Gentle Respect

“Right now, I could kill George Bush,” she said at the Adam’s Mark Hotel and Conference Center in Dallas. “No, I don’t mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that.”

About half the crowd gave her a standing ovation after she called for Mr. Bush’s removal from power.

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Religious men, especially evangelical Protestants, are more involved and attentive husbands and fathers than men who are not religious, new research shows.

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In Africa all churches are booming, but Pentecostalism is overtaking traditional Catholic and Anglican faiths brought by European colonizers over a century ago.

Pentecostals and charismatics now account for 147 million Africans, 17 percent of the continent’s people, compared with 5 percent in 1970, the World Christian Database says.

Christians say the ecstatic experiences offered by Pentecostals are more exciting than the subdued worship — complete with silent congregations and soporific organ music — that the continent’s first missionaries brought here.

“Africans want things done powerfully,” said Rev. Nathan Samwini of the Christian Council of Ghana. “You meet white evangelicals from America, they behave like Africans. They are vibrant, everything is done with vigor.”

For Pentecostals, the Holy Spirit — the third person of the Christian Trinity — plays an active role in life, performing miracles and answering prayers. This appeals greatly to a continent beset by poverty and sickness.

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Here are a few thoughts on the Democratic call for libertarians to become Democrats.

Let’s quickly move past the obvious point which is that the case for libertarian Democrats is deeply incoherent. If Moulitsas (AKA DailyKos) knew anything about Public Choice Theory and regulatory capture, he would know that corporations today are powerful not despite government regulations and taxes, but because of them. The more effective case for libertarian Democrats stems from the fact that social issues are more important than economic issues, despite the incoherent protestations made by the What’s the Matter With Kansas crowd. Given this, I expect that most libertarians will become Democrats.
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There is a good post on the Acton Institute’s Power Blog that captures many of my feelings about immigration. The concept of first possession - that whoever owns something first gets to keep it - is anathema to the political left. But it is essential for societies to be friendly to newcomers. Here is an example of a town that does not respect first possession:

Imagine a town with one hundred people. Each has a one hundred foot wide lot. If someone new shows up, we redraw property lines. Each lot shrinks by one foot, to make room for the new person’s equal share (and so on as more people arrive). Question: How friendly will that town be?

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It seems that the latter is exactly what many political liberals in America are doing by guaranteeing various kinds of entitlements to immigrants, whether legal or illegal. In that sense, a statist ideology that emphasizes government provision of various social entitlements seems to promote and foment rather than minimize xenophobia.

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There are two interesting articles in the Village Voice’s recent queer issue. Christians and conservatives would be well advised to read them. The first article is about babies and small children that might be gay:

“When I took my kids to the science museum to learn about birthing, my daughter, who was five at the time, decided that she would marry another girl and let her have the baby,” says one mother at a playground in Boston. (”Oh, how cute!” exclaimed another mother nearby.) “My son has a very close friend,” says the mother of a five-year-old boy. “He calls him his ‘godbrother’ and he does want to marry him. It’s just kind of like that’s what you do.”

That’s no surprise to Elaine Winter, principal of the lower school at the Little Red School House in Manhattan. “There absolutely is dramatic play in early childhood,” she reports. “They’ll say, ‘This can be a house with two mommies,’ because that’s the book we read yesterday, or that’s what Susie’s family is like.”

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A mildly popular blogger liberal blogger named Digby made this recent speech on behalf of bloggers at the Take Back America conference.

You will not find anyone amongst us who believes that the Bush administration’s executive power grab and flagrant partisan use of the federal government is anything less than an assault on the Constitution.

This is a standard talking point from the left. But what exactly does it mean? How can someone who believes in a Living Document theory of Constitutional law say that something is an assault on the Constitution? If the Constitution evolves, then why can’t it evolve to make the Executive more powerful?

This underscores what the slippery slope of the Living Document theory of Constitutional Law. Textualism or even originalism would be far superior.