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Mike Huckabee: It’s Time to Support a Conservative Values Candidate

Oct22

I’ve not written anything on my blog about politics for a very long time. Some of you who are new readers may not even know that I am one of those scary Christian conservatives. And, yes, I’m to some extent a one-issue voter: I believe abortion is wrong, that as Americans we are destroying our nation by destroying our children in the womb. I can’t vote for anyone who believes that abortion is just another choice, so I’m going to have a real problem if our choice come election time is between Rudy Giulani, Mr. Pro-Abortion Republican, and Hilary Clinton, Ms. Pro-Abortion Democrat.

I have resisted becoming mentally engaged in choosing a candidate for an election so far in advance. I think many people, even those who have been politically active in the past, have been reluctant to even think about an election that doesn’t even take place for another year. However, if you agree with the position I took in the first paragraph of this post, we have to try to do something about it now rather than later. The first primaries may take place as early as the beginning of January. If people of faith, those who oppose abortion and believe in limited government, don’t start now to suppport a candidate who shares those values, we will be left with a Hobson’s choice come election time. Either take this pro-abortion Republican or don’t vote, and thereby throw the election to an even more pro-abortion Democrat.

So I’m supporting Mike Huckabee for President. I think he can win. I think we should start talking about his ideas and positions, start sending him money, start blogging about him, support his candidacy in any way we can. And I’m going to be doing just that on Mondays for a while here on Semicolon. If you don’t want to read about Huckabee or about politics or about the election, skip Mondays. But if you’re interested in finding out more, here are a few links to get you started.

Athol Dickson: Should We Give Up?: I would like to send a message to the kingmakers that they are wrong, that we should not give up, that we should have some faith for crying out loud, that democracy is not yet dead and there can still be a real choice in 2008. Do you believe that’s possible? If you do, I strongly suggest that you get busy right now.

Joel Griffith at the Seventh Sola: “Mike Huckabee’s performance last night was solid given the constraints. He clearly stated his positions on social issues of concern to Christians, and they match up with mine. More than that, despite the short time alloted him by the questioners, he even pitched some quick, innovative ideas on health care and the Social Security question. I’d love to see those ideas fleshed out substantively.”

Quaid at Thinklings: “Instead of being like Bob Jones III, who has chosen a candidate for the chief reason of their ability to beat Hillary Clinton (btw – this is some of the more-flawed reasoning I’ve seen in a while), maybe you should choose a candidate who actually believes what you believe, stands what you stand for and honors God in the process. Forget the fact that he doesn’t seem electable now – if you and enough others choose to stand on principle instead of politics, what seems impossible quickly becomes probable.”

Mike Huckabee’s website:

My faith is my life – it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them. For example, when it comes to the environment, I believe in being a good steward of the earth. I don’t separate my faith from my personal and professional lives.

Real faith makes us humble and mindful, not of the faults of others, but of our own. It makes us less judgmental, as we see others with the same frailties we have. Faith gives us strength in the face of injustice and motivates us to do our best for “the least of us.”

I agree with Mr. Huckabee, and if this attitude makes us “scary” sobeit. Let’s have a lot more strength and justice and a lot less cowardice and fear.

Patriot Day

Sep11

September 11, 2001, was a defining moment in American history. On that terrible day, our Nation saw the face of evil as 19 men barbarously attacked us and wantonly murdered people of many races, nationalities, and creeds. On Patriot Day, we remember the innocent victims, and we pay tribute to the valiant firefighters, police officers, emergency personnel, and ordinary citizens who risked their lives so others might live.

After the attacks on 9/11, America resolved that we would go on the offense against our enemies, and we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor and support them. All Americans honor the selfless men and women of our Armed Forces, the dedicated members of our public safety, law enforcement, and intelligence communities, and the thousands of others who work hard each day to protect our country, secure our liberty, and prevent future attacks.

The spirit of our people is the source of America’s strength, and 6 years ago, Americans came to the aid of neighbors in need. On Patriot Day, we pray for those who died and for their families. We volunteer to help others and demonstrate the continuing compassion of our citizens. On this solemn occasion, we rededicate ourselves to laying the foundation of peace with confidence in our mission and our free way of life.

By a joint resolution approved December 18, 2001 (Public Law 107-89), the Congress has designated September 11 of each year as “Patriot Day.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim September 11, 2007, as Patriot Day. I call upon the Governors of the United States and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, as well as appropriate officials of all units of government, to direct that the flag be flown at half-staff on Patriot Day. I also call upon the people of the United States to observe Patriot Day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and remembrance services, to display the flag at half-staff from their homes on that day, and to observe a moment of silence beginning at 8:46 a.m. eastern daylight time to honor the innocent Americans and people from around the world who lost their lives as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of September, in the year of our Lord two thousand seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-second.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Project: Books for the Prime Minister

Aug25

I just read about this rather intriguing project via one of the Saturday Review-ers (Melanie at Indextrious). It seems that Canadian author Yann Martel (Life of Pi) decided to send some books to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.”

So far, Martel has sent ten books to Mr. Harper. He’s received one response to the first book, The Death of Ivan Illych by Tolstoy.

The other nine books are:

Animal Farm by George Orwell.

The Murder of Roger Akroyd by Agatha Christie.

By Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart.

The Bagavad Gita

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan.

Candide by Voltaire.

Short and Sweet: 101 very short poems, edited by Simon Armitage

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez.

Miss Julia by August Strindberg.

Interesting choices, don’t you think? If you were going to send one book to one of the candidates for the Democratic or Republican nomination for U.S. president, to whom would you send it, and what book woud you send, and why?

Quick Tips for Cheap Books

Apr17

In May, Scholastic Book Distributors have their Customer Appreciation Warehouse Sales for educators, librarians, homeschoolers, and school volunteers at Scholastic warehouses all over the country (US). The books are the leftovers from the book fairs that they do in schools and libraries all year, and here in Houston the prices and the selection are pretty good. I’ve gone and spent money and come home with new books for the homeschool library.

Go here for more information and to find a sale near you.

Also, for those of you in the Houston (TX) area, the Friends of the Houston Library book sale is this coming weekend, April 20, 21, and 22 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. I hope to be there, but I have a full weekend and may have to sandwich in only a few hours browsing through the thousands of books at the sale. Go here for more information.

Of Mice and Men

Apr12

“While modern Darwinists may wince, eugenics clearly drew inspiration from Darwin’s theory. In fact, Galton was Darwin’s cousin. He took evolutionary theory seriously, arguing persuasively that hospitals, mental institutions and social welfare all violate the law of natural selection. These institutions preserve the weak at the expense of the gene pool. In the wild, such people would die off naturally, thus keeping the human race strong. As Darwin himself declared in ‘The Descent of Man,’ ‘No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this has been highly injurious to the race of man. … Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.'”

And so as we continue as a nation to debate the ethics and efficacy of embryonic stem cell research, it might pay to remember the history of the eugenics movement. Read here for a reminder of what can happen when we decide that some people are dispensable and not worth perpetuating or even living.

Hat tip to Amanda at Wittingshire.

Resurrection Reading: Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild

Apr2

I finished reading this nonfiction account of the campaign to end the British slave trade in late February, about the time I went on blog break. Then, sometime in March I went to see the movie Amazing Grace, a treatment of the same subject, at the movie theater with twelve year old Brown Bear Daughter. I thought the book and the movie dovetailed and gave me a much fuller picture of this episode in history than I would have gotten from either alone.

The push to end the trade in human slaves by British merchants took place in the late eighteenth century and in the early 1800’s, the time of poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, just after the American Revolution (or the loss of the American colonies, as the British themselves would have named it). During the decades that Wilberforce and his supporters worked to end the slave trade, the French Revolution devastated France and threatened the British aristocracy and later Toussaint L’Ouverture led the slaves in Haiti to revolt, and Napoleon became an even bigger threat to the British monarchy. Wilberforce and his cohorts, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and others, tried to keep the focus on the abolition of the slave trade, but of course the other events that were shaking their world and forming public opinion could not help but influence the course of their movement. Wilberforce began to campaign against the slave trade in 1787; the trade was finally abolished on March 23, 1807. The movie, Amazing Grace was released on March 23 of this year to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition by Parliament of the slave trade by British subjects.

“To the British abolitionists, the challenge of ending slavery in a world that considered it fully normal was as daunting as it seems today when we consider challenging the entrenched wrongs of our own age:
—the gap between rich and poor nations
—the spread of nuclear weapons
—assaults on the earth, air and water
—the habit of war.

I don’t know Mr. Hothchld’s political persuasion, but these are the analogies he sees when he compares the campaign to abolish the slave trade to the need to end evil institutions in our time. I immediately see a different analogy: the Abolition of Abortion. These and other similarities have been noted before by others, but they are striking:

It’s all for the best: Slave owners and slave traders argued, outrageously, that the slaves were happy to leave a barbaric existence in Africa, to sail across the ocean in near-luxury on slave trading ships, to work for kind Christian masters on delightful Caribbean islands. The reality was, of course, much grimmer and likely to end in disease, dismemberment, or death for the “happy slaves.”
Abortion proponents argue, outrageously, that aborted children are better off dead. They would not have wanted to be born into poverty or into abusive families. In both cases the claim to read minds and to know that death and slavery are best for another person is hubris and infamously cruel.

Property rights: Slaves were property, argued the slave owners and traders, and couldn’t be freed without compensation to the slave owners.
Unborn babies are the property of their mothers (not fathers for some reason), and abortion cannot be abolished unless we compensate those mothers who will be forced to bear unwanted children.

Out of sight, out of mind: British slaves were, for the most part, far away from England on Carribean island sugar plantations.Abolitionists had to demonstrate the evils of slavery to a population, most of whom had never seen slavery enacted nor even met a slave in person. Some of the British people may have known slave owners, absentee plantation owners, but not know the source of their great wealth. (The Church of England actually owned vast sugar plantations worked by slaves in the Caribbean.)
Similarly, abortion in the United States takes place almost clandestinely. I may know an abortionist, or someone who has had an abortion, probably I do, but I have no idea who it might be.

The Means to Abolition: In his book Hochschild writes that the abolitionists learned that “. . . the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings.”
I believe that we will end the evil of abortion, finally, not by appeals to Scripture nor even to reason, but rather when we are able to demonstrate to enough people, especially young people, what a violent and abhorrent act it is to murder an innocent child who has barely even had the opportunity to begin his or her life.

The slaves in the British West Indies were finally freed on August 1, 1838. On that date, over fifty years after Wilberforce first took up the cause of ending slavery, nearly 800,000 men, women, and children throughout the British Empire officially became free. In the United States, during the next two and a half decades prior to the Civil War, free blacks in the North and many sympathetic whites celebrated August 1, Emancipation Day, with parades, outdoor meetings, and church services—and with hope that emancipation and the abolition of slavery would come to the slave states of the United States, too.

William WIlberforce’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey:

“To the memory of William Wilberforce (born in Hull, August 24th 1759, died in London, July 29th 1833); for nearly half a century a member of the House of Commons, and, for six parliaments during that period, one of the two representatives for Yorkshire. In an age and country fertile in great and good men, he was among the foremost of those who fixed the character of their times; because to high and various talents, to warm benevolence, and to universal candour, he added the abiding eloquence of a Christian life. Eminent as he was in every department of public labour, and a leader in every work of charity, whether to relieve the temporal or the spiritual wants of his fellow-men, his name will ever be specially identified with those exertions which, by the blessing of God, removed from England the guilt of the African slave trade, and prepared the way for the abolition of slavery in every colony of the empire: in the prosecution of these objects he relied, not in vain, on God; but in the progress he was called to endure great obloquy and great opposition: he outlived, however, all enmity; and in the evening of his days, withdrew from public life and public observation to the bosom of his family. Yet he died not unnoticed or forgotten by his country: the Peers and Commons of England, with the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker at their head, in solemn procession from their respective houses, carried him to his fitting place among the mighty dead around, here to repose: till, through the merits of Jesus Christ, his only redeemer and saviour, (whom, in his life and in his writings he had desired to glorify,) he shall rise in the resurrection of the just.”

Resources:
The Amazing Change: How You Can Help to End Modern Day Slavery.

Study guide to accompany Amazing Grace, the movie.

Ending Slavery: An Unfinished Business, a study guide on the history and current status of slaves and slavery around the world.

BBC Interactive Map on the Abolition of British Slavery.

Books by and About William WIlberforce.

Come Back to Afghanistan by Said Hyder Akbar

Feb26

“[T]he people of Afghanistan . . . are tired, poor, and have few opportunities—and they are thus at the mercy of warlords, terrorists, opium, the country’s carnivorous neighbors, you name it. They need long-term help, not the shaky presence of the aid comminity.” (p. 326)

“In spite of everything, there is still a lot of goodwill toward the Americans here. It’s not like it is in Iraq: in Afghanistan the U.S. troops have legitimacy. The Americans did not invade this country: they helped overthrow an occupying force. Since then they’ve decreased the detrimental influence of neighboring countries. And perhaps most important, their continued presence prevents a return to chaos. But even this substantial benefit cannot placate Afghans forever.” (p.289)

These two quotations from Mr. Akbar’s book epitomize his view of Afghanistan’s future, American foreign policy, and what the U.S. owes Afghanistan. I would respond that although the Afghan people need and deserve our help, they don’t need to be “placated” like little children. Americans will do what they can, but it is ultimately the responsibility of the Afghan people themselves to make their own way in the world and to find a way to govern themselves peacefully and reconcile the many tribal tensions and feuds that still make violence a part of daily life in Afghanistan.

Said Hyder Akbar is a college student, or was one when he wrote this book, born to Afghan parents in exile in Pakistan, reared in the U.S., and now the son of the governor of Afghanistan’s Kunar province. He writes mostly about the two (maybe three) summers he spent in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban as the government of Hamid Karzai, with the help of American troops, attempted to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan. The book is quite informative on the state of Afghan politics and infrastructure, but it is notable for what it doesn’t say as much as for what it does.

Two subjects are absent or near-absent from Mr. Akbar’s narrative. He spends a great deal of time and ink telling us about the former mujahadeen and about tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, about politics in Kabul and politics in Kunar Province, about Afghan poverty and American ineptness and Americans who do things well. However, two subjects which seem to me to be central to the Afghan story, Mr. Akbar almost never mentions: women and religion.

Occasionally, there is a brief allusion to daily prayers or Taliban legalities, but if the author and his family are any example, Islam is a background noise in the life of the political elite in Afghanistan. No mosque attendance, no Islamic studies, no citing of the Koran, very little prayer or reference to Islamic law, are to be found in the pages of this book in which many people were just a few years ago supposedly fanatical Islamists. Has all this religious zeal just disappeared or gone underground, or is Mr. Akbar a secular Muslim (like a secular Jew or a nominal Christian) who just doesn’t pay any attention to the role of religion within the culture of Afghanistan?

Women, too, are nearly invisible in Come Back to Afghanistan. Mr. Akbar writes about his mother; he even tells us that she was quite unhappy with him when he returned to the U.S. from Afghanistan after his first summer there. He brought back quite a bit of film of the loya jirga, a large meeting in Kabul of tribal leaders and warlords and other political leaders, including many women. Only Hyder Akbar doesn’t film or tape any of the women, and his mother is quite angry about the omission. Nevertheless, Mr. Akbar doesn’t learn any lessons from this martriarchal scorn because the rest of his book is just as woman-less as his recording of the loya jirga. He writes about his mother again, a brief visit to a girl’s school, and a glimpse he gets of his uncle’s wife. Are women in Afghanistan still just as invisible as they were under the Taliban? Or do they simply fly under Hyder Akbar’s radar screen completely? I would certainly have liked to know a lot more about whether or not women are being educated and given freedom and opportunity in the new Afghanistan, but Mr. Akbar’s a lot more interested in mountain hikes and Kalishnikovs.

Aside from these two glaring omissions, Come Back to Afghanistan is an enthusiastic, impassioned portrait of the rebuilding, and sometimes the tragic re-breaking, of Afghanistan during the years 2003-2005. When Hyder Akbar first goes to Afghanistan to spend the summer with his dad, he is seventeen years old. By the end of the book, two and a half to three years later, it is obvious that he has grown up, mostly as a result of his experiences in Afghanistan. He’s a man with a mission —to participate in the reconstruction and the political and economic of his native country. I wish him and his country well

Contests, Awards, and Carnivals

Jan22

A new Short story contest is being co-sponsored by the blog Faith in Fiction and by Relief Journal. Entries are due by mid-March, and the theme is “daily sacrament.”

“We are celebrating the release of our beautiful new poetry anthology, The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems, with a poetry contest. Children ages 12 and under are invited to submit original poetry to have a chance to win a signed copy! Winners will receive special mention on our website.”
Hidden-Treasure
Jules at Everyday Mommy is hosting the Hidden Treasure Blog Awards recognizing writing excellence. Her goal is to recognize those under-read bloggers who have written excellent posts in various categories. Nominations open on February 1st.

The Tenth Carnival of Children’s Literature is open for your enjoyment at Big A little a. Kelly’s got lots of links for all lovers of children’s books.

Also for those interested in children’s books, the live webcast announcement for the 2007 Newbery, Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, and Prinz Awards should be available at 9:45 AM CST today, January 22nd, here. Text announcement here.

In March, you’re invited to the Ultimate Blog Party hostessed by 5 Minutes for Mom. The blog world is just full of ideas, so join in. Ultimate Blog Party

Contrast

Sep20

Pope Benedict XVI: (quoting a Byzantine emperor) “‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Radical Muslims (al Qaeda): “We shall break the cross and spill the wine. … God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. … God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen.” (CNN, September 18, 2006)

Rosie O’Donnell: “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state. We’re a democracy here.”

Radical Christians (Christian Coalition spokesman): “This is America, and everyone can have their own opinion, however, we do disagree with her opinion. Christianity is all about faith. Christianity is all about humanity and equality. That was the core of the life of Jesus Christ.” (Crosswalk, September, 2006)

So who exactly is threatening whom and to what degree?