Ok, now, this will sound like a weird place to start, but stick with me a moment.  I consider myself a conservative (although more precisely, a libertarian-constitutionalist-voluntaryist) but I wasn’t always one.  I grew up on default… that is, more or less as a liberal, especially on political and economic issues.  What changed?  Well, when I came to the place where I decided that Truth mattered, I realized that my belief system should, to the best of my ability, resemble reality.

This notion that I should adjust my mind to the world as it really was was really critical in shaping how I’ve come now.  You see, there are lots of things that I wished were the case.  Unfortunately, they aren’t.  For example, I might wish that the members of the government can be trusted to look after the interests of the citizens, but it just isn’t the case.  (Formative for me on this point was Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky).  History and today’s newspaper reveal otherwise.

I have learned that in life, actions have consequences.  I can try to shut my eyes to them and hope that by magic this time the action will have a different consequence (the one that I wished would happen) or I can accept reality.  Accepting reality made me into a conservative.

Now, I say all of this in prelude because in this post I’m going to tackle something that I think even conservatives don’t get right a lot of times.  I have heard liberals and pacifists and progressives all say something very similar to… “Violence is never the answer.”   But I have heard conservatives say it, too.  A quick google search reveals people across the spectrum making this statement.

But every sane person knows that, in fact, there are times when violence is the answer.  Even most insane people know that sometimes violence is the answer.

So what we have here is a sentiment that is casually flung around that nearly all of us know isn’t true.  In short, in saying such a thing, we are out of touch with reality.  And one of the things I’ve learned about holding sentiments that don’t actually mesh with the real world is that inevitably bad things result.  For example, if you think that you can step in front of a bus going 70 mph without getting hurt, a bad thing will result.  Some times, the ‘bad things’ aren’t immediate or clear, but never fear, God cannot be mocked:  we reap what we sow.

I have had the unfortunate experience in my life to interact with two who really really really really believed that ‘violence is never the answer.’  These were both Christians.

The conversations went a bit like this…

“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“So let’s say that someone comes into your house and starts to rape your wife.”
“That would be horrible.”
“Yea, I should say so.  Would you do anything about it?”
“Well, I wouldn’t use violence, if that’s what you mean.  But I would try to stop him.”
“How?”
“Well, of course I would call 9-11.  And then I would try to pull him off her.”
“You don’t think ‘pulling’ is violent?”
“Not like shooting him in the head would be.  That would be wrong.  Jesus would never do something like that.”
“Do you think he’s just going to stop because you pull on him gently?”
“Well, I might have to pull hard.”
“And that wouldn’t be violent?”
“It isn’t the same.”
“And if he still doesn’t stop even though you’ve pulled really hard?”
“Well, like I said, I would have called 9-11.”
“Ok, so the cops finally arrive.  You’ve been Christ-like in your insistence that ‘violence is never the answer.’  What do you think the cops are going to do to the guy?”
“Well, I suppose they’ll make him stop.”
“By asking nicely?”
“Well, they would probably pull him off, too.”
“And if that didn’t work, do you think the cops are just going to leave him to it?”
“Of course not.”
“You think they might pull their guns and shoot the guy if he doesn’t stop?”
“Yes, well, they very well might shoot him.”
“So, ‘violence is never the answer’ for you, because that would be murder, but you don’t have objections to calling in other people to do your dirty work for you?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“If the cop kills the rapist, is he justified?”
“No, because that is murder, and is always wrong.”
“Then why even bother calling 9-11?  You think that just because you can out-source your sin that you’ve handled the situation correctly?  Can you explain to me precisely how a husband goes about ‘laying down his life’ for his wife to protect her if you’ll just stand there while she’s being raped.  How does your wife feel about this knowing you’d ‘pull gently’ at a rapist raping her?”
“Uh…”

Now, you may believe this or not, but I have had 2 conversations that went almost completely like this.  (GIO, if you’re out there, thanks for the unpleasant conversation!).  I think all of us, when pondering a scenario like this, understand that really, truly, violence is sometimes the answer.

The thing to do, then, is to think through the when and the how and the why one would use violence, not deny reality.

Compare and contrast this with the recent story of the young boy whose hat was deemed ‘inappropriate’ by his teacher because it displayed toy army men on it.

From the article:

Kenneth DiPietro, superintendent of Coventry Public Schools, insisted that the issue was not with patriotism or honoring the military but the promotion of weapons in school.

Just out of curiosity, if the Columbine shooters came back from the dead and began shooting up a school somewhere, would any superintendent anywhere not want the police to come in and put them back in the grave?  No.  But wouldn’t the police display of guns (and actual use of them) represent a ‘promotion of weapons in school’?

Well, yes it would.

The rejoinder here is that of course we can conceive of a an appropriate time for a gun to be used in a school- when a bad man is shooting in a school HE MUST BE STOPPED!

But that’s precisely my point.  As it turns out, violence is sometimes the answer.  Sometimes, we want weapons in schools.  Sometimes, we want people to use lethal force.  So why on earth do we hand down to our children platitudes about non-violence that we know don’t comport with reality?

I think the answer, in part, is that of course we wished that we could say ‘violence is never the answer.’  Oh, to live in such a world!  Some parents might say that they don’t mean to communicate an absolutism, and are just delivering a moral lesson in a way that their child will find easiest to understand.  I can sympathize with that.  It isn’t an easy thing to teach an eight year old when it might be appropriate to use force, even lethal force.  As an adult, I’m not sure that I’ve even got it all figured out.  I can see the temptation to default to the platitude.

But the platitude is dangerous.  On the one hand, when we transmit it, we transmit something we know is not actually true.  That’s bad policy right there.  On the other hand, it shuts down an important area of human experience that requires extensive critical thinking.  In a world filled with evil and malignant men, every good person must be prepared in their mind for what they should do given certain eventualities… because we know from the newspaper and history book that these things do happen.  Another danger to the platitude is that it sets people up for guilt after they perform a violent- but righteous- act.  Finally, if someone has never actually thought about the matter before and all they’ve been fed is the platitude, they might freeze up and do nothing, or flee when they should fight.

I can think of no better example then the story that emerged out of the Virginia Tech massacre of Liviu Librescu.  Here is a survivor of the holocaust, gunned down through the door that he refused to open for the gunman.   If Liviu was a Christian like the one I encountered above, I suppose he would have been concerned about maybe hurting the gunman’s finger or some such thing by violently keeping the door shut.  Liviu’s heroics were not in vain:  about 20 students had their lives saved as they fled through the windows.

But what about the 15 or 16 people who died after Liviu died?  Could they have been saved?  What if the students in Liviu’s classroom had bum rushed the dude as he came in the door?  As it is, the dude killed two people in that room.  Would he have been able to kill more than that if the class had attacked him from close range?  I don’t think so, and I think that all those who died afterward would have been saved by this measure.  That’s about fifteen people, about half of the total that were killed that day.

Now, you might be protesting right now (especially if you’re one of the 20 students that fled out the windows!) that such action is highly unwise by unarmed students, and it assumes knowledge that might not have been in hand (ie, the number of shooters).

And I think that there is some weight to that protest.  So why not learn from the scenario and in the future let college kids carry guns with them and instead of issuing them the platitude that ‘violence is never the answer’ instruct them on the moral and practical dimensions of violence?

Right, I know.  We can’t do that, because violence is never the answer.  That’s why we call the police, and have them use violence.  Because it’s never the answer.  Except when it is.  Oh, I just can’t get it straight!

Ok, so you can’t consider this post exhaustive.  I turned over a lot of ground and left a lot of issues unanswered.   I took for granted, for example, that every reader, including 99.99% of Christians, believe that in fact violence is an appropriate response to raping and school slaughter.  And certainly there are many times and places where non-violence really is the answer.  There are even times when (as Christians) not resisting a violent man is called for.  Yes, I know.  I didn’t deal with these issues.  Perhaps in a later post, I will.

In the meantime, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that if someone breaks into your house to do your harm or bursts into your kid’s school and starts shooting, you’ll be among the first to dial 9-11.

And that’s enough to prove the point:  violence is sometimes the answer.

Let’s lose the platitude and start using our brains.

It is my hope that in facing possible imprisonment I will be able to call attention to the shredding of the Constitution and alter some perspectives.  Of course, I should say, the continued shredding of the Constitution, as this is only one of the clearest violations of the rule of law and the ‘consent of the governed’ to come down the pike.  It is my hope that maybe, just maybe, we’ll decide that the Constitution matters and that if we want to make society-wide changes we’ll at least have the decency to do it the right way, by amending the Constitution if necessary.

In my mind, this is not just about the health care bill.  This is about a pattern of systemic abuse of the rule of law going back decades (*cough* Roe vs. Wade *cough*).   It cannot end well if we don’t put a stop to it.  Nor can I say it’s going particularly well, now.

I have no love for Blagojevich.  Frankly, I have no love for any Illinois politician.  My five years in Illinois was like being front and center at a circus.  There is also no question in my mind that Blagojevich is guilty as sin- and this is certainly not his first offense.   What is the difference between Blagojevich, Daley, and Obama?  Blagojevich got caught.  We’re talking Chicago politics, here.  You’re living in la-la land if you expect anyone- even the Messiah- to have clean hands in general, and few places in the country get hands dirtier.

So it should be clear that I have no special fondness for Blagojevich.  Nonetheless, in this country- allegedly- people are innocent until proven guilty.  To try to get the state supreme court to toss the governor out before the man has even had his trial is simply wrong.  Should the man resign?  Of course.  But then I think almost every politician in Illinois should resign, and that probably includes the Republicans, but the Democrats for sure.  If the man doesn’t resign, will the state suffer?  Probably.  But that still doesn’t mean you can just ignore the rule of law and it doesn’t mean that just because a guy is an arrogant knucklehead that you can strip him of due process.

Lisa Madigan is naturally just following the Democrat playbook, running to the courts rather than following available procedures.   Here, though, the pressure is such that conviction or not, resignation or not, the man is probably going to be impeached in short order, anyway.  Not fast enough for Lisa.

What troubles me is that I can’t say that I’ve heard anyone else raise this point.  Not even conservatives.   We conservatives are supposed to be the ones sticking up for the rule of law.  I think this indicates how far this country has moved from its founding principles.  I’m not saying that conservatives are willfully giving Madigan a pass here, I’m just saying that its become so commonplace to manipulate the law that sometimes we hardly notice when its happening.

Anyway, I say impeach the guy if he doesn’t resign, but you can’t strip the man of his position based on allegations made in an indictment that haven’t yet been aired in trial.  I mean, you can’t if you care about the rule of law.  Which is exactly why I would not be surprised one bit to see Lisa Madigan succeed in her efforts.

How would that be for a little stare decisis, eh?  A little precedent in your coffee sir?  Thank you, make it a double.  What’s that?  Congressman SuchandSuch has been accused of ThisandThat?  Bammo!  Take it to court!  Illinois vs. Blagojevich will solve your problems without the messy business of actually convicting him!

(And of course after the dust clears I suppose we’ll see the Lt. Govenor appoint Madigan to the empty senate seat.  And it will turn out that Madigan was one of Obama’s personal favorites for the job.  We will be asked not to read into this but many of us will suspect the truth:  Blago didn’t play ball; Obama showed what happens if you don’t play it his way.  He is from Chicago, after all.)

EDIT:  Well, I’ll be!  Someone did take note of the precedent angle, and it was an Illinois Democrat! Well, there is an exception to every rule, I guess.  It was in the very article I posted:

The decision to go to the state’s highest court was not welcomed by everyone. Democratic Rep. Jack Franks said it would set “a dangerous precedent” for the court to remove a governor as proposed by Madigan, who is a likely candidate for governor in 2010.

Franks, a fierce Blagojevich critic, said that kind of decision should be left to the General Assembly.

Seems a little late for Democrats to be worrying about ‘dangerous precedents’ but we’ll take what we can get.

The South Carolina chairwoman of the Democrat party said yesterday that Sarah Palin’s “primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”  This has apparently inspired a firestorm but this is an observation that was made in the conservative camp already from the reverse:  that in the liberal (feminist) mind, Sarah’s primary disqualification was that she hasn’t had an abortion.

Sarah Palin is proof that carrying your baby to term is not ‘punishment‘ and does not destroy your life and keep you from succeeding as a woman.  There is no question that young mothers have a difficult road ahead of them but the liberal message that it is ok to annihilate your offspring to make it easier is a bizarre moral statement entailing numerous wierd philosophical and ethical justifications.  Call the offspring a ‘fetus’ or a ‘zygote’ and you can do anything you want with it, nevermind the fact that these labels are almost completely arbitrary and the implication that they are not ‘human’ by virtue of these labels completely spurious.

This sort of moral and logical jujitsu made me think about the moral equivalency present in the reaction to the terrorist attacks on 9-11.  By now of course we’ve all heard the saying that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’  By insisting that there is no moral foundation many become hesitant to impose their preferences on another.  This applies to the abortion debate as well as to terrorism.  A person of this mind might not want to condemn terrorists.  They might say as their subway is blown up or their building demolished, “Well, we probably had it coming.  Who am I to say?”

I don’t for a minute believe that my country is perfectly innocent.  I am the first to remind people of certain government abuses.  However, there can be no question that America has been, in the main, a force for the good, and this in large part because of the distinctly Christian outlook that Americans historically have possessed.

The ability to see this is completely clouded in the minds of some.  Sarah Palin has been described as the perfect example of the ‘American Taliban.’  (See just one example).  This is moral equivalency writ large, moral sense perfectly unhinged.

When was the last time we saw a Pentecostal walk into a coffee bar and blow it up?  When was the last time we saw a Pentecostal (she’s not one anymore, but still) video tape him or herself beheading someone?  When was the last time we saw a Christian of any stripe commandeer an airplane and fly it into a building?  These things do not happen, yet liberals perceive that Christian ‘fundamentalists’ are just like Muslim ‘fundamentalists.’

We aren’t talking about rational people.  In ultimate terms, there is no discussion possible with them.  There are only three ways to overcome:  1.  Convert them.  2.  Out-reproduce them.  3.  Out-vote them.

The Jihadist would have added “4.  Slay them” but the fact that I didn’t won’t be noticed on the left, which is precisely my point.

Now, that argument alone needs a thumping but I’m not going to dish it out right now.

Anyway, should this matter?  Should this make conservatives think twice?  Already the blogosphere is ringing with the insinuation that a pregnant daughter somehow discredits or undermines the parents’ moral platform.  The left is all a titter about a young couple engaging in the behavior that the left itself is hellbent on promoting, except the whole ‘keeping the baby’ part.   I suppose some more measured voices on the left will be content so long as it was Bristol’s own choice to keep the baby, but there will be others on the left that believe that Bristol is ruining her life.  There will be some on the left that believe that this is the worst thing in the world that could happen to a young teenager girl.

In fact, there are some people that believe that actually carrying the baby to term would be a punishment.

In fact, such a person is running for president.  His name is Barack Obama:

When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include — which should include abstinence education and teaching the children — teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include — it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old, I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby,

http://lifenews.com/nat3827.html

Ok, so a baby isn’t a consequence, it is a punishment.  Got it.

So, the first thing that comes to my mind is that if Barack’s daughters were a little older we could be quite certain that there wouldn’t any scandal like with the Palins.  Why not?  Because if they got pregnant we’d never hear about it.  Presumably, they’d terminate, and we’d never know that his daughters had been sexually active before it was wise.

The next thing that comes to my mind is that a willingness to own up to ones mistakes and take responsibility for them is really an asset.  Bristol has a hard road ahead of her.  There is no question about that.  I know a little bit about that road, myself.  It takes courage to choose that road and good sense to realize that the mistake was her own- and not the child’s.

But to the central issue:  does Bristol’s behavior undercut the moral position of her parents?  I say no.   If the Palins had disowned their daughter, that would have undercut their moral position.  For the Christian faith has never been about being perfect and always about owning up to one’s mistakes and receiving forgiveness.

In my mind, this whole affair assures me that the Palins are real people with real problems with the right attitude for dealing with those problems.  It stands in stark contrast to how it seems Mr. Obama would handle a similar situation.   Mr. Obama apparently would prefer that his daughters get an abortion if they were in this position, viewing the baby as a punishment.   The Palins, on the other hand, wouldn’t take it out on the baby, who had nothing to do with the behavior of the daughter and her boyfriend.  One suspects that they have nonetheless had a long conversation, but there is no hint that they plan on throwing Bristol under the bus.

Which attitude do we want carrying the day in Washington DC?

I don’t agree, personally.  I believe that the ruling was constructionist (which makes me wonder why Kennedy went with it) but let’s assume it was judicial activism.  Is this not then an illustration about the foolishness of a judicial system that is allowed to deviate at will from the words on the paper?  There is no right to an abortion listed in the Constitution, ala Roe vs. Wade.  There is no language in the Constitution or even the state constitutions ensuring that gays have as much right to ‘marriage’ as others.  And yet, courts have found that they are.  This is the bed the liberals made:  now lie in it.

As far as I’m concerned, if states want to decide to legalize abortion, or legalize gay marriage, so long as it is done via the legislative branch, which is supposed to represent the will of the people, I will not be happy but at least I can say that democracy is preserved and that there is at least hope that we can yet persuade people to another position.  But on the current model, people are essentially disenfranchised.  In order to overturn a ruling, in particular the SC ruling, you need to A.  get a justice in there with the views you like and B.  Get a case to come before them that matches the thing you want to accomplish.

Not easy to do.  It can take a generation to pull it off, if not a century.  Seems like a bad way to run a country, to me.  If this is in fact an instance of judicial activism from the conservative side, then let this be a warning and a call to action to the liberals:  it’s time to stop using the courts to push our agendas and trust the people and the legislative processes.