Monday night on CNN’s Larry King Live, Pastor Rick Warren apologized for his support of Prop. 8, California’s voter-approved marriage protection amendment, saying he has “never been and never will be” an “anti-gay or anti-gay marriage activist.”
“During the whole Proposition 8 thing, I never once went to a meeting, never once issued a statement, never — never once even gave an endorsement in the two years Prop. 8 was going,” Warren told the CNN audience on Monday. ”The week before the — the vote, somebody in my church said, ‘Pastor Rick, what — what do you think about this?’ And I sent a note to my own members that said, I actually believe that marriage is — really should be defined, that that definition should be — say between a man and a woman.”
During his CNN interview on Monday, Warren expressed regret for backing Prop. 8. ”There were a number of things that were put out. I wrote to all my gay friends — the leaders that I knew — and actually apologized to them. That never got out,” he admitted.
Additionally, Pastor Warren said he did not want to comment on or criticize the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision last week to legalize same-sex “marriage” because it was “not his agenda.”
Rick Warren 2008:
However, just two weeks before the November 4 Prop. 8 vote, Pastor Warren issued a clear endorsement of the marriage amendment while speaking to church members. ”We support Proposition 8 — and if you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8,” he said.
The following is a complete transcript of Warren’s comments just weeks before the Prop. 8 election:
“The election’s coming just in a couple of weeks, and I hope you’re praying about your vote. One of the propositions, of course, that I want to mention is Proposition 8, which is the proposition that had to be instituted because the courts threw out the will of the people. And a court of four guys actually voted to change a definition of marriage that has been going for 5,000 years.
“Now let me say this really clearly: we support Proposition 8 — and if you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8. I never support a candidate, but on moral issues I come out very clear.
“This is one thing, friends, that all politicians tend to agree on. Both Barack Obama and John McCain, I flat-out asked both of them: what is your definition of marriage? And they both said the same thing — it is the traditional, historic, universal definition of marriage: one man and one woman, for life. And every culture for 5,000 years, and every religion for 5,000 years, has said the definition of marriage is between one man and a woman.
“Now here’s an interesting thing. There are about two percent of Americans [who] are homosexual or gay/lesbian people. We should not let two percent of the population determine to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years.
“This is not even just a Christian issue — it’s a humanitarian and human issue that God created marriage for the purpose of family, love, and procreation.
“So I urge you to support Proposition 8, and pass that word on. I’m going to be sending out a note to pastors on what I believe about this. But everybody knows what I believe about it. They heard me at the Civil Forum when I asked both Obama and McCain on their views.”
Obviously, there’s a lot of affirmative action in the med school racket: the acceptance rate (43%) for Mexican-Americans is virtually the same as for non-Hispanic Whites (44%) even though Mexican Americans average around the 26th percentile of the white distribution in MCATs and college GPA. And 36% of blacks get accepted compared to 44% of whites even though blacks scores and grades are down around the 17th percentile of the white distribution.
In fact, the AAMC posts offical grids showing how much easier it is to get into medical school for Non-Asian Minorities (NAMs) than for overall applicants. For example, 32.4% of “self-identified” NAMs get accepted to medical school with 3.00 to 3.19 GPAs and MCATs of 21-23, while only 13.4% of overall applicants get in with the same credentials. For applicants with 3.40 to 3.59 GPAs and 24-26 on the MCAT, 67.1 of NAMs get in versus 27.5% of the overall applicants (and somewhat less for Whites/Asians, of course).
In summary, it’s probably a good idea to get a second opinion.
Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.
As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?
After that it degenerates into optimism, but the “point of recognition” is close at hand. The rebellion of conservative governors (including our own chameleon conservative Rick Perry) refusing federal funds is a very positive development. If what good for the feds isn’t what’s good for Texas, well that opens up all sort of possibilities.
I think it hit me tonight that I am officially a parent. It occurred to me as I lead my two year old with a sore throat and fever in this prayer after correction:
The increase in the size of a religion’s fundamentalist population can change the local and even national politics of a country. During the twentieth century, conservative Protestants increased from little more than a third of the white Protestant total (among those born in 1900) to almost two-thirds (for those born after 1975). Only a quarter of this effect was down to changes in switching patterns, the rest accruing to demography. Indeed, one graph showed the relationship between a state’s non-Hispanic White total fertility rate (TFR) in 2002 and the percent vote for George Bush in 2004. At one end of the spectrum was Utah, which had the highest TFR and percentage of people who voted for Bush, and on the other end was Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Kaufmann hypothesizes that while the Fukuyama, “post-historical” core societies — liberal democratic, capitalist and secular — have been able to survive external threats like the advancement of technology and the challenge of socialism, it may not be a demographically sustainable system. There is the possibility that the stark differences in growth rate between religious fundamentalists and others could threaten this system from within.
In reply to a question, Kaufmann speculated that demography may expose a contradiction, first cited by Nietzsche, between liberalism’s practical need to defend itself and its inability to legitimate the illiberal policies that may be required to do so.
Or as Robert Frost put it, a liberal is someone unwilling to take his own side in an argument. Raising conservative babies is one of the most aggressive acts you can take against the system. Call it the Palin Revolution. Guns, Babies, Jesus!
It occurred to me that I’ve let the social mood grab me too hard here lately. Gloom and doom is not really what I believe, though some sort of realignment is necessary before things can get better. You have to dig out the foundation to fix it. But I do believe there are two great causes of hope, as we enter some difficult times, that are unique to our point in history:
1) The Internet. If you believe in such a thing as truth, and you also believe truth must prevail, then a great free market in ideas like the Internet is a good thing. The media stranglehold on our people has been broken, once and for all. Not all will seek it, but the truth is out there and easily found. Though a great deal of evil is facilitated by the Internet, much more good will ultimately come. Water will seeks its own level and the great sifting of history will speed up as the degenerate become yet more degenerate while the fit and regenerate sharpen each other.
2) The Death of the Empire. I saw a video the other day that challenged my mental model of how things will play out:
Ignore the rest of the video about biotech (which is interesting) and let’s focus on the part about fedgov spending. Essentially, the government is broke by 2017. I had predicted the death of this country by long-term demographics, but it looks like Bush-Obama are going to push us over the brink to insolvency before that really happens.
When the Federal Empire is dead, it will be as if a great vise has been broken, an oppressive force that holds together the unnatural arrangement of our country. The worst possibility would be a strong, solvent ideologically coherent federal government able to smash the square peg of demographic catastrophe into the round hole of our civilization. By 2017 things will have degenerated a little further, but the great regional indigenous cultures of this country will still be there: Texas will still be Texas and the Christian Heartland will still be largely intact.
The witch is dead, and we know not what will come after, but we know that what will come cannot until the present evil has passed. Fedgov will likely enter a supernova stage as it angrily exits the stage of history, but it will be mere birth pangs to a new era. But praise God that the evil government that takes our guns, steals our money, aborts innocent children and disinherits our progeny will soon perish.
That it will pass sooner and while the American people remain largely intact is a cause for great hope. And maybe, just maybe, the sons and daughters of the pioneers will finally have a country that is truly their own.
Joseph Schumpeter was an extremely gifted economist who predicted what we see now:
Schumpeter’s most popular book in English is probably Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. This book opens with a treatment of Karl Marx. While he is sympathetic to Marx’s theory that capitalism will collapse and will be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter concludes that this will not come about in the way Marx predicted. To describe it he borrowed the phrase “creative destruction,” and made it famous by using it to describe a process in which the old ways of doing things are endogenously destroyed and replaced by new ways.
Schumpeter’s theory is that the success of capitalism will lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism; it will be replaced by socialism in some form. There will not be a revolution, but merely a trend in parliaments to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another. He argued that capitalism’s collapse from within will come about as democratic majorities vote for the creation of a welfare state and place restrictions upon entrepreneurship that will burden and destroy the capitalist structure. Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy. In his vision, the intellectual class will play an important role in capitalism’s demise. The term “intellectuals” denotes a class of persons in a position to develop critiques of societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and able to stand up for the interests of strata to which they themselves do not belong. One of the great advantages of capitalism, he argues, is that as compared with pre-capitalist periods, when education was a privilege of the few, more and more people acquire (higher) education. The availability of fulfilling work is however limited and this, coupled with the experience of unemployment, produces discontent. The intellectual class is then able to organise protest and develop critical ideas.
Pinochet and Franco found a workaround to this problem for a time: dig a big ditch and put all the liberal intellectuals and assorted Communists in it. But they came back in a generation, implying the problem is intractable by simple murder, even if such an option were moral.
Great post over at TakiMag concerning the self-defeating efforts of conservatives to dismiss Darwin’s insights:
I too am often disappointed that pundits on the pseudo-Right seek to undermine an insight that could strengthen their alleged worldview. It’s no surprise that lurking below Intelligent Design there is an appeal to a form of universalism (and all its attendant condemnations), not unlike pro-life activists invoking civil-rights rhetoric and modern Christians championing universal human rights.
The fact that some extreme atheists use Darwinism as a sort of religion to explain ultimate origins does not excuse Christians who invoke the equally atheistic spirit of the French Revolution to attack it. Both are lies. And as I’ve pointed out before, all of the practical, political implications of Darwinism are microevolutionary in nature:
When poor people with two-digit IQ’s are given the right to immigrate and vote on politicians who then decide how to tax the greater property and income of those with three-digit IQ’s, whom they outnumber, democracy becomes a farce of two wolves voting themselves a lamb for dinner. When those differences are largely genetic and intractable, and those with less wealth have higher birthrates, we have a recipe for a very unstable society, on its way to the logical progression of multiculturalism: from the First World to crony-corrupt Mexico, from Mexico to racial-socialist Venezuela, from Venezuela to the affirmative-action-state (and world rape capital) of South Africa, from South Africa to the lawless murders, rapes, stealing and mass inflation of Zimbabwe, and from Zimbabwe to the permanent abyss of Haiti.
But hey, it feels good to rant about Hitler and Darwin, right?
So my wife refuses to watch any Rocky movies, despite my telling her how vitally important they were to my development from boy to man. She says she would rather see people kill each other than hit each other. The boxing movie and the dog movie (i.e. the ability of an Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows to make a grown man cry who never gets choked up at typical romantic fare) seem to be male phenomena. That’s why this commercial caught my eye:
I don’t know about you, but that really grabbed me by the gut.
This is the type of story you never see in the media anymore, but was a staple of John Wayne movies: the triumph of the strong, silent Westerner over the show-off braggart. And it was made by a German beer company: don’t they know Germans aren’t supposed to do stuff like that anymore?
And have you noticed that the media ignores heavyweight boxing now that big dudes from Eastern Europe dominate the would-be Mike Tysons? Here are the current belt-holders:
WBA
WBC
IBF
WBO
(a)Nikolai Valuev
Vitali Klitschko
Wladimir Klitschko
Wladimir Klitschko
In any case, a decent dose of boxing or other types of fighting sports (UFC, etc) is an important part of bringing up boys in my opinion. They’ll be feminized enough by the culture, if not the church.
What kind of bizarro-world is it when the Catholic Church, looking quite well down the liberal road only a few decades ago, shows more principle than the world’s best known Southern Baptist?
Vatican officials said Saturday they were disappointed by President Barack Obama’s decision to end a ban on federal funding for international groups that perform abortions or provide information on them.
Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, urged Obama to listen to all voices in America without “the arrogance of those who, being in power, believe they can decide of life and death.”
Fisichella said in an interview published Saturday in Corriere della Sera that “if this is one of President Obama’s first acts, I have to say, in all due respect, that we’re heading quickly toward disappointment.”
Obama signed an executive order that ended the ban on Friday, reversing the policy of the Bush administration.
The four bishops belong to a movement founded by late French traditionalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Followers oppose dialogue with other religions and say Jews should convert. Rome’s chief rabbi said Williamson’s rehabilitation in particular would open “a deep wound” in Jewish-Vatican relations, which had already been strained by recent controversy over the effort to make Pope Pius XII a saint despite some historians’ contention that he did little to save Jews during the Holocaust. The French Jewish organization CRIF called Williamson “a despicable liar whose only goal is to revive the centuries-old hatred against Jews.”
Ding, Dong, the (Feminist) Witch is Dead:
Obama Sends a Shout-Out to His Homeboy Pastor Rick:
Huckabee Is Finished:
Nightline Report on the "Quiver Full" Movement:
This Warms My Heart: