1. It seems clear that the Ninth Circuit is using a rational basis test, which is the strongest test the Supreme Court has been willing to give for sexual-orientation discrimination. As I've argued before, I think this is a mistake on the part of the opponents of Proposition 8. If they want the analogy with Loving v. Virginia and the overturning of bans on interracial marriage, they ought to be presenting this as a case of sex discrimination, not sexual-orientation discrimination. A black person under Virginia's law could marry a black person but not a white person. A white person could marry a white person but not a black person. So the marriage rights of a black person differed from the marriage rights of a white person in terms of who they could marry. That's race discrimination, which faces a strict scrutiny test, the strongest test the Supreme Court recognizes for discrimination cases.

Similarly, a restriction on marriage to opposite-sex couples does treat one group differently from another group. But those groups are not gays and straights. A straight man can marry the same people as a gay man. The discrimination is along sex lines. A man can't marry the same people as a woman. That's sex discrimination, by the same sort of reasoning that you find in Loving v. Virginia. It's not sexual-orientation discrimination. Sex discrimination faces intermediate scrutiny, the middle-level test of the three the Supreme Court recognizes for discrimination cases. Sexual-orientation faces only rational basis scrutiny, which is the weakest of the tests. So by Supreme Court precedent, the opponents of Proposition 8 would be better suited to pursue their arguments in terms of sex discrimination, which would be both more analogous to Loving v. Virginia and more difficult to get a law past it because of the higher scrutiny. But they continue to push it as a sexual-orientation discrimination claim, which I think helps their purposes much less.

2. The basic claim of the opinion is that there is no rational basis for a law like this, a claim that I think is obviously false. To pass rational basis scrutiny, all there needs to be is some sort of reason-based argument for the law or provision in question, not one that the Court even needs to think is a very good argument, just one that a rational person could support with some reasoning. It has to be a pretty grossly-awful argument to fail rational basis review. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld that stupid laws can pass rational basis review. The Ninth Circuit's opinion in this case says exactly that. Proposition 8 fails rational basis review because it doesn't even have a stupid but somewhat rational connection between the law and some hypothetical government interest. And the key point they were addressing was not same-sex marriage bans in general but just ones in states where there are already civil unions. The decision is silent on whether there's a rational basis for same-sex marriage bans themselves. Their argument is that there's nothing to a same-sex marriage ban when all the rights of marriage are already present. It's a symbolic law, and there's no rational basis for symbolic laws.

Basically what they're saying is that there's no even minimally-rational basis for reserving the word 'marriage' for opposite-sex couples while observing civil unions for the issues of rights. But I can think of several, and even if they're not very good arguments they might pass the rational-basis test as long as they're not such awful arguments that the reasoning is utterly unconnected with the law itself. Here are a few. Some people want to keep government out of marriage. Passing civil-union laws is fine, according to this view, but having the government recognize more marriages rather than fewer marriages is the wrong direction. I have a lot of sympathy for this view, and the reasoning strikes me as certainly passing rational-basis review.

Another basis is preferring an honorific title for traditional marriage because of its historic role and greater natural connection with childrearing. This is not a non-sequitur, since there is a greater connection between traditional marriage and childrearing than there is with same-sex marriage, and it doesn't have to pass the test of rigorous and careful argumentation to be a rational basis. The mere historical connection makes it not completely arbitrary, and that's enough to pass rational-basis review. So one could favor civil unions for actual rights while wanting to reserve the word 'marriage' for something that recognizes the traditional institution for its contribution to childrearing that the new-fangled same-sex marriage concept is not able to convey, and this is so even if it's not a very good ethical argument to reserve that word for traditional marriage. All that there needs to be is some non-arbitrary connection, and there's at least that.

A third argument I've heard sometimes is that same-sex marriage encourages legitimizing sexual relationships that are much more prone to divorce or breakup than opposite-sex marriages, and that result would undermine marriage as an institution. Again, this doesn't have to be a very good argument. It might well be a terrible argument. It might be that affirming same-sex relationships as marriages would actually have the opposite effect. But all that matters for rational-basis review is that a legitimate argument can be put forward that isn't completely unrelated to the state interest in question, and that condition seems to be met. You'd need to do some empirical study to show whether this is a good argument, but on the face of it it's not so stupid that it's irrelevant to the issue at stake. Some reasoning is put forward, and it's reasoning that has to be evaluated, reasoning that's not so obviously bad that you can dismiss it out of hand, and that's the test that the Ninth Circuit claims to be using.

As I've said, I don't think it's in the best interest of opponents of Proposition 8 to use rational-basis review when they can use intermediate scrutiny for sex-discrimination. Intermediate scrutiny requires that the basis being presented is substantially related to the legitimate government purpose, and I'm not sure all the above arguments would pass that. The third almost certainly wouldn't, in my view. I think the second might, and I'm not sure you can get out of the first one even with strict scrutiny. But my point is that they'd have an easier time of it if they didn't insist on treating this as sexual-orientation discrimination, which isn't the most accurate way to go anyway if they want to propose a parallel with Loving v. Virginia. I suspect it will all come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy anyway, though, and he's already on record saying that he thinks same-sex marriage is not required by previous Supreme Court decisions, so he'd have to think there's some new argument here that changes everything he's already written.

There's a relatively new movement in the communities of people who deal regularly with autism and related conditions that's assigned themselves the term "neurodiversity" as a shorthand reference to their commitment to affirming atypical neurological conditions as equally legitimate. This movement shuns the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal' and instead prefers to speak of those who are neurotypical and those who are not. The neurodiversity movement seeks to identify various traits common with autism as neither better nor worse but simply different.

This movement should be praised for its recognition that respecting people with autism requires taking into account how differently they take in information, process it, use it, and produce various responses. They rightly emphasize that an atypical neurological state need not be thought of as a disease that needs a medical cure or treatment or a disability that requires taking the person to be deficient. They recommend supporting a person for who they are rather than trying to "fix" them to conform to the standards everyone else has. Some autism advocates on the autistic spectrum insist that they wouldn't want to be made "normal" if a "cure" were ever found. They like being the way they are.

There's something obviously right about most of that. The more I read stuff from this movement, however, the more disturbed I get that there's something they're just not seeing, and the good in what I just wrote is blinding a lot of well-meaning people to a serious philosophical error lying behind much of what the neurodiversity movement produces. Consider this story by Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times. She is right to point out that, just because autistic people do badly on certain standardized tests, it doesn't mean they're cognitively deficient. It may well be that the reason a certain person scores low on a certain test is because the test is relying on typical patterns of language use, and someone with autism may be using a different pattern of language use. The underlying cognitive ability being tested for may be stronger than the test shows. That's all correct. But in her rush to make this point, Kaplan completely ignores the fact that the reason someone is scoring low on the test is because of a genuine deficiency in the kind of language use that most people are much better able to engage in. That means there is a lack of ability that comes with autism, even if its manifestation will be different from person to person.

Again, Kaplan speaks of those who emphasize "training kids with autism to behave like typical kids instead of allowing them to make the most of their differently wired brains." That's especially helpful, because allowing autistic people to make the most of their differently-operating brain is certainly the right goal. But that's perfectly compatible with taking their differently-wired brain to be operating at a deficient level with respect to certain cognitive skills, even if it's also operating at a higher level with regard to other cognitive skills. Some in the neurodiversity movement are willing to recognize that differences between neurotypicals and autistic people involve autism conveying certain strengths and weaknesses. But the language of "not better or worse but just different" disallows any such recognition and smacks of crude relativism, whereby we cannot recognize any difference as being better or worse. When taken to its logical implication, we'd have to say that someone who is not intelligent enough to read is not less smart in any respect than the norm, just different. I submit that such a statement is nonsense. There's a particular cognitive ability that allows for reading that most people have, and someone who doesn't have that ability (assuming they genuinely don't) is lacking a cognitive skill. Why can't we just accept that?

Similarly, there is a seeming refusal to recognize any medical condition that can be spoken of in terms of being made worse off. In some respects this strikes me as a general problem among disability communities that stems from crudely relativistic thinking. The deaf community is largely unsupportive of cochlear implants, because it gives children the ability to hear, and they take their lack of hearing not to be a genuine disability. There's nothing wrong with not hearing, so why should they support giving deaf children the ability to hear the way most people can?

If we really took this line of reasoning seriously, we'd have to apply it to other conditions that virtually no one wants to see as perfectly normal. For example, one could argue that pedophilia is just a different way of being, and we should respect it. After all, it's caused by a brain condition, and all brain conditions are equally good. In terms of the arguments I see from the neurodiversity movement, I see no way to say the things they say while avoiding such a conclusion. There are plenty of ways to distinguish between the two cases, but I don't see how those are available given the extreme sorts of statements that I regularly see among neurodiversity advocates.

People who have serious cognitive deficiencies often have serious problems seeing their own intrinsic worth. It's important to affirm that. It's important to help them see that their very existence is not wrong in the sense that we should blame them for being the way they are. It's important to help them see that their preferences may seem weird to others but that in many cases perfectly all right for them to have them. But some voices advocating for neurodiversity want us to say that someone with autism is not messed up in any sense. The fact is that we're all messed up. We're all distorted. We're all flawed. No one is the way we ought to be. Autism is one way to have various deficiencies, one that also happens in many cases to have plenty of strengths above the level typical of most people. To say that we can never evaluate being less good at something or more good at something with such value-laden language would be to overreact to a genuine problem in how many people look at people with disabilities.

But on one level, I can't blame the neurodiversity movement (and the more general relativistic outlook among other disability communities). After all, their view follows fairly easily from a particular version of secularized naturalistic thinking. Different neurological conditions stem from natural variation, and there's no other level of explanation but natural variation. There's no God who designed human beings to have certain capabilities. There are no natural purposes according to which organisms have a nature, and certain capacities are part of what a well-functioning member of their species will be able to do. There's no notion of well-functioning if your worldview doesn't allow for higher-level explanations about purposes and design, other than perhaps simply asking whether a particular organism fits into the way most members of its species are or whether it fits the patterns members of its species typically desire for themselves. There's nothing objective about what a healthy member of that species or a well-functioning member of that species would be like. There is no way we can have a notion of the way we ought to be if there's no ground for what it would be to be the way we ought to be. But such a conclusion seems to me to be so obviously false that perhaps we should just question the metaphysical underpinning of the neurodiversity movement, rather than giving in to that metaphysical picture's logical implications.

[cross-posted at Evangel and the Neurodiversity Consulting blog]

Internalism holds that what justifies our beliefs or makes them rational or what grounds our knowledge must be something internal to our thinking, in other words something where the reasons why it is justified, rational, or grounded are accessible to our conscious thought. We have to be able to see why our beliefs are grounded for those beliefs to be grounded. We have to be aware of what makes it a good belief for it to be a good belief. It wouldn't be enough to have reliable belief-forming mechanisms (such as senses that reliably give me the right information).

Externalism holds that there might be things make our beliefs justified or rational or grounding our knowledge that are not accessible to our conscious thought. We don't have to be aware of what justifies us in thinking something for it to be a justified belief. For it to be well-grounded knowledge, we don't have to know that our knowledge is grounded in reliable practices and thus why it is well-grounded knowledge. It just has to be grounded in the right sort of ways.

Perhaps the biggest place of disagreement comes over how to respond to skepticism. If internalism is true, I would have to prove that my senses are reliable for them to ground my knowledge, which of course I can't do, because I might be in a virtual reality for all I can know by internalist standards. There are internalists would would disagree, but a lot of philosophers have concluded that internalism leads hopelessly to skepticism, because I can't prove that my senses are reliable, and just having reliable senses isn't enough. I'd have to be able to prove it, which I can't do. But externalism can handle skeptical arguments by pointing out that I can know all sorts of stuff even without being able to prove it. It doesn't mean I can prove I know things. It just means that skeptical arguments fail, because the skeptic has to show that my senses are unreliable to show that I don't know things. With internalism, all the skeptic has to show is that I don't know if my senses are unreliable. With externalism, the skeptic has to show that they are in fact unreliable. So the burden of proof on the skeptic is higher with externalism.

Once Upon a Time provides a nice illustration of externalist epistemology. The basic premise of the show is that the Evil Queen has cursed all the characters in the Enchanted Forest by bringing them to a terrible place where there are no happy endings except for her. That terrible place is Storybrooke, Maine, in a world otherwise very much like our current day. The Evil Queen is the mayor. The story shifts back and forth between events in the characters' lives back in the Enchanted Forest and events in their lives now in Storybrooke, where no one is supposed to remember their previous lives except the Evil Queen.

Snow White and Prince Charming are the Evil Queen's primary targets. She wants revenge against Snow White for something we haven't seen yet (as least as of last week's episode). She wants to ensure that they are not together. They have no memory of each other, certainly not of having been married to each other. He was in a coma when the show began, and apparently he had been since the curse began. She has no memory of him. When he awakes from his coma, he has no memory, until the Evil Queen at some point seems to have interfered to give him memories of being married to someone else, someone who turns out to have been engaged to him in the Enchanted Forest before he broke it off to marry Snow White. But when they meet up, they feel such a longing for each other, as if they have always been meant to be together.

Prince Charming tries to rebuild his marriage, but he can't ignore his feelings for Snow White. This woman whom he (falsely) thinks is his wife brings out no current feelings, but he seems to have memories of feelings for her, and he tries to make it work. Technically, he's living in an adulterous relationship with her while thinking his feelings for Snow White are the adulterous ones. But Snow White is really his wife, and some process within him is leading him to think he should be with her. But he has no access to what would be leading him to that. An externalist would say that he has some process within him that he can't understand that's leading him to know that Snow White is the one for him, and his false beliefs about his past do not interfere with that knowledge. An internalist has to say that his most justified beliefs are the false ones.

So suppose there's some reliable process whereby his body's memories of his love for Snow White are leading him to know that she's really the one he's supposed to be with. His resistance to this woman who isn't his wife, whom he believes is his wife, is then grounded in processes that he has no access to. An externalist could say that his belief that he should be with Snow White (whom he knows now by another name, of course) is justified by these processes he's unaware of, and it's bogus to rely on his memories for the belief that he's married to the other woman. An internalist would say that his belief that he is married to the other woman is in fact false but is justified. Which belief is justified, then, depends on which epistemology is correct.

Which view you adopt would seem to have significant moral implications. He's doing something clearly wrong, according to internalism, by having clandestine romantic interactions with Snow White. But what if he has knowledge on some level that can somehow cancel his seeming knowledge (that isn't knowledge at all) that this is adultery? Those are false beliefs, based on false memories. If he doesn't know those things but falsely believes them, and he also knows on some level that Snow White is his true love, is it enough to remove the wrongness of the adultery? Perhaps that's too much, but it does seem to be ethically different in some ways.

General Overview: There are three main metaphysical positions on race. Anti-realists deny that there are races. Natural-kind positions find sub-groups of homo sapiens with scientific importance and call them races. Social-kind views consider races to exist because of contingent social practices. I argue for a view closest to the third camp, with a few wrinkles. Three distinctives of my approach are:

(a) I self-consciously argue as an analytic metaphysician, taking this to be a work of applied metaphysics in the same sense that looking at questions regarding abortion, just war theory, or the ethics of lying count as applied ethics, and its relation to theoretical metaphysics (what is most commonly called metaphysics among analytic philosophers) is analogous to how applied ethics relates to ethical theory (e.g. utilitarian, deontological, virtue, natural law, or other theoretical approaches, which was what ethics was largely restricted to until the applied ethics revolution of the late 20th century). Part of my aim is to remove the bias against seeing this sort of subject as part of what metaphysicians should be doing.

(b) I argue that race is highly context-sensitive, in more ways than most race theorists mean when they speak of themselves as holding views they call contextualist.

(c) My overall conclusion by the end is that we should not abandon race-talk, race-theorizing, or race-classification, at least not in the short-term. We need to be able to speak of such social realities to address real racial problems. However, we ought to find ways to challenge some of the social forces that work to make racial groups racialized and to form the social realities that surround race, some of which are not the way we should want them to be.

Here is the chapter breakdown:

1. Natural Kinds and the Analogy of Species:

There's a debate in the philosophy of biology about whether species are natural kinds. This chapter looks closely at that debate to argue that it is meaningful to speak of natural kinds, although species are not natural kinds in the strong sense that Aristotle might have taken them to be.

2. Natural Kinds and Race

I look at three conceptions of race as what I call minimalist natural kinds, two from philosophers and one from biologists. Al three views have potential to pick out groups useful for categorizing people according to scientific purposes but all three have problems if we want to identify the groups they point to as the same groups that we ordinarily call races.

3. Classic Anti-Realism

I argue in this chapter against certain of the traditional anti-realist arguments (especially Naomi Zack and Kwame Anthony Appiah), especially emphasizing ordinary use (as opposed to the language of experts) and changes is race-language.

4. Glasgow's Revisionism

Joshua Glasgow develops an anti-realism that takes the groups we call races to exist as social constructions, but he doesn't think those groups should be called races. I resist his arguments and argue that some of his evidence actually support a social kind view like the one I end up adopting.

5. Social-Construction and Biological Constructionism

The contingency of the racial categories, the fact that arbitrary socially-determined facts determine the structure of racial classification, and the instability of racial categories are all good evidence that races are social constructions. I conclude that races are social kinds that take their basis in biologically-identified traits, but the selection of which biological traits we use to identify races are biologically-arbitrary.

6. Races and the Metaphysics of Objects and Groups

My view is that races exist as socially-constructed entities but that they might just as well have existed without being races. Social facts don't bring races into existence but rather make existing groups into races. This chapter looks to contemporary metaphysics to see arguments that nihilists and coincident-entity theorists might make against my view. I argue against those conceptions, but even if those views were correct, much of what I say would still follow.

7. Race and Context-Sensitivity

This chapter argues for context-sensitivity in racial constructions, with fluidity from one context to another even for the same person. Different factors might be relevant in different settings to change which racial labels might apply.This context-sensitivity is much more diverse in terms of ways of being context-sensitive than I find in most of the philosophy of race literature. The particular ways this works will support my eventual revisionism in the next chapter.

8. The Ethics of the Metaphysics of Race

Here I argue that we should use existing racial categories to identify problems within the social constructions of race, rather than seeking to eliminate the categories in any direct way, but we should also make efforts to change the conditions that generate those problematic elements, so we can retain only the unproblematic aspects, and some elements of racial identity-formation can be good.

9. Implicit Bias and the Argument for Elimination

Recent work in psychology and cognitive science shows that our patterns of forming race-judgments rely on a more general pattern in child development that leads to implicit racial bias of an invisible but harmful sort, even among people who are explicitly anti-racist in their reflective views. I argue that there is evidence in the psychology and cognitive science literature that shows that we need to retain our racial categories to address existing implicit bias, but there is also evidence that we should rethink how we speak of racial issues with small children, to reduce the perpetuation of implicit bias in further generations, and this result fits well with (and gives further details to flesh out) the conclusion of the previous chapter.

1. Matthew 26:1-16 She has done a beautiful thing (Jeremy Jackson) 1-8-12
2. Matthew 26:17-29 I will keep the Passover (John Hartung) 1-15-12
3. Matthew 26:30-46 Your will be done (Nathaniel Jackson) 1-29-12
4. Matthew 26:47-56 That the Scriptures ... be fulfilled (Stefan Matzal)  2-5-12
[Jeremy Jackson was originally scheduled for Feb 5. It is undetermined if the next two weeks will remain as scheduled.]
5. Matthew 26:57-68 He has uttered blasphemy (Stefan Matzal?) 2-12-12
6. Matthew 26:69-75 Peter ... went out and wept bitterly (Stefan Matzal?) 2-19-12
7. Matthew 27:1-10 Thirty pieces ... the price of him (Jeremy Jackson) 2-26-12
8. Matthew 27:11-26 His blood be on us and our children (Nathaniel Jackson) 3-4-12
9. Matthew 27:27-44 He saved others; he cannot ... himself (Stefan Matzal) 3-11-12
10. Matthew 27:45-56 My God ... why have you forsaken me? (Jeremy Jackson) 3-18-12
11. Matthew 27:57-66 They went and made the tomb secure (Nathaniel Jackson) 3-25-12
12. Matthew 28:1-10 He is not here for he has risen (Stefan Matzal) 4-1-12
13. Matthew 28:11-20 I am with you always (Jeremy Jackson) 4-8-12 (Easter Sunday)

Doug Weeks preached on Matthew 27:50-28:20 in the 1981 Matthew series.
Bill Finch preached on Matthew 26 in 1982. See this topical series.
These chapters were previously covered in 1985.
They were also again covered in 1998.

For more sermons, see here.

Currently Newt Gingrich has been enjoying his brief turn at the top as the non-Romney candidate, as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain have done. Like the others, he will soon drop. Indications are strong that Ron Paul will briefly occupy the top spot, perhaps even winning the Iowa caucuses and the NH primary. During this time, he'll finally get the exposure his fans have wanted. Moderate and mainstream conservatives will see how significantly he wants to dismantle the federal government. Libertarian Republicans will see that he isn't really one of them but is just an extreme federalist who doesn't want the federal government doing much, but his social conservatism will turn them off. Social conservatives will stop being fooled by his pro-life and other socially-conservative positions when they see that he has no backbone to stand of for such concerns on the federal level. Non-isolationists will be offended at his unwillingness to engage in any ventures of foreign policy to help around the world, and anyone concerned about national security will be scared to death of his willingness to dismiss Iran by saying we just need to be nice to them. To many, he will make Obama look like Dick Cheney. Most important, people of any moral conscience will see his willingness to pal around with racists and tolerate the use of their publications for political gain.

That will leave Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum as the two unvetted candidates. Each will have a turn as the non-Romney, for perhaps a couple weeks each. Huntsman will probably be first. His willingness to work in the Obama Administration and his out-of-context quotes that have wrongly led many to see him as a moderate instead of the genuine conservative that he is will lead Santorum to have a brief time in the spotlight. He is mostly untested. He's known as a social conservative. The left has successfully portrayed him as an extremist, despite the fact that his views are pretty mainstream for social conservatism. That will all occur in an extreme way, and he'll be given the Sarah Palin treatment, as Bachmann was. His statements will be taken out of context. Some of his views that are quite mainstream will be made fun of as neanderthal and called beyond the pale. He does have some strange notions of the Constitution that might or might not become the main issues. I tend to think they won't, because the focus from the left will be not on his odd views but on his mainstream once, which they will portray as ridiculous. But I think his views of foreign policy will be his undoing. GOP primary-goers will dismiss the left's hand-waving on those issues and will worry about views of his that just don't sound reasonable to most Republicans. I know only a little about his views on such matters (I haven't had time to watch more than bits and pieces of the debates, and he's not getting much attention), but being in the room when one debate focusing on those issues early on happened to be playing led me to think that he was making Ron Paul sound mainstream.

What will happen after that is wide open. At this point we'll be getting to a number of bigger states, and the early states will have been all over the map, leading each one (and several are simultaneous) to go in different directions. Candidates with strengths in certain regions will win more states in those regions. It's possible there will be a consensus. The non-Romney supporters will eventually concede and go with Romney, or the Romney supporters may eventually settle on some other candidate. But I'm guessing this will go on for a while, perhaps with no candidate receiving enough delegates to have a clear candidate by the time of the convention. This may well be the first brokered convention in decades. Just four years ago, pundits were claiming that we could never have such a thing again. I'm not so sure. This year looks like a really good chance for it. My suspicion is that Romney will eventually win, although I wouldn't rule out Huntsman, and Gingrich may still have a chance. I don't think Paul, Gingrich, or Santorum will be the nominee. But I can't even really be sure of that. I'd be a little surprised if the first few states turn out to settle things as quickly as they usually do, however.

If this is all right, the GOP will have a harder time using the convention to promote their candidate, which will help Obama a bit. But at the same time he'll have a harder time crafting his own campaign with an opponent in mind, which will mean he won't be able to craft his public image or message in contrast to anyone in particular. There might be some advantage in that, because he'll continue to be able to run against the House Republicans, as he's been doing so far. But I suspect it will frustrate him greatly, and it will play to his weaknesses as a president rather than his strengths as a campaigner.

As to who will win, my prediction is that if Romney gets the nomination he'll have a strong chance of winning the presidency. I think the same is true of Hunstman. Perhaps he would have an even easier time, because he doesn't have a record of changing his mind on one big issue, like Romney has, with every other minor statement being misused out-of-context to pretend he can't take a stand on anything. Perry could pull it off but would have a much tougher time of it, and I think he would more likely lose than win. I don't think Gingrich, Paul, Bachmann, or Santorum could have much chance against Obama unless he tanks much more than he has so far (and he's just gotten a bit of a boost, actually). Gingrich would clean house in the debates, of course. But all four figures have lower positives and as-high negatives as Obama. Even Obama's negatives would, therefore, not help them.

If GOP voters want to make Obama a one-term president, their best shot will be to focus on Romney or Huntsman. They'll have to learn to be more charitable than people largely have so far in interpreting what they've said, and they'll have to settle for the inevitable conclusion that they won't like everything about their candidate. I suspect any other path is likely to lead to another term for Obama, and GOP efforts at some notion of ideological purity would end up leading to what it led to in 2010, this time with the presidency at stake rather than the control of the Senate (if Colorado, Delaware, and New Mexico had nominated more mainstream candidates we might have ended up with a Republican Senate at present).

8/14/79 How a Church Can Avoid Becoming a Jonestown: Revelation 13
6/18/85 Christians & Elect Angels
6/25/85 Christians & Fallen Angels
7/2/85 Christians & Angels: Distortions of Scripture
8/7/85 How Christ's Death Applies to Us (tape says 8/9, but that's not a Tuesday)
8/20/85 The Lord's Supper
8/27/85 Witnessing and Worshiping
9/3/85 The Law and Love for the Christian
9/10/85 Authority of Scripture II Samuel 6:1-15
7/1/86 Prayer & Intercession
7/8/86 Meaning of Corporate Prayer (tape says this date; this can't be right if the next one's date is right)
7/8/86 Baptism (Jeremy Jackson says this was this date, but the tape has no date; this can't be right if the previous one is right)
7/15/86 Marriage: Divorce and Remarriage
7/22/86 Life After Death I
7/29/86 Life After Death II
8/5/86 Judgement
8/12/86 Judgement II (only first 12 minutes)
9/9/86 Authority of Scripture II Peter 1:20-21
9/19/89 Authority of Scripture Revelation 1:1
9/11/90 Authority of Scripture Joshua 3:7-13
9/12/95 Authority of Scripture Acts 1:1-11

See here for more Bible studies and sermons.

One sphere of language in which this lesson has never been properly applied is in the area of race. Why are we still talking about black people, for instance? Do we really want to define people solely in terms of their race? Do we really want to signal that their blackness is so central to who they are that we're going to pretend that people with blackness aren't people? If we call them black people, then we are treating their blackness as if it's a greater part of our conception of people with blackness than their personhood is. People with person-firstness have instructed us that we should never put disability-related adjectives in front of a noun or pronoun referring to a person, because we don't want them identified with that condition. But we've also learned from the same people that having a disability is not negative, which means this policy is not because disabilities are bad. Therefore, we ought to apply it to other cases when something is not bad but might wrongly be taken by someone to be bad, just as we would apply it to things that are genuinely bad. If race is not to be a negative, then I am not a white person. I'm a person with whiteness. It does make it a little awkward to speak of people with Asianness or people with Australian-first-people-ness (i.e. what used to be called aboriginalness). But it's worth the awkwardness of expression to avoid any chance of identifying them with the racial or ethnic group whose membership they possess.

Even worse, it's especially pernicious to say that someone is black (or African-American or whatever racial term we might choose). After all, using predicate adjectives amounts to making identity statements rather than merely ascribing a property to someone the way we would have thought that adjectives in English, even predicate adjectives, do. It's much more preferable to say that someone has blackness than to say that she is black. People aren't anything except persons. I'm not philosophical. I have philosophicalness. Glenn Beck is not unfair to his political adversaries. He has unfairness to the people who have political adversariness with him. President Obama is not bad at speaking without a teleprompter. He has badness at speaking without a teleprompter. I shouldn't say that I am Christian. I'm a person who has Christianity. I shouldn't be identified with my faith. I should claim, rather, to possess the entirety of Christianity, as if it belongs to me. We need to avoid identifying people with any property ascribed to them other than personhood. It's much better to say that they possess the entirety of the thing that formerly we would have used to describe them.

For more explanation, please see here (except you can ignore the sections explaining how people with blindness and people with deafness have offendedness at the obviously-correct way to refer to them, and you certainly shouldn't read person-with-autism Jim Sinclair's reasons for disliking person-first language).

This is the chronological archive for sermons from Trinity Fellowship in Syracuse, New York. Most of the current sermons are preached by the elders of the congregation: Jeremy Jackson, Stefan Matzal, Doug Weeks, and Nathaniel Jackson (with Al Gurley preaching a lot of the earlier ones, as one of the three founding elders). Audio for other sermons by current members, former members, and guest preachers is included only if I have permission from the preacher.

With some exceptions, Trinity Fellowship preaches from the gospels in the winter, historical books in the spring, epistles in the summer, and prophets in the fall. In earlier years, the schedule was slightly different, and topical series sometimes occur in place of one of the others (but only once in place of a gospel) during a break between books.

This archive is ordered chronologically. To see them ordered by section of the Bible, see here. I've left out retreat talks and other recorded messages unless they were given on a Sunday or they were given in a series that included a Sunday morning sermon. Some of those left out can be found among the topical sermons at the link earlier in this paragraph.

Because of a post-length limit that I never knew this blog had, I had to split the archive into two pieces. I could have split it anywhere from 1999-2002 or so, and given that range it seemed best to split it at the century marker, so this post covers the 20th century, and the next post covers the 21st.

I have a 10:00 appointment today. It's going to take me five minutes to get there. It should be about 45 minutes long. It will take about five minutes to get home. Even if it goes long, I should be home well before 11:30. So I was hoping Dell would put me in the 1:30-5:30 slot for service today, and I was expecting to be able to change that when they called to ask me what time would work for me. What's the point of asking me if a time will work if they're unwilling to change it? The service desk person had me talk to the technician, who said it won't fit her schedule, and I'd have to talk to the service desk people again. I did, and they said only the technicians can change it. There's no way even to move me to the later slot. I have to wait until tomorrow, and tomorrow I have the same problem. I need it to be later in the day tomorrow too. At least they let me schedule that.

This could easily have been avoided if they'd asked me when I could be available for the technician to come before they assigned me to a technician and a time slot. I never used to have a problem with this. If the technician scheduled me for a time I couldn't keep, I'd be moved earlier or later in the day, as long as I talked to them when they initially called me to verify the time. If that technician couldn't accommodate me, they could assign it to a different technician as long as they knew before the technician had gone out with the parts. Now they seem to assign a time and a technician, verify it with the customer as a formality, and then move you to the next day in violation of the contract if you can't conform to the schedule they didn't bother to confirm with you before they assigned you. This does not count as next-day service. If it happened one call in ten, I wouldn't be very upset about it, but this seems to happen to me just about every single time. It happened last week, and it had to be delayed two days. I think something like that also happened a little over a month ago.

After three calls to the scheduling desk personnel and two to the technician, I finally got someone to tell me that I can call the number they had me call and influence my schedule before the parts get shipped (i.e. the day before but only once my dispatch has taken place to be in their system). They don't normally even give you that number until you get your first call from Unisys (in the morning), when your time is assigned already. So maybe I now have a way to ensure that my next-day service really is next-day, but the information required to ensure such a thing is hardly available to most people calling in service requests, and I wouldn't have thought such a thing was necessary.

I think this is a nice example of what I've elsewhere called a secondary moral obligation, an obligation you incur because you fail at a prior moral obligation. You ought not to have the attitude toward children that you see them as fulfilling your needs, but if you do then it's immoral to adopt, even if it's generally a moral mandate to adopt when such immoral attitudes are not present (and they shouldn't be present) and when there aren't other extenuating circumstances making it a less good idea to adopt (whatever those might be, and I'm open to their being lots of them).

What Moore does not mention is that the same is true of having children naturally. If you have the attitude that children are to meet your needs, then you shouldn't have children, even if (and I know not all Christians agree on this) it's Christian teaching that we ought to seek to have children or at least be very open to it (as many believe it is; whether it is is irrelevant to my point here, but assume it is for the sake of argument). My suspicion is that many new parents who were seeking to have children were doing so for completely selfish reasons. It strikes me as a thoroughly immoral reason to want to have children, and it seems to me that it's just as immoral to go ahead and have children if your desire is for them to fulfill your needs. That's so even if there is a moral mandate upon Christians to seek to have children, as many Christians do believe.

What makes this a nice case of a secondary moral obligation is that you have two obligations that conflict, one of which only appears if you violate the other one. It's wrong to have this selfish kid-possessing attitude, and those who have it ought not to have children. But you ought to seek to have children (on the premise I've been assuming, at least for the sake of argument). There's no inconsistency in such a position, despite the initial surface-level appearance of two contrary obligations. You do have an obligation to seek to have children (at least certain people do, anyway, on this view), and you do have an obligation not to want children for the wrong reasons, but if you do have the wrong reasons for wanting children then you simply ought not to have children, even if that means failing in the first obligation. It's worse to seek to meet the first obligation but violate the second than it is to fail the first because you're meeting the second.

But it becomes a fairly messy question if children come along anyway unintentionally when someone has this attitude. The original obligation still remains in such a case, and you simply ought not to have this attitude, even though most people do before they have children. Once they appear, you ought not to rid yourself of them unless your situation is so bad that they'll have a much better home without you than with you (and this selfish desire isn't usually so bad as to generate that situation; other conditions need to be met for that). I would argue that someone with the selfish attitude toward children does conceive a child, they ought (barring other considerations) to raise that child and to remove that selfish attitude. But that's compatible with thinking they ought not to seek to have children until they can rid themselves of that attitude, especially when it comes to great expense as with adoption.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

1. He's opposed to abortion in all circumstances, but it's not the government's role to make that decision.
2. The president has no authority to order people not to seek an abortion.
3. He would appoint judges who know the Constitution contains no right to abortion.
4. He would veto legislation funding Planned Parenthood.
5. In the case of rape, it comes down to a family & doctor choice. He's opposed to it morally but shouldn't tell the nation what to think, because the government shouldn't be making our decisions on social issues.
6. The government shouldn't make decisions on whether abortion should be legal.
7. People shouldn't be free to seek abortions. Abortion should not be legal. (This was said immediately after 6.)
8. He opposes abortion with exceptions.
9. He opposes abortion except when the mother's life is threatened.

Sources: Huffington Post, CNN, Wikipedia

When it comes to Herman Cain's view on abortion, we seem to have a choice among (a) the uncharitable dishonest-about-his-views interpretion, i.e. he's not consistently being honest about what he thinks (b) the uncharitable intelligence interpretation, i.e. he's holding a flatly inconsistent set of beliefs in a pretty explicit way, (c) the uncharitable dishonest flip-flopper interpretation, i.e. he's not being honest about some change of views (and one such change has to be within minutes, (d) the uncharitable misuse-of-language interpretation, i.e. he's perhaps saying someone, perhaps only some of the time, that everyone misunderstands because of a highly idiosyncratic use of terms, or (e) he's got such a nuanced set of views that I can't even figure out how to put it together, with all my training in doing so.

(e) is the most charitable, but I'm extremely skeptical that he's so finely-tuned in his language without one of the others being true. I tend to think (d) is the least uncharitable of the others. Perhaps he means "it's not the role of government" and "it's the person's choice" in odd ways. You can, after all, say the second while thinking certain options should be illegal. You just wouldn't say so in an abortion discussion without being radically misunderstood. You could, also, say the first while thinking it's the role of a legislature but not the role of the executive or legislature to countermand the wrongful decision of the courts, but again you'd be radically misunderstood. That's about as good as I can do to put this together, and if it takes something like that, I think he's politically finished. There's no way the general public is going to be willing to be that charitable. But that may well be what's going on.

So here's my proposal. I'm going to take Herman Cain to hold to the following positions, all of them compatible with all of the above statements if they might have pragmatically-odd by semantically-possible meanings, and I'm going to see if I (or a commenter) might find a statement by him that does not fit with this view. So here's the approach I have in mind:

So (1) means abortion is morally wrong in all cases, but it's not the federal legislative and executive's right to do anything on that issue anymore, given the Supreme Court's wrongful intervention on the issue. (2) means the president can't tell people what to think and has been removed from being able to have any direct influence on abortion law at least at the very general level of deciding when it is legal to have an abortion in cases when the Supreme Court takes it to be a fundamental right. (3) clearly states that the Supreme Court wrongly decided Roe v. Wade, despite several claims that he hasn't made such a statement from social conservatives, and his preference for judges who would seek to do what they could to reverse or roll back that decision. (4) signals his opposition to federal funding for abortion or for abortion providers, something a president can have some say in. (5) signals his moral opposition to abortion in rape cases but his willingness to think that (i) that's a case when the law should be less clear than he thinks morality is, (ii) he as president shouldn't dictate what Americans' views on such matters ought to be, even if he has a clear policy preference, or (iii) given the Supreme Court's dictates, it's no longer the president's position but is given to a woman and a doctor to decide, even if he would prefer that the Supreme Court hadn't done that and would undo that dictate. (6) If he means the legislative and executive branch of the federal government here, and he isn't giving his ideal preference but his understanding of the limited role the Supreme Court has given him as president, then it's consistent with his view in his immediate next statement. (7) Ideally abortion should be outlawed, even if it's not possible to do so right now on the level of the legislature and executive. (8) Abortion is almost always wrong. There are exceptions, and he's aware of at least one. (9) One of those exceptions is when the mother's life is threatened, and there may or may not be others (and from above rape is not one of them).

This does strike me as a consistent position, and it does mean taking some of his statements in odd ways, but that's clearly more charitable than taking him to be lying about what his views are, lying about some change in his views, or so confused on the issue that he can't put together meaningful back-to-back statements explaining coherent positions. He does have an Obama-like history of overstating things and having to take them back, but his clarifications don't usually have the character of stating a view he holds and then backing off to a view he doesn't hold, and they also don't usually have the character of being corrected but embarassed to admit it. They usually have the character of not realizing how he might be misinterpreted and then being more careful the second time. It's just that this would be a case where his attempts to be more careful are only partially successful.

So that's my proposal of what I think he most likely is thinking. I admit that there are a couple points where it's a little bit of a stretch, but I don't think the evidence justified being less charitable at this point, and I'm not going to support misrepresentation  even by accident, which is I think what's going on if people are legitimately convinced he's pro-choice if he really isn't. He's certainly got a problem stating his views, but I'm not sure the general-election opponent is any better at expressing his views.

I can't see why pro-life voters would want this man representing them on this issue, but a vote for a president isn't necessarily a vote for the ideal person to represent your cause. It's a vote for the candidate that you think is better than the others. In a primary, that means the person who can best balance (a) the ability to beat the other candidate and (b) the ability to be a decent enough president to be preferable to the other party's candidate. In a general election, it's almost always a choice between two candidates as to which one will be better than the other on the issues you think are most important. It may turn out that someone who isn't the best person to represent your views on an issue does satisfy these criteria. Whether that person for pro-life Republicans is Herman Cain is, at least, not yet settled by this issue, in my view (although there are other issues that might serve as possible obstacles, and I could see this issue turning into one, depending on further statements that I haven't seen or he hasn't yet made). It partly depends on other people, too, but I have a better sense of what they think, at least the ones with much chance of winning.

1. Mark 1:1-20 Trinity Fellowship (Jeremy Jackson) 2-5-78 [not taped]
2. Mark 3:7-35 The Will of God: God's Good Will (Jeremy Jackson) 2-12-78 [not taped]
3. Mark 4 Principles from the parable (Al Gurley) 2-19-78 [not taped]
4. Mark 5:1-6:47 Temptations Jesus faced in ministry (Doug Weeks) 2-26-78 [not taped]
5. Mark 9:1-8 The Transfiguration (Jeremy Jackson) 3-5-78
6. Mark 11:12-25 The Fig Tree, Brought a Judgement (Jeremy Jackson) 3-12-78
7. ? (Al Gurley) 3-19-78 [Palm Sunday, not taped]
8. ? (Doug Weeks) 3-26-78 [Easter Sunday, not taped]

For a more comprehensive and systematic study of Mark, see the 1992-1994 sermons here, here, and here.

For more sermons, see here.

1. Joshua 1 Continuing in God's Word (Jeremy Jackson) 6-25-78
2. Joshua 2 Rahab, Israel, and the LORD (Jeremy Jackson) 7-2-78
3. Joshua 3 Preparing to enter the Land (Al Gurley) 7-9-78
4. Joshua 4:1-5:12 Entering land: God's faithfulness, the blessings of the covenant (Doug Weeks) 7-16-78
5. Joshua 5:13-6:27 Taking Strongholds: Jericho (Jeremy Jackson) 7-23-78
6. Joshua 7 Study in Contrasts (Al Gurley) 7-30-78
7. Joshua 8:1-29 How to thoroughly defeat the enemy [even after it looks like he's defeated you] (Doug Weeks) 8-6-78
8. Joshua 8:30-13:7 God's Justice (Jeremy Jackson) 8-13-78
9. Joshua 13-19 The Growth of God's Kingdom (Jeremy Jackson) 8-20-78
10. Joshua 20-21 Cities of Refuge & Levitical Cities: God's provision for us in times of greatness (Doug Weeks) 8-27-78
11. Joshua 22 Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh: the Life of the Church (Al Gurley) 9-3-78
12. Joshua 23-24 Life Choices: Joshua's Farewell (Jeremy Jackson) 9-10-78

For a complete, more in-depth treatment on Joshua, see the 1998-1999 Joshua series here and here.

For more sermons, see here.