Battle of the Sexists

Wow . . . it's been a long time. The last several months have been crazy, and have included everything from getting a brand new wonderful job, to a brand new, even more wonderful fiancee'. Life has been great, but has left little time for blogging.

That changed today, when I read something that almost broke my heart. I had no choice but to write about it.

Those of you who know me best - along with any of you who have read my contributions over at Heidi's (the aforementioned fiancee's) blog - know that I am somewhat of a crusader for a more balanced (and to my mind, more Christian) approach toward women than that for which many of my fellow evangelical conservatives are known. In short, I am somebody who believes that the term "feminist" is not a term to be run from, but a term to be recaptured for what it once meant . . . advocating that men and women are, and of right ought to be, equal in the eyes of the law as they are in the eyes of God.

That said, articles like this one tend to make me a bit . . . angry.

Articles like this one, on the other hand, bring me to tears.

It seems to me that the Gospel of Christ, so simply laid out in the first- and second-hand accounts of the first four New Testament Books, and so eloquently explained in further detail through the personal correspondences of Paul and others, was hijacked by the likes of Augustine (who was prone to overreaction on the issue of women, due to a rather . . . colorful . . . lifestyle before his conversion) and others who honestly and fervently believed in the inferiority of the fairer sex. In the modern era, this has become a politically incorrect hot potato, so modern evangelicals have had to come up with another explanation besides the one commonly accepted for nearly two millenia - that women were less than their male counterparts.

The church seems to have been at a loss as far as what to do, and has ended up arriving, for the most part, at the rationally unintelligible position that women are "equal in being, but unequal in role." (if they're unequal in roles, simply due to who and what they are, doesn't that make them unequal in being??) The trial faced by modern evangelicals is that Augustine & Co., rather than merely being content to observe that women were held as inferior by tradition, had to assert that they were also held as inferior by divine command.

Having no such divine authority behind it, secular psychology has simply resorted to shifting the blame. For thousands of years, women were seen as the cause of the world's moral problems. Secular psychology has simply transferred that blame to men, without exception or qualification.

This country is facing a hidden cultural crisis - and according to the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) messages with which you are being bombarded every day, if you are male, it is all my fault . . .

. . . well . . . mine, along with any of you readers who also happen to be male.

More and more, studies are showing that the way boys and girls learn, even at the very youngest ages, is completely different. Given the grip that the fringes of the feminist movement (as opposed to individual feminists - I count myself among the latter, but wouldn't go near the former for fear of my life) have gained on the public school system in this country, does anybody doubt the veracity of studies supporting the conclusion that classes are structured in a way in which most boys simply find it impossible to learn?? Does anybody wonder if there might be a connection between this assertion and the fact that 90% of our public school students doped up on ritalin happen to be boys??

The whole thing reminds me of the observation made by an article in my local paper several years ago about the ethnicity classes taught at the community college I attended at the time. It pointed out that classes about African-American culture were a celebration of the unique things that culture had to offer (all well and good). Classes on Hispanic culture were a celebration of the unique things that culture had to offer (wonderful). Classes on Asian culture were a celebration of the unique things that culture had to offer (great). Classes on "White" culture (whatever that means) were all about how we Caucasians were to blame for all the problems suffered by all the other cultures (what the heck is a "caucasian" anyway? My ancestors didn't come from anywhere near the Caucasus, unless you're tracking all the way back to Noah.)

Similarly, when the term "women's studies" is bandied about, it is heralded as a means of celebrating the unique achievements and perspective of women in society - and there are a lot of them, to be sure.

However, as these articles point out, a study of male behavior - even for children for crying out loud! - has to be about the way these young boys are at fault for the whole of society's problems simply by virtue of the fact that they are male.

It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to curse. It makes me want to hit somebody . . . (oops, that would be an act of male rage, wouldn't it?)

For [censored], people! These are children! They might be called "naive" or "innocent," except for the tragic fact that the 13-year-old boy in the second article I posted has suffered more than I have at age 25 - indeed, more than I hope I ever suffer in my entire life. Innocence has already been stolen from him, and now he's told that he's to blame.

No wonder there's so little understanding between advocates of gender equality on both sides. Like so many US Senators, the people out of power at any given time aren't interested in sharing it, just getting it. Similarly, the ones in power are interested neither in sharing, nor using it well - just in using it as much as possible.

It seems appropriate here to steal a line made famous by another radically liberal cause celbre. Thus, as Walt Kelly said on the first Earth Day in 1970, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

[Hat tip to instapundit for the links.]

Thoughts on a Book that has Changed My Life

Recently, I attended a retreat in Colorado, hosted by Ransomed Heart Ministries, that was based on John Eldredge's book, Wild at Heart. Mr. Eldredge served as the main speaker far the conference, aimed at helping men rediscover themselves - helping them cut through the daily grind, the "male image," and all of the pressures that come with . . . well . . . life in general, and just exist as God initially intended.

Upon coming home, I discussed this conference and the book on which it was based with one of the elders at my church, who expressed some vague unease about Mr. Eldredge and about some of his teachings. In the course of our discussion of the book, he emailed me an article produced by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, reviewing Wild at Heart. Given the impact this book had on my life, I felt compelled to author a "review of the review" - a response to this article, outlining what I believe to be its shortcomings in the areas of logic and scripture. The review of Eldredge is here, and my response is here. It's a discussion well worth reading, but be patient - there's a lot there. The initial review is four pages, and my review is . . . well . . . let's just say, I got into what I was writing. When I finished, there were eleven pages of response.

Read it if you like, hopefully, it'll be some decent food for thought.

The Science of Design . . . ?

Of late, due to comments made by our President, the old debate over the science taught in public schools is flaring up again in earnest.

At issue is the newly repackaged version of creationism being pushed as an areligious alternative able to pass muster with those who believe in the somewhat fanciful notion of a "wall of separation between church and state."

The ins, outs, ups, downs, and every-which-ways of such a wall are the subject for another conversation. This conversation is about the public furor over the notion of "Intelligent Design."

I woke up this morning firmly ensconced in the camp of those who wish to see Intelligent Design taught in schools. Now, I am not so certain of that position.

Intelligent Design is quite simple in premise. Its major tenet holds that the universe and all that is therein are too complex to have developed by chance. It posits no religious tenet, and owes allegiance to no creed or divine text. It simply holds that the complexity of the system in which we exist is proof, in and of itself, of its own creator.

That's it - pretty straightforward. There are other ins and outs, but the essential element of the political debate is that Intelligent Design is being pushed forward as something that should be given equal time in science classes in publich schools, as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

As I said, this morning I believed that.

Then I came across a series of arguments that started me thinking more in-depth about the issue. The most influential of these on my thinking was found at what is normally a somewhat sarcastic, often superficial political weblog, the Ace of Spades

All of this got me wondering exactly how Intelligent Design relates to science, a question answered by some careful examination.

. . . To put it simply, it doesn't.

Let me say that again, as I know many of my readers will probably be a bit startled to see that.

Intelligent Design is not science.

Science is, "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena."

Science is propogated by study, via the scientific method. This is most simply described in the following sequence:

1. Observe some aspect of the Universe.
2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations
5. Modify the hypothesis in light of your results
6. Repeat until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment/observation

Intelligent Design stops short of the burdens of true science. Proponents of evolution often do as well, but that is not the point. Evolution itself is scientific. It is based in the physical world, and is premised upon a set of hypotheses that can be tested, at least in a limited way, and subsequently verified or discarded. Because of its very nature, Intelligent design on the other hand is not only not scientific, it is anti-scientific.

Proponents of intelligent design have made an observation about our universe: namely, that it is complex. They have formulated a hypothesis based on that observation: that it could not have happened by chance. There are, then, a variety of ways theorized as to how it might have happened - they include Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Theistic Evolution, and a wide variety of more localized belief systems.

That I happen to agree with their hypothesis does not change the fact that it cannot be tested. Herein lies the basic burden of science. In order to be sceintific, a hypothesis must be able to be tested and replicated repeatedly.

Until the supreme Creator decides in his wisdom to create another universe and invite a couple of creationists along to observe, that's not going to happen. Thus, intelligent design does not meet with the requirements of even a scientific theory. Evolution can at least be tested microcosmically, as new stars are born, new crust is created at the edge of continental plates, and new animal and human life comes into existence. Intelligent Design could only truly be tested microcosmically in this way if every prayer by every follower of a given religion were always answered affirmatively. That would go quite a way toward proving the existence of a divine being (although not necessarily an intelligent one) but that's not going to happen either.

Ace of Spades thus concludes his article with the comment, "Religion and science do not need to be in conflict. But if some of the religious continue insisting on pushing them into conflict, I'm afraid I'm going to have to side with science."

I'm afraid I have to disagree.

What, after all, is religion? To answer that question in full would take several posts, but to put it simply, religion is, "Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe." It is also "A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship."

Could somebody explain to me where, exactly, that leaves room for verification?

The problem is that in the modern world, "anti-scientific" has become a perjorative term. It shouldn't be. It has come to be almost synonymous with "anti-truth," which is simply not . . . well . . . true. For truth has many levels, and not all of them can be experienced with the senses - the realm of science.

This all comes down, then, to faith - which Scripture defines for us in Hebrews 11:1 as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Again, not too much room there for rigorous experimentation and replication.

It seems to me, then, that the problem is not so much that science is being taught wrongly in schools. It seems rather that modern man has become altogether too dependent on science. One can, after all, only get so far by utilization of the five senses. Poetry cannot be felt with the fingertips. Love cannot be seen with the eyes. Joy cannot be heard with the ears. Victory and success can neither be tasted with the tongue nor smelled with the nose.

Yet modern man wishes a scientific answer for everything:

Success? Well that's easily measured through a battery of statistics.

Victory? Well, you can see with your own eyes whether your opponent still stands, can you not?

Joy? Well, what is your net worth? Do you have the job you want? The house you want? The life you want?

Love? . . . ah, love. Do you have a regular companion with whom you desire, and are able, to spend the bulk of your time and your life? Well, you must be in love, right?

Poetry? It's all a matter of mathematics and meter and rhythm, isn't it?

If all of this is beginning to sound shallow, it is because when one holds science up as all-important, one cannot help but be shallow. Science is a necessary process for understanding some aspects of the physical world in which we live - but it is only good insofar that it can provide the answers to various questions.

As the recently produced 125th Anniversary Edition of Science Magazine illustrates, though, those who have given their lives to the sciences are good at coming up with answers, but they have a long way yet to go. For their anniversary, the magazine published a list of 125 questions science simply has not answered - and the list contains some doozies:

There are practical questions such as what the limit will eventually be on how much data can be squeezed onto a conventional computer chip.

There are philosophical questions such as what the precise genetic difference is that makes us distinct from animals.

And at the top of the list is this doozy: "What is the universe made of?"

One would think that question to be key to the evolution/intelligent design debate, would one not?

So it seems that while evolution is hardly the proven fact that some claim it to be, intelligent design does not even meet the criterion required of a theory - and more importantly can never meet them. Theoretically speaking, evolution could one day be proven true (though I don't believe it will be.)

The same cannot be said of intelligent design - and it is therefore unscientific.

Thus, the conflict here is not between competing theories. Rather, it is between the preeminence of science and soul.


With apologies to those who have given their lives to empirical pursuits, I'm sorry, but I want to know more than what makes my fingers bend, move, and register sensations. I want to experience the bliss that comes when they touch the cheek of the woman I love.

I want to know more than how many people live in my city, their average age, their ethnic backgrounds, their preferences of politics, and their favorite foods. I want to get to know individuals among them, to become a part of their lives, and to experience the joy that comes with sharing a small piece of other people's stories.

I want to know more than how many grains of dust in the atmosphere it takes to turn a sunset from soft blue, to flaming orange, to deep indigo. I want to know why my heart thrills to watch it happening.

It seems to me, then, that as long as individuals look to science to discover all the answers, religion and science do have to be in conflict.

And in this particular conflict, I'm afraid science just doesn't cut it.

A New Direction . . .

Greetings after a long absence. My apologies for the extended silence.

It seems thatI have once again grown weary of commenting on things political. This has been happening a lot, lately. I sit down to think about things, and find as I peruse the pages of my fellow bloggers, that somewhere, somebody has already thought up and fully expounded upon precisely the topic about which I wish to write.

I hate that. When I am writing, the one thing I loathe more than anything else is to be unoriginal.

Nevertheless, the issues I was covering when I was engaging in political writing are more than capably handled by others - which has led me in a new direction.

Of late, I have had a hard time writing just about anything. The one exception, I have found, is when my girlfriend asked me to do a series of posts on her own weblog about the role of women, in the dual contexts of scripture and history. History being a passion of mine, I agreed.

I loved it. My writing felt alive for the first time in a long time.

So I have decided to take up my virtual pen on more topics at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, and religion. Those who know me best know that here, of all places, I will be anything but conventional.

So join me as I take up residence here for a while. I apologize for any disappointment of any who found this site hoping to discover intense political discourse (assuming there is anybody out there who still realizes this site exists after having not been updated in the last few months.) I assure you, the discussion here will be intense. At times it will even be political. That will not, however, be its focus any longer.

What will its focus then be? I am not sure. Only time can tell that for certain. All I know is that I am going to war. My weapon is the keyboard. My enemy, conventional wisdom - not because it is or is not wisdom, but because it is conventional.

. . . let us see what comes of this battle.

What the Left Really Hates

It is interesting to note that every issue coming under public scrutiny of late, from the Terri Schiavo case, to Social Security, to Media Bias, to Judicial Filibusters, to the Iraq War, to the Succession in the Vatican, to . . . well . . . everything . . . has thrown back the curtain of the Left and revealed what it is they truly hate.

In the Terri Schiavo case, what we were told is that the "bad guys" were those with "deep seated beliefs in extreme religious ideals," because they were getting in the way of a woman's right to determine her own fate.

In the case of Social Security, the "bad guys" are those with a deep conviction in the notion that we the people are in the best position to decide how our own money should be spent.

In the debate over media bias, the villains are those with firmly rooted ideas about how best to distribute facts in an objective and truthful manner.

In the case of Judicial Filibusters, the left's bogeymen (and women) are the judicial nominees themselves, who are "conservative activists" (which as I noted in my last post is an oxymoron) and are guilty of having deepseated religious convictions.

In the Iraq war, of course, the archvillain of them all is President Bush, who went to war from the start with the firm conviction that Saddam Hussein was a danger to international security, and that a democratic Iraq could be a catalyst for unprecedented change in the Middle East.

And remember what it was, with which the few who criticized John Paul II, and the many who have criticized Benedict XVI took issue?

It seems that the liberal left doesn't so much have a problem with any particular deeply-held belief . . .

. . . they just seem to have a problem with the notion of deeply-held beliefs.

the former Cardinal Ratzinger was widly criticized not because he's a bad person (he's not) nor because he's demonstrated that as pope he will trample certain cherished leftist mantras underfoot (he hasn't). He was critiqued because of his relentless assault on moral relativism.

I'm not Catholic, and I don't acknowledge the Pope as my spiritual authority in any way. John Paul II was a personal hero of mine because of his accomplishments in international affairs.

I admire his successor for precisely the reason the Left hates him. Benedict is a believer. He may not be a believer in the same religion I am, but he has the courage to have a conviction.

This is a notion completely foreign to liberals - which is why they are falling all over themselves trying to stop these judicial nominations . . . it seems these judges - most vocally Judge Janice Rogers Brown - have the same courage exhibited by Joseph Ratzinger.

That our leftist leading lights do not have this same moral fortitude is exhibited everywhere we look: from Kerry's flip-flops, to Hillary's March to the Center, to the filibuster fiasco. Instead of following their hearts, liberals follow their noses whichever way the wind tells them the scent of political opinion is blowing.

What is dividing America today? It is conviction. The Right views conviction as a virtue, to be altered only when proven wrong. The left views it as a danger - a perilous exercise fraught with the hazardous possibility of being mistaken.

So the left, of course, is never mistaken - for how can one be wrong when one doesn't believe in anything. To the left, virtue is found in flexibility. If the views I espouse turn out to be unpopular, why, I'll just trade them for a more widely acceptable set.

Thus it is that the Democrat party finds itself in trouble, and where the Republican party follows suit it is to the extent that they have bought into the same flawed premise: that deeply held beliefs - whatever they are, are the problem.

True conservatives know that, far from being the problem, deeply held convictions displayed in a commitment to truth, no matter how unpopular or unlikely that truth might turn out to be - are the solution.

Judicial Activism and Left-Wing Ire

The 2004 election cycle, and its aftermath (in the midst of which we still squarely sit as a nation) have been incredibly insightful on any number of levels, but the most entertaining to watch, for me at least, has been the depth to which left-wing hypocrisy has been well and truly aired.

It began with the left-wing's appointed national spokesperson, Senator John Kerry. I'm not sure if, as a Senator from dark-blue Massachusetts, he simply wasn't used to having to find a message that resonated with a broader audience than his fellow New Englanders, but it seemed that Senator Kerry simply wasn't accustomed to having his words broadcast across the nation within moments of their utterance. He wasn't accustomed to being caught claiming to be in favor of protectionism in the manufacturing states of the Great Lakes area, while claiming to be a staunch free-trader in the export-happy climes of Washington State. He simply looked as though he expected to give a message to a certain crowd of people, and have it stay there.

Then it progressed to the favorite cheerleaders of the left: the news anchors, reporters, columnists, editors, and other yes-heads of liberalism who spin the daily news to mean whatever they want it to mean. Their longstanding claims of objectivity while virtually (or in cases like Mary Mapes, literally) campaigning for the defeat of President Bush, were finally laid to rest with the fall of Dan Rather, and the later capitulation of Eason Jordan.

After the election it was seen in the anguished soul-searching in which those on the left engaged . . . where they repeatedly asked themselves not the logical question, "How do we appeal to those who disagree with our belief system?" but the far more nonsensical, "How do we make it look to those who disagree with us like we're coming around to their point of view?"

Such introspection has led to the hilarious appropriation of "religious-ish" language by the denizens of the DNC, which have led most recently to the outlandish comparison, by Senator Ken Salazar, of Dr. James Dobson to the anti-Christ, and to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's pinning his hopes for a Democratic majority in 2006 on "a miracle."

Now, we see this hypocrisy, like every other political tool and trend in existence, drawn into play in the Senate filibuster battle.

Of what, you may ask, do I speak?

Of none other than the Democratic Party's new-found ire, in the wake of the Terri Schiavo case, directed against "activist" judges.

Like their religious tomes, however, these new indignant incantations are unpracticed, and therefore, a bit rusty. To a liberal, activism means carrying a deepseated passion for a certain cause, and acting on that passion to push that cause forward. Judicial activism then, (again, to a liberal) would mean acting on that passion as a member of the judiciary.

One wonders though, for example, in the case of Judge Janice Rogers Brown, how it is even possible to be, as one Democratic senator termed her, a "conservative judicial activist," given the fact that judicial activism is by its very definition unconservative.

What Senator Durbin means, of course, is not that she is a conservative judicial activist, but that she is a conservative activist within the judiciary. What the senator, and liberals in general, fail to realize is that judicial activism is a very specific term, connoting activism (as earlier defined) by means of using one's power as a member of the judiciary to re-interpret law.

This, Judge Janice Rogers Brown has certainly not done, and indeed she has been held up by her colleagues as "a jurist who applies the law without favor and without bias."

All of which is bad enough, but it is most galling because it comes from the very same Democrats who applauded Supreme Court Justice Kennedy for his opinion in Lawrence v. Texas that invalidated a Texas state homosexuality law because it did not conform to "international norms" . . . a standard never even considered within the Constitution.

Such a manipulation of the law renders the term "judicial activism" positively lethargic by comparison, and yet these same liberals applaud such an action, while simultaneously co-opting the language of the right once again, and manufacturing obviously false claims of judicial activism against a highly qualified jurist like Judge Janice Rogers Brown.

Were it not tearing at the very fabric of the Constitution that holds this country together, it would almost be amusing.

Instead, it's nothing short of tragic.

In the Battle for the Heart of America, Republicans are the French.

I am a Republican . . . it says so on my voter registration card, after all. However, I cannot help but get the feeling that my party is conducting a broad-based, and successful, assault on its own justification for existence.

In fact, the 21st Century Republican Leadership reminds me of nothing quite so much as it does the 20th Century history of the nation-state of France.

That said, there are many valuable lessons in that history, from which the Republican Party might stand to benefit if it cared to examine them.

Consider:

The French entered the 20th Century embittered by defeat in a war they undertook for the sake of partisan pride, and for which they were not quite equipped to fight.

Republicans entered the 21st Century embittered from a similar defeat, in a similar war - the impeachment of President Clinton.

The French fought back to win a very slim victory over their arch-rivals for European power, the Germans, in World War I - just as President Bush's Republican Party pulled out the slimmest of victories in the election of 2000.

The French suffered some embarrassing setbacks during World War II, including the loss of their own country for five years. But ultimately a remnant of them hung on and, with the help of allies, regained their footing atop their country and dealt Germany an even firmer ultimate defeat in 1945.

Similarly, the Republicans suffered major embarrassments in the aftermath of the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib being the lowest of low points. However, we hung on and, with the help of Tony Blair, John Howard, and Aleksander Kwasniewski (we must not, after all, forget Poland), were able to keep the country stable enough to hold a national election two months after President Bush's reelection.

Since World War II, the French have been . . . erratic . . . to say the least. During the Cold War, they pulled control of their strategic weapons out of NATO, and yet still demanded a voice at the negotiating table. Since losing their colonies in Indochina they have repeatedly engaged in adventurism in various parts of Africa, as well as in distant regions like Haiti, while simultaneously criticising any others who did so. Their hypocrisy has largely been motivated by the fact that the actions they criticized were likely to come at a high cost to their own partisan interests.

If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, all one must do is look to the Republican Party once again. After forging broad-based alliances with Democrats (Medicare Bill, No Child Left Behind), the Republicans proceeded to undercut those alliances and give their colleagues a handful of sticks with which to beat them.

The formerly isolationist party, which stood in times past for the firm standard of only involving itself in foreign conflicts for the sake of its own national interest, proceeded to justify a war not on those grounds, but on the far more dubious grounds of "top-down" democracy-building.

Finally, many of its leaders have allowed themselves to be embroiled in the same sort of economically-based hypocrisy at which the French have become such experts. Whether financing an anti-gambling campaign with casino money; paying exorbitant salaries to relatives and watching your colleagues justify it by claiming to have "saved money" on consulting fees; or financing a gargantuan tax cut not with decreases in spending, but with a spate of borrowing that brings doubt to the notion that it even is a cut in taxes in the long run, the Republicans certainly have succumbed to their own hubris.

What is the point of this long-winded analogy?

For that, we have to bring ourselves up to the present.

France entered the 20th Century as one of the world's superpowers. It left that century as a third-rate country with strained vocal chords trying in vain to assure the world that it was still important. France spent the better part of a half-century forging an ever-stronger alliance between the nations of Europe, and now looks to be on the cusp of watching that broad-based alliance fail not because of dissent from the fringes, but because the French government has so thoroughly alienated its own people.

The Republican Party entered the 21st Century at the top of its game. Over the course of the last four years, it has taken back the Senate, made historic gains in both houses of Congress, fought back from a damaging media campaign against a sitting President to win the 2004 election, and unseated a sitting Democratic Senate Leader with charges of "obstruction."

It has, in the process, seemingly done its dead-level best to eviscerate any position it ever stood for.

Instead of being the party of limited government it has become a collection of "BIG $PENDER$."

Instead of being the party of localized decision-making, it has become the party that brought education, medical, legal, and moral decisionmaking more thorougly inside the beltway than any administration before it.

Instead of being the party that staunchly stood in favor of judicial restraint, it has become the party of "selective activism," . . . that is, "activism is all right, if it's in my favor."

Instead of being the party of personal freedom, it has become the party of "freedom for those who agree with me."

Instead of being the party that appoints conservative judges who will not monkey with the Constitution, it has become the party that lets a minority of Senators make its appointments instead.

Like the French government, the Republican party needs to do some serious rethinking of its positions in terms of how it relates to the people who put it in power. If not, it will end up, like Jacques Chirac, a group of small men with big megaphones, pleading with their constituents to give them one last chance to show that they matter.

. . . and speaking of letters to Congress . . .

. . . I just mailed one off to my Senator, on an entirely different subject.

It took me a long time to figure out exactly where I stood on the issue of changing the Senate rules on filibusters for judicial nominations. A lot of the problem, for me, was the incredibly hyperbolic rhetoric that has characterized both sides of the debate. Democrats are certainly wrong when they say that filibustering such nominations is a "time-honored" tradition, and claims that the filibuster is "an integral part of the system of checks and balances" makes one wonder if they have ever read the Constitution.

However, one is forced to wonder the same thing about Republicans who claim that such a filibuster is unconstitutional. Our nation's founding document says precisely nothing about the rules for debate in either house of Congress, except that the two houses can set their own rules - which both have done, and re-done, numerous times throughout their history.

So lay off the Constitution, already! You're not going to find anything in it to support your position - whatever that position is - without engaging in feats of verbal gymnastics that border on the miraculous. It's just not there.

That being the case, it is doubtless that both sides view this as a proxy-war for future Supreme Court Nomination battles - which is why the stakes are so high here.

It is equally doubtless, though, that we are dealing with the lives and reputations of real people - people who have devoted their careers to service of this country. Such people, whatever their political affiliation, deserve a hearing. They have now been in limbo for month after painful month, and it cannot be doubted that this position is an incredible strain on them and their families. If there is some doubt as to their qualifications to fulfill the offices to which they have been nominated, then by all means, let those doubts be aired! Thus far, however, no such doubts have been raised. Those who oppose their nominations have merely turned them into pawn in a complicated political game. Those who support their nominations are little better.

Thus, my position is that the Senate can do whatever the heck it wants with its rules and procedures. If the Majority can invoke a change in parliamentary procedure to force a vote, so be it. The nominees deserve it. If the minority can block them, so be it. They're doing their job as a minority party. Thus, as I support and sympathize with the expressed views of the judges in question, and of the President who nominated them, I support anything within the bounds of legality that will get them the promotions they deserve - busting the filibuster included.

Will it come back to haunt the GOP? Probably, but is there any doubt that if it was a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate majority of 55, they would do the same thing regardless of whether or not Bill Frist blinks on this one? There is no such doubt in my mind. If we do nothing, we gain nothing.

Barring another event on the world-shattering magnitude of September 11, 2001, President Bush's judicial appointments will be the single most important (and enduring) action of his second term.

With that in mind, I wrote a letter to my senior Senator, John Warner - one of the collection of moderate Republicans whose names have been bounced about as possibly voting with the Democrats against any proposed rule change. I suggest any of you who read this, and live in Maine, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, Nebraska or Arizona do likewise. "Squishy" Republicans like these are notorious for their lack of backbone, and a letter or email might help their spinal fortitude on this vitally important issue.

The Internet Unchained . . . (we hope)

Big update over at RedState.org - Mike Krempasky reports that both S. 678, Senator Reid's internet protection bill, and Representative Jeb Hensarling's house equivalent have gone bipartisan. In the house, Tim Ryan (D-OH) has signed on as a cosponsor to what has now become HR 1606. In the Senate, Reid's bill now has arch-conservative Senator Tom Coburn on board. Things don't get much more bipartisan than that!

Krempasky also points out Downsize DC, a place you can go to easily make your voice heard on the matter. Alternatively, you're welcome to copy and paste my letters (in sidebar), insert the names of your senators and representative, and email, fax, or mail them in.