame meant she was the one hoisted to the top of the human pyramid. Now 35, she is a mother of three, a part-time paralegal and a $23,000-a-year municipal court judge in a town north of here.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she has found herself an unpaid night job. She uses the Internet to find terrorism suspects, she said, hunting for them while her family sleeps, spending the hours between 3 a.m. and dawn at her home computer. Her husband, Randy, a wireless network technician, keeps eight computers and two broadband systems working in their house.

Apparently she’s been quite successful, as this article from Wired suggests:

it’s distinctly possible that Rossmiller, alone at her computer, has a better track record than the Justice Department. A Washington Post analysis in 2005 of the 400-plus people charged with terrorism-related crimes by the federal government found that only 14 of those convicted actually had any ties at all to al Qaeda or its network. Rossmiller’s cases have come with solid backup, while the feeble evidence in the other high-profile Justice Department cases makes many prosecutors roll their eyes. Consider the seven Miami men arrested in the summer of 2006 and hyped as desiring to wage a “ground war” against the US and intending to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. They turned out to be a bunch of trash-talking blowhards whose plans were formulated while smoking pot in an empty warehouse. In contrast, the man Rossmiller most recently implicated — Michael Reynolds — had prepared meticulous plans to blow up pipelines and was shopping online for used gas trucks to implement his plot. The Pennsylvania resident was arrested after traveling 2,000 miles to southern Idaho, lured by Rossmiller into a supposed meeting with a financial backer.

“When I was in the White House and doing terrorism, the holy grail was ‘actionable intelligence,’ and she brings a form of actionable intelligence,” says Roger Cressey, a White House counterterrorism official in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. (He learned of Rossmiller after he left the government.) The FBI, on the other hand, has failed in every attempt to modernize its technology since 2001, and it so restricts the software available to agents that they can’t even begin to match what Rossmiller does. “The FBI is a dinosaur in many respects,” says Cressey.

Rossmiller agrees. “I went to a meeting in Great Falls, and we got to talking, and someone had to look something up online,” she says. “I asked, ‘What do you use for Internet access?’ and one agent said, ‘We have to go to the public library down the street.’”

She also tells a story about another agent who had to get permission to open a Yahoo account because it violated office regs. “They weren’t allowed,” she says.

The feds aren’t allowed to troll for terrorists using a Yahoo account. But they are allowed to keep tabs on perhaps three quarters of a million people, to detain them and question them during ordinary activities, to spy on our phone conversations, to torture, and all the rest that we probably don’t even know about yet. The results speak for themselves.

Meanwhile, not all of us can do what Shannen Rossmiller does. Rossmiller is a real hero: She spent weeks studying Arabic while she recovered from a hip injury, and I’m guessing she has a talent for languages, because Arabic is famously hard to learn. But then, even an army of incompetent pseudo-terrorists would do a lot to disrupt golbal jihad, wouldn’t it? If ten thousand people did this as a hobby, each adopting 5 different personae in a year, and if a real terrorist mistook a persona for the genuine article only one time in a hundred, we would have disrupted five hundred terrorist plots in a year, all while scarcely violating anyone’s rights. In the meantime, terrorist bulletin boards and user groups would be flooded with useless noise — a spam attack, in effect, but a smart, sophisticated one, which would in itself disrupt many other potential plots.

…And In Which I Try Not To Feel Smug About It.

The four-year-old sex offender: Welcome to the idiotic world of zero tolerance. Not only do zero tolerance policies on drugs, weapons, and sexual harassment produce absurd results at the far extremes, they also make a botch of the border cases:

Schools… now appear to be holding even young children to adult standards of responsibility and liability. To me, some cases seem clear-cut. If an 11-year-old boy touches a 4-year-old girl’s genitals and asks her to perform a sex act, his intent is apparent. But the motivations of two 4-year-olds caught “playing doctor” are less clear; it’s probably natural curiosity, not abuse.

The situation gets even more muddy when adolescents are involved and the alleged victim is part of the horseplay. Last February, two 13-year-old boys in McMinnville, Ore., were arrested, put in handcuffs and placed in juvenile detention for five days for allegedly slapping several girls’ backsides, according to news reports. The boys were charged with several counts of felony sexual abuse and faced up to 10 years in prison and the prospect of having to register as sex offenders upon release.

In August, several of the girls who initially filed the complaint asked a judge to dismiss the charges, which he did. The boys said the butt-slapping was a game inspired by the movie “Jackass.” Like so many activities that adolescents engage in, the slapping was idiotic but not criminal.

I don’t mean to defend these thirteen-year-olds. But applying criminal penalties is just delusional. Yes, yes, their behavior was obnoxious. Was it “ten years in prison” obnoxious? Hardly.

No, the real way to reform them is simply for thirteen-year-old girls to declare, in no uncertain terms, that their affections belong only to gentlemen, and that gentlemen don’t behave like this. A thirteen-year-old mind, awash as it is in hormones, will be sure to understand.

The New Civic Religion: Recycling. I used to think that my dad was a troglodyte for refusing to recycle. “Recycling just means keeping more trash in the house for longer and longer,” he’d grumble. This would be bad enough if the big paper and metals companies were getting all the profits. Turns out though that recycling is just inefficient all around, and the only benefit goes to the environmental do-gooders who think that Recycling is a Very Good Idea. Still worse, the inconvenience to households doesn’t even help the environment all that much:

Despite all this, households only produce a small percentage of the total waste stream in the UK. The Commons Committee on Refuse Collection notes, ‘for all the political heat it generates, municipal refuse represents only nine per cent of the total national waste stream’ (this figure falls to seven per cent if you consider waste from households only) (3-5). It is incredible that so much effort has been put into reducing such a small percentage of waste. Although municipal recycling rates have quadrupled over the past decade, in practice this still accounts for just two per cent of the nation’s total waste stream (5).

Perhaps reducing municipal waste isn’t the main point. Recycling is part of a policy outlook that aims to change the way we think about consumption. The slogan ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ derives from the EU’s waste hierarchy. It is the reduction of the consumption of materials that is important (Defra 2007: 9). A popular way of conceptualising this is the idea of ‘zero waste’, an ideal that is impossible to realise in practice, but aims to make producers and consumers think about reducing their environmental impact. This idea shifts the focus away from waste disposal towards considering the entire life cycle of a product. A mobile phone, for example, damages the environment throughout its production (resources, energy), retail (transport), use (energy), and disposal (transport, toxic emissions) or recycling (energy) (22).

…but this is true of any product. “Zero waste” is therefore absurd on two fronts. First, it is not a laudable yet impossible goal. It’s a vicious and sadly all-too-achievable goal. We need only give up… everything! Scrap civilization and go back to the Pleistocene. We need not waste even flint chips if we do this properly.

And second, corporations already have an incentive to avoid most forms of waste, namely the costs they incur in making wasteful products. Any net improvement on efficiency in materials or energy runs straight to the bottom line and turns into more profits. Think corporations are just amoral money-grubbers? You should be thankful that they are, because, in taking care of your material needs, efficiency is precisely what they aim at. As money-grubbers they can do nothing else.

The moment a more efficient process becomes available, corporations will do their best to make use of it. That recyclers don’t make any money on the trash they sort only proves that it’s inefficient for urban dwellers in developed countries to spend their time sorting trash. (Comparative advantage, anyone?)

The Obligatory Kvetch about Religion and Homosexuality: Andrew Sullivan complains that Bush will likely veto ENDA because it would prohibit some employers from firing people for being gay. Sullivan doesn’t like this reasoning, which he sums up as follows:

If you ban employers in large firms from firing employees just because they’re gay, you are violating their religious freedom. Christianity, it seems, is reflected in punishing gay people for no other reason than their sexual orientation.

He offers it sarcastically, but I’d suggest that the quote is in fact perfectly true.

Now, maybe this is just the Quinean in me, or maybe it’s just the Catholic, but here’s how the issue looks from where I sit: “Christianity” is no more and no less than what its adherents do, say, and think. Evangelical Christianity may deny tradition and insist on sola scriptura, but it’s clearly got traditions of its own as well, and one of them is, frankly, a profound suspicion of homosexuals, one that goes well beyond anything found in the Bible.

Thus if some variants of Christianity dictate that gay people must be fired, we are in no position to disagree. If other variants dictate wearing funny hats, or handling poisonous snakes, or talking in tongues, then so it is. Christianity includes many different practices, and the religious obligation to fire gay people could very well be one of them.

You may argue that this practice is mean-spirited, vulgar, stupid, or contrary to the teachings of Christ if they were but properly understood. You may think the same of wearing funny hats or handling poisonous snakes for all I know. But you can’t call these practices un-Christian.

No, it’s not for me to tell anyone that they aren’t true Christians, because that would lead me directly into no-true-Scotsman territory. It’s also not for me to determine that one source or another it more authentically Christian out of the three traditional Christian guides of scripture, tradition, and reason. (Given that at least two of these three argue in some way against the acceptance of homosexuality, we’re on even shakier ground, but I digress.)

“Christianity” is the sum total of what Christians say it is, what Christians think that it is, and what Christians do in its name. Does Christianity contradict itself? Please. Virtually the entire history of Christianity consists of self-contradiction. It’s the nature of the beast.

Thus Christianity might just be a religion that (sometimes? usually? always?) rejects homosexuality, given what its adherents say. (Gosh, who knew?) The question then becomes: How can society tolerate both Christians and homosexuals, given that civic toleration is a value that even Christians can accept?

I’m afraid that Volokh Conspiracy commenter DangerMouse is correct: We can’t just pass a law and make opposition to homosexuality illegal. That would be interfering with the freedom of religion, and the religious must be allowed to practice what they believe that God demands of them. Let’s let Christians have their bizarre cultic practices, their ritual firings, their bigotry — because that’s certainly what it is.

Let them have it, and let’s all keep what we can of religious liberty. In the end, it’s better to know where everyone stands and to convince others of the truth of our beliefs using methods other than the threat of government force. Given that gays and lesbians have so often been the victims of government force, one would hope that they would be less willing to employ it themselves, but this seems unfortunately not to be the case.

The Obligatory Crow About the Victory of Free Markets: Happily summed up in two words: Gorby Vuitton.

The Folly of Crowds: Polls like this one seem fundamentally flawed to me:

By a margin of more than 2.5 to 1, CP readers believe crime is getting worse, not better, in Annapolis.

When asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement, “CRIME is getting worse in Annapolis, 23 said, “I agree” while only 9 said, “I disagree”. Seven readers said, “I am not sure.” CP does not know what to make of the nine “silly” votes that responded, “Wait a second, I’m being robbed” or “Wait a second, I’m robbing someone”.

Keep in mind that this IS NOT a scientifically reliable poll. Admittedly, its uses are limited, but it does allow a self-selecting and stratified sample of nearly 40 CP readers overwhelmingly believe crime is getting worse in Annapolis. Please send us your suggestions for future survey questions.

The flaw lies in the assumption that asking about individual perceptions will yield any meaningful data about the likelihood of crime, the efficacy of various enforcement methods, or the relative importance of crime among the various problems confronting the government.

There is a whole class of subjects on which the public is systematically uninformed. A majority always thinks crime is going up. A majority always thinks divorce is going up. A majority always thinks drug use is going up. A majority always thinks the environment is worse now than it was ten years ago. A majority always thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And yet it never gets there, and the majority just keeps on thinking this way, even when divorce, drug use, and crime decrease, when the environment improves, and when life overall gets better.

With Bush’s threatened veto of a federal sexual orientation antidiscrimination bill, you knew you could count on the antigay right to come forth with bad arguments against it. There are good arguments, I think, against antidiscrimination laws that apply to the private sector in general. The best argument I could imagine against adding sexual orientation is we shouldn’t expand what is already a set of liberty infringing litigation encouraging laws. However, the antigay right tends to argue the indefensible: the laws are just fine, those groups already protected deserve to be there, sexual orientation doesn’t.

Take for instance, this article by Harry Jackson:

Let me give you a list of five of the most important reasons we are against this legislation.

1. ENDA would overturn the historical basis of protected class status by adding “actual or perceived sexual orientation.” While every other federally-protected class embodies three standards: an obvious, immutable characteristic; a history of discrimination evidenced by economic disenfranchisement; and political powerlessness, “sexual orientation” falls under none of these criteria. It is an insult to African Americans to grant special protections for “sexual orientation.”

He bombs with his first reason. I don’t know what planet he is living on. Federal law currently protects not just race, but ethnic origin, color, gender, religion, age, disability and pregnancy. Religion is obviously not immutable, otherwise there would be no reason to proselytize. Neither are pregnancy or age, the latter of which is in a constant state of flux. And because people tend to amass more wealth as they age, older folks are richer than younger.

Gays don’t need to make a near perfect analogy to blacks for “sexual orientation” to “qualify” as a protected class. Can anyone with a straight face assert the aged or disabled have suffered more oppression from society than have gays? We could just as easily assert “It is an insult to gays to grant special protections for the aged [which is defined as people over 40] and disabled” while not protecting them. The way current anti-discrimination laws are structured, one cannot plausible argue the list makes sense as it is and sexual orientation does not qualify according to its criteria.

Next we have Peter LaBarbera who inaptly appeals to America’s founders:

“Homosexuality is not a ‘civil right,’ it is a human wrong – one that is redeemable as proven by thousands of contented former homosexuals and ex-lesbians. Our Founding Fathers, infused with a biblical view of fallen man, created limited government that sought to restrain the sinful outworking of men’s hearts … The law once punished sin (e.g., sodomy and anti-abortion laws), so it is preposterous to say that homosexuality affirming laws are necessary to uphold basic ‘constitutional rights,’” LaBarbera said.

America’s key founders while certainly not “pro-gay” by any stretch of the imagination, were not “infused with a biblical view of fallen man,” and their creation of limited government was not to seek “to restrain the sinful outworking of men’s hearts.” The problems with LaBarbera’s assertion:

First, it seems to me that limited government would not suffice to restrain a nature that was so fallen. The law of Moses, for instance, was the antithesis of a “limited government” that granted political liberty, because it regulated virtually every aspect of an individual’s life! Limited government arguably implies confidence in man’s nature — in man’s ability to rule himself.

Second, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, outright rejected original sin, and Washington, Adams, Madison, and Franklin rejected Calvin’s view of total human depravity and viewed man’s nature as partially fallen, capable of great good or great evil.

Third, their attitude on the fallibility of the Bible was a cafeteria rationalism that thought man’s reason could “edit” those parts of scripture they deemed “irrational.” This, it seems to me, is exactly what pro-gay theologians do when they try to scrub out the antigay passages from scripture.

Finally, these founders did grant, as a basic civil right, the right to violate not just the Bible, but the very First Commandment of the Ten Commandments. Every single one of those 5 key founders (as well as many other non-key founders) believed in granting the full rights of conscience to non-Christian worshippers. When you have an unalienable right to worship false gods, as America’s founders believed, you have a natural right to do what scripture forbids. Therefore, how America’s founders believed the Bible should relate to America’s civil laws proves nothing against sexual orientation’s status in antidiscrimination codes.

Huckabee claimed that the majority of the signers of the Declaration were clergymen. This site notes:

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). A few more of the signers were former clergymen, though it’s a little unclear just how many. The conservative Heritage Foundation said two other signers were former clergymen. The religion web site Adherents.com said four signers of the declaration were current or former full-time preachers. But everyone agrees only Witherspoon was an active minister when he signed the Declaration of Independence.

The site notes the reason for the confusion:

One issue that may contribute to the confusion about which signers had a history in the clergy is that during the time the Declaration was written, people who studied at universities often received doctorates of divinity, a common degree designation, even if they were not working clergy, said Mary Jenkins of the Independence National Historical Park.

Barton is the one who most notably asserts something along the lines of 27 signers of the Declaration of Independence had “seminary” degrees. The reality is, they had degrees from places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton which were originally founded with orthodox Christian missions.

Something the Christian Nation crowd doesn’t tell us about these “Christian” colleges is during the time the founders (and the ministers they followed) were educated, those colleges became hotbeds of “infidelity” and even the seminary schools trained their ministers in “infidel” principles. The result was Harvard trained ministers like Jonathan Mayhew, Samuel West, and Charles Chauncy embraced theological unitarianism, universalism and rationalism and, in so doing, arguably ceased being “Christian,” (or at least “Christian” as defined by its historic orthodoxy). These men also delivered the most notable and influential pro-revolutionary sermons from the pulpit. And even Witherspoon, who was an orthodox Christian, when he argued for Revolution from the pulpit, left his orthodox Christianity at the church door and instead turned to Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment and rationalism, because the Bible/orthodox Christianity could not provide a sufficient basis to justify revolt while those a-biblical sources could and did.