Churchless States and Stateless Churches I
Every “Holiday Season” Americans are given a glimpse of the most serious social and political enemy we face. I do not mean the atheism that prompts the ACLU, leftwing Jewish groups, and the rest of the anti-Christian lobby to challenge public displays of manger scenes. Atheism and anti-Christianity are serious problems, but the equally serious problem of public moronism. It is not just that most Americans in public life are stupid or drunk or even stupid drunkards like Senator Max Baucus, whose slurred speech and dim-wittted ramblings have made him an Internet star for several days.
In the case of stupidity, Baucus comes by it honest, as we used to say. What I have in mind is not the congenital idiocy of politicians but the painfully acquired moronism of American political commentators, including the minority who rise to the heights of average intelligence. Listen to this from the the great conservative Prophet of Little Rock, Paul Greenburg, who is commenting on the atheists’ successful campaign to install their own display near a crèche at the State Capitol.
“The folks in charge of maintaining the grounds at the Capitol made their big mistake when they forgot about that quaint old American practice called the separation of church and state. Instead of giving the hazy line between the two a wide berth, they concluded it would be permissible to put up a religious display on public property, which the state Capitol most certainly is.
"Welcome as the Holy Family are, they should have been directed to the nearest private inn instead, or even offered home hospitality. Instead, they were treated as wards of the state. Surely a better solution to this seasonal wrangle could have been found than to put them in public housing.”
This Greenberg, remember, is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and a frequent contributor both to Jewish World Review and NR's Town Hall. I used to think Arkansans had retained a residuum of common sense, but, if they had, they would long ago have given Greenberg a one-way ticket to New York.
Greenberg apparently thinks he can delude his readers into believing that it is the fault of the vast Christian majority in Arkansas, if they don’t object to the sight of Christian symbols on the property they own. If Christians did not insist upon offending Greenberg by being Christian, then the atheists would give up their campaign against Christmas. But casual atheists don't hate Christmas. They leave that to anti-Christian bigots who don't have the courage or mental clarity to call themselves atheists but take refuge in the meaningless term "agnostic."
When I was a young atheist, I saw nothing wrong in the Christmas pageants put on in my public school or in the obligatory prayers during home room. Only a tiny embittered minority has ever seen anything wrong in a manger scene on the property the people own, and if we follow this argument to its logical conclusion, we shall be forever giving ground the anti-Christian minorities. We shall have to outlaw public consumption of alcohol to please the Muslims, lift the ban on polygamy to make the Mormons happy, and enforce kosher laws in restaurants . But for the “conservative” Paul Greenberg, the rights of the minority obviously trump every other consideration, including constitutional law and common sense. This is not merely moronic, but self-consciously and deliberately moronic.
Greenberg's conscious and deliberate recourse to stupidity is revealed in the subterfuge apparent in his diction. He does not refer to a legal or constitutional separation of church and state, because he may be just smart enough to know that there is no such thing. A personal letter from Thomas Jefferson to a group of worried Baptists does not constitute a constitutional amendment. Instead he invokes “that quaint old American practice called the separation of church and state.” But, even a Paul Greenberg has to know that there is nothing quaint or old about this alleged practice. It is a modern weapon of the federal courts used to undermine both the Constitution and American religious freedom. If there is one thing even moderate Republicans have traditionally claimed to oppose it is the federal courts and their imperialistic expansion of power at the expense of the rights and liberties of citizens and the states (unless, of course, the states are Southern and the Republicans see a chance to take a trick by playing a race card.
With people like Greenberg prancing around as a conservative Republican, it is small wonder that neither the Republican Party nor the “conservative movement” will ever lift a finger in defense either of the American Constitution or the majority of Americans who describe themselves as Christian.
In the next few days, I shall post some things I have written in the past, showing what any educated American is supposed to know, namely, that the Constitution of 1787 says nothing about religion, because it takes for granted the powers of the separate states to decide for themselves if they wish to have a religious establishment, that the First Amendment was written and past to prevent the Federal government from interfering in the religious practices of the states, that, for decades after passage of the First Amendment, some states had religious establishments and other states had religious requirements for public office. In other words, until the mid-2oth century, state and local governments were free to encourage any version of the Christian church they liked, though in practice this meant a generalized form of Protestantism. There is no constitutional basis, no law, no custom, and no quaint practice that can be invoked to justify the “separation of church and state” in these United States, and anyone who tries to do so is arguing from ignorance or bad faith or both.
This insulting preamble was composed not to inaugurate a conversation about that quaint and now entirely irrelevant document known as “The Constitution of the United States,” but to clear the way for the more interesting discussion of the proper relationship between religion(s) and a commonwealth or kingdom. Once we disembarrass ourselves of the platitudinous thinking of both Paul Greenberg and the ACLU and the Federalist Society and the Megachurch TV watchers, we might arrive at a deeper understanding of what is at stake.
Entries(RSS)
Right you are. The main result of these Supreme Court edicts -- such as Engel V. Vitale, Wallace v. Jaffree, Lee v. Weisman, and Santa Fe ISD v. Doe -- has been to impose functionally atheist schools on the 89% of kids who are their inmates. And Bush's "No Child Left Behind" diktat consolidated the nationalization of government schools, with the support of the brain-dead "conservatives" Dr. Fleming properly excoriates.
No wonder religious belief keeps declining. (The foolishness of many Protestant and Catholic clergy hasn't helped.)
The solution, however, is not to bring back school prayer. Nowadays, doing so would only impose a generic prayer not just to Jesus, but to Shiva, Buddha, Allah, Quatzequatel, Isis, Zeus, Wotan, etc. Instead of wasting time and money on such an effort, private and parochial schools and scholarships should be advanced, along with home schooling. And the "public" schools should be opposed and ridiculed at every opportunity, especially when they want more tax money. Forget public school "reform"; talk abolition.
On the hopeful side, America's Rancid Ruling Elite (RRE) never will abolish private and parochial schools because that's where they send their kids: Sidwell Friends for the Gores, Clintons, and Obamas; Phillips Academy for the Bushes. So there's no obstacle to Christians establishing their own schools for every Christian child.
Get to work.
John, you are absolutely right. The best the conservatives can offer are generic unitarian prayers or a moment of silence to pay tribute to the Great Nothingness in the universe.
I should add that, although fighting over the government schools is a waste of time that should be spent establishing private and parochial schools, it is NOT a waste of time to fight over placing Christmas creches in front of city halls, using Dr. Fleming's arguments based on the Constitution.
And all these situations are reasons at least to bring up the topic of secession. The U.S. government won't follow its own Constitution on anything -- from conducting multiple unconstitutional wars that bankrupted the country, to preventing the protection of unborn life by states, to banning creches in front of city halls. So then is it perhaps time again "for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another"?
An excellent piece.
I've posted Dr. Fleming's "Establishing Christian America," which can be found here.
An excellent piece and I look forward to reading Dr. Fleming's future articles on this subject.
The liberal argument for the so called 'wall' is one of the more laughable constitutional legal theories - that a private letter by a politician who had nothing to do with the drafting of the Constitution says how it is applied today should be considered folly. But it should not be surprising that the Radical Republican 14th Amendment is now nothing but a scam to enforce a flat society upon us all.
You misunderstand why the "embittered minority" objects so vehemently to Christmas creches in the public square. It is virtually impossible to leave one's house in the morning without being repeatedly forced, whether one likes it or not, to repeatedly pay homage to the Christian deity. Whether it's using money that says "In God We Trust", or paying taxes to provide government services to churches that don't pay taxes, or obeying laws that have little basis except Christian morality, or having your children subjected to anti-science activism in the schools by young earth creationists, if you're an atheist it's just one thing after another to remind you day in and day out that you're a second class citizen. That's before we even get to the economic discrimination atheists face in the marketplace. That Mr. Fleming apparently didn't mind being a second class citizen when he was an atheist is completely beside the point.
And at the visceral level, that Christmas creche is the one thing atheists can actually do something about. So do something about it they do.
Sorry, but there are plenty of places to put creches other than public buildings and land. Everything isn't about you.
Freeline is an excellent example of the American atheist. Apparently, the rejection of supranatural authority entails the rejection of logic. The notion that atheists are a persecuted minority in schools that are dominated--and at higher levels exclusively staffed--by non-believers is hilarious. Although most Americans say they are Christians of one kind or another, their tax dollars go to pay for an educational system that is anti-Christian, except in a few small pockets of unenlightenment, from pre-school to graduate school. The formative institutions and industries--publishing, electronic media, entertainment--are so stoutly anti-Christian that the poor Evangelicals have tried to create an alternative culture.
As an atheist in a world far more Christian than it is today and in the very Christian state of South Carolina, I was no more discriminated against than anyone else who happens to disagree with what people think. I do remember there was a highschool teacher who told her students I was a godless communist because I read Marx and denied the existence of God. Close enough. Obviously, I would not have been invited to join a Christian fraternity, but I had no wish to join anything. Some of my best friends were very committed Christians. They were a little tedious about praying for my conversion, but atheists and Jews should be offended if their religious friends don't pray for them.
But here in America, the poor pampered darlings get worked up about being persecuted when they are confronted with what other people believe. By the same token, I should be able to exclude all non-Christian symbols from the world and make up my own universe as if I were god, which is exactly what atheism is all about. Perhaps freeline should stay home and contemplate his image in the mirror. In that way he would not have to endure the Hell that is other people. One might apply a similar argument to meat-eating or consumption of alcohol. "Why should I as a Hindu or Muslim have to put up with the public celebration of these abominations. My taxes are used to pay for state dinner at which evil politicians act like drunken cannibals."
Atheism also entails an inability to read. The point of this discussion, as I said, is not to repeat the annual complaints about the war on Christmas, a subject that interests me only as a social and phenomenon but to clear away the non-issues, such as the Constitution, First Amendment, the "rights: of Christians in order to explore historically and rationally the proper relations between religions and commonwealths.
Quite aside from religious belief, America is a European Christian culture, and it is that remnant of culture that the Christmas suppressors want to kill.
#8 I will pray for your deliverance from your afflictons
I am beginning to believe that it is impossible to have a state without religion of some kind. Even the Soviet Union had Communism.
Is it premature to ask whether the principle of toleration of many Christian sects contributed to the overall decline of Christianity in America? Of course the question may be moot since Christianity has declined in all Western countries.
Perhaps the Church needs it's Emperor to protect it and the faithful, just as the State needs the church to provide it with it's necessary theological, philosophical, and moral grounding.
Mr. Wilson @ 12
As a puppy running with some experienced hounds on these fora, I, nevertheless, venture to say that there is no polity without religion, not even a culture.
The late Philip Rieff defined a culture precisely in religious terms. A culture is a human response, a religious act, to the perceived presence or action on the cosmological absolute in and through the cosmic or created order. Culture is the sets of processes, institutions, principles, customs and traditions which restrain the whims of the individual so that he, emancipated from them, is FREE therefrom, to perform his duties, responsibilities and obligations to God or the gods, to family, the the religious institutions (Church in our case), and the real community in which he lives. Culture replaces then whims and desires of the individual to which the individual is "enslaved" with virtues - cardinal, capital and theological - so that man can acquire and live them out. It stresses man in relationship to the gods, to family, to religious institutions and the real community. Religion is, therefore, very public. In fact, there could be no "public" without religion.
Anti-culture aids and abets in the deconstruction of the symbols, institutions, principles, customs and traditions - the instruments of culture. The product of anti-culture is anti-freedom, i.e. the "freedom" to pursue one's whims and desires and to emancipate oneself from the restraints of culture. Virtues are replaced by values or mere opinions, not matter how informed or uninformed they may be. Character is supplanted by "personality," from which quickly evolves the cult thereof - from Obama to Michael Jackson. Anti-culture is the domain of the so-called autonomous individual (Rousseau) outfitted with his abstract rights (Locke). The lie is that the autonomous individual can, of his own will, become a Promethean individual, when, in fact, he becomes without the relationships which obligation, duty and responsibility hold together an estranged, alienated and shriveled self, as in the soulless movie stars of our day dying on drugs or the vampires which our women folk now seem to worship in book, T.V. series and movie.
In order to destroy the restraining instruments of culture, this abstract individual outfitted with these abstract rights needs a powerful ally. Here we come to the "state," which itself is an abstraction. Hobbes defines this state as a abstract corporation with a monopoly on coercion, the ability to define the limits of its own power and driven by a power will.
This is the ally of the autonomous man - the abstract state; for it is the only power with can banish the gods, destroy the family, marginalize the Church and subsume the real commonwealths and ignore subsidiarity.
Warlords, kins and emperors ante-Hobbes were natural of a social order which they lived. They were not abstractions. Modern "leaders" are merely faces of the Hobbesian state. The Hobbesian state, no matter what its form - dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy - tolerates no religion but itself. The autonomous man can tolerate to religion but the Hobbesian state, for to do so is to no longer be "autonomous," although the fool does not realize that end the end he will be the mere automaton of the Hobbesian state.
Despite their flawed understanding of God and how He intends for us to respond to Him, we Christians have more in common, we Christians have more in common with the Pacific witch doctor who threw virgins into volcanoes and the Aztec priests who cut the hearts out of captives. They perceived a "something" pushing back through the order of being, and they responded on behalf of their community, flawed though it was, to that push back. They seemed to intuit that something that was once bound together (in communion) had become unbound and needed rebinding through blood.
The autonomous man, in order to remain "autonomous" must deny the push of the "something,' thereby negating any necessity for a response, otherwise, the "autonomous" man would not be "autonomous." His servant and slave master, the Hobbesian state, is willing to accommodate him.
So, as a Christian, I walk closer to the witch doctor than I do the the average guy on Madison Avenue.
OK, so let's talk about the First Amendment rather than the wars on Christmas. It is a black-letter rule of interpreting statutes, contracts, and Constitutions that what matters is what the words on the page objctively mean, and not what the parties subjectively thought. That must be the case or it would never be possible to know, for example, what a contract means since anyone could say, "Oh, that's not what I meant."
It is therefore simply irrelevant what the framers subjectively thought they were signing; what matters is what the words on the page actually say. And they clearly and unambiguously forbid government establishment of religion (applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment).
That being the case, it's also irrelevant what the actual practice of the states was or is, because once the First Amendment had been ratified, its plain language trumped what people had actually been doing. That's the way laws work.
And think for a minute about the alternative. Instead of being able to read a clear statute and know immediately if one's conduct is in compliance, no one would ever be able to know if they were in violation of the law until they had first researched the subjective intentions and viewpoints of the members of Congress that passed it.
"The Hobbesian state, no matter what its form – dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy – tolerates no religion but itself."
Well said, Dr. Peters. Would you say, that at the root of all law (as well as culture, as you pointed out) that there is some religious foundation? I tried to argue this elsewhere but was immediately gainsaid and silenced because I am not intellectually equipped to defend the point. I argued that, for example, murder is illegal because our religion forbids it. As to unjust laws, I cannot say. (Or as for non-Christian countries who still outlaw murder; either their religion contains similar constraints, or else they are adopting Western systems of law). I am way over my head here, but I agree with Allen Wilson's comment (12), and would appreciate anyone's knowledgeable contribution.
Thank you, Mr Peters. You put it in a way that I wish I could have.
I would define the drive to be 'autonomous' as a form of egoism, which is just psychopathic personality and psychopathic behaviour clothed in pseudo-philosophy, or put another way, clothed in garments that the psychopath thinks will look good to others.
In their own bizarre way, the cults and world views of witch doctors make more sense than those of most moderns.
Mr Ezzo, I would agree that there is some religious foundation at the root of all law. I dont see how it could be otherwise. Look at the influence the priests and temples had in Egypt. I think the priests even conducted trials in some cases.
Freeline, I'm sure the founders knew exactly what they meant when they wrote the constitution or they would never haver bothered. They came to an agreement and wrote it out in words they all knew the meaning of, even if they didn't all get what they wanted in the bargain. The problem came when words changed meaning over time, people who weren't there read their own meaning into it, etc.
To all: concerning interpretation, is it not strange the similarity that exists between activist judges and lawyers 'interpreting' the constitution on the one hand, and degenerate 'Christian' sects 'interpreting' the Bible on the other, to justify all sorts of weirdness and insanity? And in both cases, you have lairs who take clauses or phrases out of context intentionally or fools who do so out of ignorance, to amazingly destructive and murderous effect.
Mr. Freeline provides us with a good laugh, as all uneducated and ideology-driven anti-Christian Marxists and atheists constantly do. Yes, there is a case for Mr. Freeline's "way laws work," that is, people UNKNOWINGLY ratifying and signing onto laws which somehow PROHIBIT a very activity they had engaged in for generations and which they planned on keeping up in the future. This, Mr. Freeline, is "the way laws work" in an AUTHORITARIAN government.
To complete your education on the U.S. Constitution that you so radically hate, it is worth reminding you that the amendment which is referred to as the 14th by our political establishment is null, void, and non-existent. According to the Constitution an amendment must be ratified by the people of the states in the federal Union. Since the Confederate state governments had been either partially or fully taken over by Yankees in 1868 as part of Reconstruction, the people of those states were not represented. Also, the imperial D.C. government itself declared that the Confederate States were outside of the Union, and would have to meet several qualifications to be readmitted. Since one of these was the ratification of an amendment to a constitution whose government those states were NO LONGER UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF at the time, the method used to "ratify" the 14th amendment was unconstitutional.
Your love of the incorporation doctrine which the non-existent 14th amendment gave birth to is proof positive of what it was created for: a blank check for ultimate POWER over the subjects of the American empire who did not comply with its wishes.
#14 "irrelevant what the framers thought subjectively when they were signing" etc. Actually, it is not irrelevant but it is not conclusive either. The Constitution properly means not what they intended when they wrote but what the people of the States meant when they ratified it. What the framers wrote was a proposal, totally without authority. As Madison tells us, it is ratification by people of the States "that gives it all the validity which it possesses."
As I said in the beginning, I regard the debate over the Constitution as irrelevant to the circumstances in which we find ourselves and it is a little tedious to provide An Introduction to the Constitution 01 every time a victim of American education writes in. Here goes, for one last time.
We are told, here, that "It is a black-letter rule of interpreting statutes, contracts, and Constitutions that what matters is what the words on the page objctively mean, and not what the parties subjectively thought. That must be the case or it would never be possible to know, for example, what a contract means since anyone could say, 'Oh, that’s not what I meant.'"
This is an assertion, not an argument much less an accepted fact. One would search the Constitution in vain for the term black-letter, nor would one find this rule cited by anyone who wrote or participated in the ratification of the Constitution. That is because the notion did not exist.
A black-letter rule, as I understand it, is a foundational principle that is transparently clear and indispensable. Whether such a thing is possible may well be doubted, but it has nothing to do with a document drafted over 200 years ago. It is a little like the Scriptural interpretation used by a weird sect known as "The Way." I had two students in an introductory Greek class. among the several reasons why they got final grades approaching zero (one obvious reason was that they preyed all night before the exam instead of studying) was the principle that since the Creator did not want to mislead anyone, He made sure that every word in the NT was used only in one sense. Thus, when I pointed out that even the simplest words like "kai' had several senses, in this case, and, also, and even, and that more complex words like logos could be very elusive. No translation is remotely adequate, and a 400 year old translation will contain many words whose sense has changed. Ironically, though, the AV is less misleading than most recent translations, where translators, in order to keep it simple, impose a personal or sectarian interpretation on words. A Christian who wants to understand the Scriptures must either learn Greek and learn it thoroughly or else submit himself to the authority of a tradition, like the Catholic Magisterium, or a confession.
To apply Freeline's mode of interpretation to the Constitution is to be entrapped by circular reasoning: Since we know what it means already, we have only to apply it to specific cases. In fact we often don't fully understand the Constitution either because we don't quite understand words like "establishment" or "cruel and unusual" or because we do not know the historical context. Then how do we begin to understand what it says?
As usual, Prof. Wilson is absolutely right. It is the what went on in the states--both the ratifying conventions and the pamphlet wars that give us the necessary background to interpret the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In general, we know that people were concerned about the possible over-centralization of power-hence Amendment 10--but that they also wished to protect themselves from the abuses they suffered--or thought they suffered--under the last decades of British rule. Thus, Amendments 2, 4, and 5 have much to do with the Stamp Act and the British policy of issuing general writs that permitted armed officers to invade commercial properties and even homes to seize contraband. In some big cases, they had authority to transfer jurisdiction from sympathetic colonial courts to Admiralty courts. When local militias began drilling and stockpiling arms, the Brits marched on Lexington to seize the arms, hence the reference to a well-ordered militia in #2 has nothing to do with a government-run national guard but with citizens banding together to resist the government.
In the case of the First Amendment's concern with religious liberty, we also know the background: the fear that not only was the British government going to establish the Church of England in Puritan New England but that it might even establish the Catholic Church in all of Quebec, which included the Ohio Valley. Now, what was a religious establishment? The establishment they knew best was the Cof E from the days of Elizabeth to George III. In general, it meant that people were taxed to support the Anglican Church and its ministers, that only Anglicans could hold office or attend university, that other sects of Christianity could be either outlawed or grudgingly tolerated until the public mood justified a pogrom, like the Gordon Riots against Catholics, or the execution of heretics in Massachusetts. There mere public exercise of one or another form of Christianity, either by citizens on state property or by members of Congress had little or nothing to do with establishment.
In fact, as we know, several states maintained full-blown establishments--Anglican in SC and Puritan in Connecticut for some time. All states, in varying degrees, had religious tests for public office or jury duty, and these tests, far from disappearing, might be strengthened and made more explicit, as they were in Texas.
How was this possible under the First Amendment which states clearly that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Yes, Congress, which means, in an age when neither the executive nor judicial branches could make law, the Federal Government.
Then the campaign to exclude Christianity from the public square has nothing to do with the Constitution of 1787 and everything to do with 1) the Union victory, 2) the illegallly passed 14th amendment, and 3) the deliberate misinterpretation of that amendment known as the "incorporation doctrine." The anti-Christians have no case except the case built on the fact of power. Truth has nothing to do with it, only the power that comes from the barrel of a gun. But this is not enough for these liars: T hey cannot be content unless we kiss the gun barrel and burn incense to the god of this world. Enough.
"Truth has nothing to do with it, only the power that comes from the barrel of a gun. But this is not enough for these liars: They cannot be content unless we kiss the gun barrel and burn incense to the god of this world. Enough."
This comment in two sentences and one exclamation sums up the current cultural and political environment as anyone under the age of 100 yrs has known it in these United States. After a century and one half of advertisement, most baptized Christians have come to accept it as the way of the world, which it certainly is. What has been lost, however,is infinitely more important.
I think the debate about the Constitution is irrelevant in another sense: it's completely question-begging. Originalists (and I agree with Austin Bramwell's critique of originalism at Takimag) simply ignore the fact that the 14th Amendment, say, contains abstract clauses which, as abstract, could not have a determinate meaning no matter what the framers or ratifiers believed. Ronald Dworkin is absolutely conclusive on this score--and I experience despair and derision when I see his arguments blithely ignored by originalists--who certainly aren't original thinkers. And no, I do not wish to engage in a prolonged debate about this. My time is better spent telling legal conservatives to respond to Ronald Dworkin or shut up.
Is this the same Bramwell who has hung his hat at the Frum's blog and published in First Things and pooh-poohs the idea that there might be any merit in anything American? Another self-important NR/neoconservative who does not need to be boosted here. Let them bore each other to death.
I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here. The poor drafting of the 14th amendment and its later misinterpretation somehow refute originalism in all its forms? But perhaps I am obtuse. I tried to wade through several of Dworkin's books and found nothing but question-begging, to say nothing of the entirely idiotic opinion that it is better to have fundamental questions decided by a Supreme Court made up of such wise philosophers as Sandy O'Conner and RB Ginzburg and JP Stevens than by any shabby political process. Dworkin may have his merits as a legal analyst--though what they are I do not know--but as a political philosopher he is without discernible merit. What is the point, by the way, to these butterfly catching categories, such as "originalists." It is better to state an argument and then refute it, rather than assigning terms like conservative, liberal, originalist, etc. And why, by the way, should a constitutional interpreter be an original thinker? I cannot think of a worse quality than originality in such a field. Let us rather emulate the conservative honeybees that sting to death any original-thinking bee who makes a single innovation in the bee dance. While we are at it, let us pass an amendment that excludes all lawyers from political or bureaucratic office and forbids any legislature to employ the services of lawyers, when drafting legislation. I am so happy that an apprenticeship with Steve Presser turned my younger son against the law. As a trained chef, he is of some use to the world.
Speaking of lawyers, I am reminded of the only witticism attributed to US Grant. Apparently Grant came into an inn at a county seat, where the lawyers were all gathered for court. It was a cold and rainy night and the attorneys were warming themselves by the fire when a weary and rain-soaked Grant came in, shaking the rain of his clothes. One of the legal wags cried out, "Why stranger, you look as if you came from Hell. Tell us, how goes it in the infernal regions?" Grant replied, in his terse style, "About the same as here: lawyers closest to the fire."
I think Bramwell writing at the Frum blog is unfortunate as is his position on originalism. But he is rather hard to characterize. He is not simply a Frum style moderate. His essay upon leaving NR, while critical of "paleos" (another butterfly catching category), was brilliant in its critique of the NR crowd's (which at the time would have included Frum) support for the War.
"And why, by the way, should a constitutional interpreter be an original thinker? I cannot think of a worse quality than originality in such a field."
This is true in most fields but especially true in the practice and study of Law.
There have been very few saints from the legal field ( Thomas More was not cannonized for being a lawyer )none at all that we know of from the field of high finance or economic analysis. Belloc only stated the obvious when he observed that it took two or three generations to form a class of farmers and craftsmen but only one to make a politician or lawyer. Chefs are like writers, some are really good some are hyped as really good, all are temperamental and for this quality I can't think of a better formation for a cantakerous Chef than a lifetime with Tom Fleming as Father!!
@13 Robert M. Peters:
Thank you for helping me to forgive my inner witch doctor. Of course! Why didn't I see it? I could weep thinking of all the time I've wasted trying to argue from logic, history, and common sense with atheists, especially when, of the three, it is only in common sense that I approach even average strength.
Seriously, I would have done better to break out in singing the two bars of the Ave Maria that I know, or better yet, to just get down on my knees and pray over the poor bastards. Whether by this they would have been mortified with embarrassment or moved to some other emotion, either way it would have been an improvement over my ham-handed arguing.
Thanks, Mr. Phillips, for that point. I wasn't aware that Bramwell was blogging at Frum's new site; when the site started, I took a look and quickly got bored by all the clonish and clownish nitwits parroting the party line of "moderate" neoconservatism. But yes, Bramwell's discussion of originalism in Takimag impressed me, not for its philosophical sophistication--there was little or none--but for its analytic common sense.
Dworkin is a judicial supremacist and I am not. But I think Dworkin is right when he says that the individual-rights portions of the Constitution are not set in concrete and can plausibly be interpreted in different ways. To deny this is madness--yet it is what the folks at the Federallist Society (my real target in my little screed) seem determined to do. Unlike Dworkin, I regard this indeterminacy, if that is the right word, as a good reason to regard only legislative resolutions of certain constitutional issues as legitimate.
Back to Bramwell. Maybe he's a work in progress. His criticism of originalism is the first really sharp criticism of that interpretive approach that I have ever seen from a conservative. That shows independent-mindedness and (given the lockstep style of the Federalist Society on this score) a degree of courage. Let us hope he continues to "grow" by rejecting the shibboleths of the neos and mainies (if I may coin a term).
I used to get the Democrat-Gazette years ago, and I should have mentioned earlier in this thread that Greenberg's writing has always been just as described by Dr Fleming. Only a fool would believe the man to be a conservative.
I'd like to think there might be a greater waste of time than reading Austin Bramwell or considering the profundity of Ronald Dworkin, but I cannot come up with one. Watching old episodes of The Gong Show? Nope, the show had a cruel sense of humor. Making cathedrals out of popsicle sticks? Well, you could always use it for kindling, if the fire went out. I suppose one could always cut oneself to watch the blood run out, but at least that would concentrate the mind on the pain and the blood. But spending time on people who cannot write well and have nothing significant to say? What's next--studying political history with Jonah Goldberg? Having drinks with David Frum? Writing an internet column?
"Writing an internet column?"
Haha!
Dr. Fleming,
In a way, I wish you would quit writing internet columns because if it were not for you,Pat Buchanan, Clyde Wilson, Ilana Mercer, Scott, Aaron, and a few others, I would have no good reason to even watch the internet. But so long as you continue to write them, I will be reading them. rr