Is That Discrimination?

In an NYT article about alleged discrimination by Evangelical churches against unmarried male pastors, one evangelical leader makes the following defense:

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said it was unfair to accuse churches of discrimination because that word implied something "wrongful."

"Both the logic of Scripture and the centrality of marriage in society," he said, justify "the strong inclination of congregations to hire a man who is not only married but faithfully married."

Putting aside whether an open bias against unmarried men for the mentioned reasons is or isn't "wrongful", I do agree with Mr. (Rev.? Dr.?) Mohler on one thing: "discrimination" does imply something "wrongful".

Some folks try to get very cute with defining "discrimination" as any sort of distinction or evaluation. It's a valid usage, and can even be a point of praise (as in "he has discriminating taste"), but it is also rapidly becoming archaic. In our society, discrimination does imply not just that a distinction is being made, but that the distinction is wrongful. Which, perhaps it is -- but that's usually precisely what is being debated. If one doesn't think that there is anything wrong with Evangelical churches preferring married men to their single peers, then it's a bit weird to still call it "discrimination". The way that language has involved gives discrimination an inherent connotation of wrongfulness and immorality, which is something that must be demonstrated by argument -- it can't be inferred simply from the fact of a distinction.

Latino Evangelicals Challenge Macho Culture

One of the downfalls of being sick is that I haven't been able to write posts on links of interest. So I will regretfully simply have to give you this WaPo article, on how Latino churches are challenging "macho" norms in their community, without much comment. It's a good piece, but far too short for my liking.

Liberty U Thinks About Jews

Liberty University has established a "Center for Judaic Studies". Oh joy. They say that the purpose behind the establishment was so that their Christian students could understand how important the modern state of Israel is to Biblical prophesy.

I see.

Look, I'm willing to argue that as a Jew I want to be considered "useful" from within Christian theological frames. But that's not all I want, and I don't see any indication that LU's new center plans on engaging with Jews qua Jews in any substantive manner that doesn't replicate their pre-existing biases. Using us only as tools for your own worldview is kind of obnoxious, don't you think?

Who is Against Bristol Palin?

CNN reports that evangelicals are rallying around Bristol Palin. And I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad that nobody is portraying her as a slut or whore. I'm glad that the evangelical community is reacting to the news with compassion given that they believe her to have engaged in what they see as immoral behavior, and I hope that they would demonstrate that compassion to all other women who have engaged in similar behavior -- both on a micro-level (in personal relations) and a macro-level (in terms of public policy).

And I, along with everybody else who identifies as pro-choice, respect her choice to keep her child. That is, of course, implicit in the definition of "choice". Assuming (as seems reasonable) that this was not a planned pregnancy, I wish that she had access to contraception and birth control so that she did not become pregnant before she was ready (I feel like it is a fair assumption that she received a pretty strong pro-abstinence message from her family). And if she did use contraception and it failed, then I hope that she had a full array of options presented to her, and that she made a free and independent decision about her future. And yes, I hope that she made it in consultation with her parents, not because I don't respect her autonomy, but because I hope that all teenagers feel safe and comfortable in discussing such weighty matters with their parents. It is a blessing that Bristol did appear to feel secure in talking to her parents about this. Many teens do not have that in their lives.

So when evangelical leader Richard Land says this:

"This is the pro-life choice. The fact that people will criticize her for this shows the astounding extent to which the secular critics of the pro-life movement just don't get it," Land said in a statement.

I am left perplexed. Who is "criticizing" Bristol Palin? At absolute worst, it is a data point for the proposition that abstinence-only is an insufficient reproductive health message for teens. But even that argument hasn't really cropped up. At Feministing, they note that insofar as Bristol had a "choice" on whether to keep her child (a point the McCain/Palin campaign emphasized to the press), that's a choice McCain and Palin want to take away. But again, that's not a criticism of Bristol -- that's a request that the right she had over her own body be extended to cover all women.

And certainly, nobody is saying that Bristol is a bad person. Those of us on the left don't even think that she did anything wrong, in a moral sense. We may suspect that she had insufficient access to reproductive health products or information, or that she may have felt uncomfortable using them. But that's hardly her fault.

It is all very simple. We on the left (like, I assume, our friends on the right) want every pregnancy to be a planned pregnancy. Assuming this pregnancy was not planned, then that is unfortunate, and we would like to see young women like Bristol have all the resources they need to prevent it from happening. But once the unplanned pregnancy occurs, we also want Bristol to be in a position where she can choose, in consultation with those close to her, what outcome she feels is right. Insofar as Bristol engaged in that process, and elected to keep her baby, that is a success story. And don't let anybody tell you the left feels otherwise.

Huckabee's Catholic Problem

I've always kind of assumed the deep divisions between (conservative) American Catholics and Evangelicals had mostly healed by now. But maybe that's due to my stance as an outsider: as a liberal Jew, it's difficult for me to differentiate between various conservative Christian sects from each other. This also might lead me to pervasively underestimate the amount of anti-Mormon sentiment Mitt Romney faces. He's conservative (today, anyway)! He's Christian! What more do you folks want?

And so, it appears my instinct might be mistaken. Running some numbers on the Iowa caucuses, Philip Klinkner finds that Huckabee has a serious Catholic problem. Despite his statewide victory, he ran into serious trouble in Catholic counties, who went strongly for Romney. I guess I have to ask whether or not the data is skewed by non-Catholic (and evangelical-heavy) areas just went hard against Romney because he's Mormon (while Catholics were less disposed to be automatically biased against him), but to my poorly trained eye it looks like Klinkner separated those variables out. Debaser raises the possibility that Catholic concentration in urban areas presents a confounding variable, which seems a legitimate point. But it wouldn't surprise me if Huckabee was at least underperforming among Catholics.

As Matt Yglesias points out, if true, this represents a problem for Huckabee. Catholics are the paradigmatic case of a voting bloc that is sympathetic to social conservatism but also likes their government programs. It's his platform personified. If he turns them off, he's going to have trouble making any serious progress in the general.

An Inconvenient Truth

The FRC, looking at new polling data on the political affiliations of young White evangelicals, notes that while this generation of evangelicals is less likely to identify as Republican, they are in some ways more conservative than their older peers (I imagine they are less so in other ways--the war in Iraq, I suspect, has soured a great many on the GOP foreign policy ideology). But the FRC seems peeved about the way one question on abortion was phrased:

For example, 70% of young evangelicals favor "making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion" (by the way, this is a particularly noxious phrasing of the issue as it frames a pro-life position as creating difficulty for women), whereas only 55% of older white evangelicals have the same view.

Umm...the "pro-life" position does create a "difficulty for women" -- it makes it more difficult for them to get abortions. To be sure, this is a burden that the FRC wants to impose on women, but that doesn't make it any less accurate. There is simply no way to characterize this phraseology as "noxious" without a hyper-developed victim complex (which, to be fair, is something we already knew the FRC possessed in abundance).