The War on Dairy

From the Washington Times, via the Freeman:

A yearlong sting operation, including aliases, a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and surreptitious purchases from an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, culminated in the federal government announcing this week that it has gone to court to stop Rainbow Acres Farm from selling its contraband to willing customers in the Washington area. The product in question: unpasteurized milk. It’s a battle that’s been going on behind the scenes for years, with natural foods advocates arguing that raw milk, as it’s also known, is healthier than the pasteurized product, while the Food and Drug Administration says raw milk can carry harmful bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria.

A sting operation. To stop whom? The Amish. From doing what? Selling milk.

*sigh*

Another Keynes vs. Hayek video

Here's a sequel to the first Keynes vs. Hayek rap anthem.



(Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc&feature=player_embedded)

These guys are good; I don't care what this guy says.

Finally, a hermeneutic I can get into

Thanks to Mockingbird for pointing out this wonderful article by Timothy Beal, though I have serious problems with the interpretation they give. (In particular, I've found that Mockingbird presents a pretty distorted view of reality by relentlessly filtering it through the "law" and "gospel" dichotomy. Because of this, I also think their critique of Beal falls flat.)

This article seems to have been written just for me:

For many potential Bible readers, that expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. If the Bible is God's perfect, infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you "what it really says." I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature.

In the midst of many discussions in which I feel sandwiched between the strident claims of atheists and the overly conservative claims of evangelical Christians, it's nice to hear someone say, as Beal puts so well,

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what's at stake, namely the Bible's credibility as God's infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably.

But you can't fail at something you're not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That's a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. On the contrary, biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating, and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere. Ultimately it resists conclusion and explodes any desire we might have for univocality.

Pragmatism and compassion: a pro-life perspective

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones has this to say about the ongoing abortion debate:

There is, of course, no logical reason why women who get abortions shouldn't be prosecuted for feticide if abortion really is murder. And they probably will be, too, if Roe v. Wade ever gets overturned, as LaBruzzo and his allies hope. After all, LaBruzzo has merely said a little more bluntly what lots of other anti-abortion have previously said more circumspectly: the only reason to exempt women from prosecution is that it would be hard to pass a bill that didn't. It's not that they don't think these women are murderers who ought to be in prison. They do. They just don't quite have the votes to make that stick yet.

I'm not sure if he's right on either point, but he could be. That's part of what makes the abortion debate weird for me. I don't think my position on the issue is especially "conservative," in the traditional sense, yet that's how the issue seems to line up in mainstream American politics. Sometimes these alignments get a little incomprehensible to me.

From my perspective, of course it makes sense not to prosecute women for having abortions, for the simple reason that both women and children are the victims. I think it was Frederica Mathewes Green who said something like, "A woman doesn't want an abortion likes she wants a car or an ice cream cone. A woman wants an abortion like an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg." And we can extend that metaphor fairly plausibly. If you see starving people resorting to cannibalism, do you prosecute them for it? Maybe there's actually something wrong with us, who let life go by without taking care of such desperate people.

It makes sense to me to prosecute abortionists, i.e. the doctors who perform abortions, who with full knowledge of the facts break the first rule of medicine: do no harm. They ought to endure the responsibility of providing a false solution to a hard problem. And while I am well aware that many women have abortions despite having full knowledge of the facts and despite having the means to choose otherwise, it would still make sense to determine laws based on the all too widespread disadvantages women have been given in this society.

The fundamental principle at work here is that laws are meant to protect the vulnerable. If both women and their unborn children are vulnerable members of society, then it is not inconsistent to suggest alternatives to holding women directly responsible for seeking abortions. And if this happens to be pragmatic, so much the better. My goal is to see more people live, not to achieve perfect abstract consistency in legislation.

A foundationalist moral philosophy?

Blogger Matt Zwolinski over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians has an article on how our emotions cloud our moral judgments. He writes specifically concerning the libertarian belief in open immigration. I appreciate his argument, since I'm inclined to favor his conclusions. But ultimately, I wonder about the merits of moral foundationalism, by which I mean the belief that all moral truth can be expressed in the form of consistent abstract propositions.

For instance, Zwolinksi uses this argument against critics of open immigration: "If we are justified in using men with guns to stop poor people from crossing the border, are we justified in using them to stop poor people from having children as well?" The argument being made is that both immigrants and newborn children fall under the same abstract principle: people should be free to live wherever they wish, so long as they do not infringe on the basic rights of others. Our sense of repugnance, Zwolinski argues, clouds our minds from seeing the same abstract principle at work in both cases, and thus we come to the wrong moral conclusion.

Another example he uses, perhaps just as provocatively, is an argument by Janet Radcliffe-Richards in favor of permitting people to sell their organs. If all people have the right to their own bodies to use as their own property, why should that not apply to organ sales? He applies the same reasoning to a string of other controversial issues: "Much the same, I suspect, could be said about objections to the legalization of certain drugs, for the repeal of laws against price gouging, for the toleration of sweatshop labor, and so on."

Easter Meditation

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father to and to your Father, to my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:11-18

This passage has made me cry, at least in recent years, every time I read it. As we heard this morning, it really is the most tender moment in all of the Bible: a woman restored to intimacy with the one man who gave her identity in a cruel world. In all of the gospel accounts, it is the women who see Jesus risen first. John makes this particular woman, Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the resurrection. Here is the woman who was once possessed by seven demons; Mary, who anointed Jesus' feet with costly perfume and wiped them with her hair. Gross speculation here probably causes us to shy away from the beautiful fact that Mary's love for Jesus was passionate and expressive. Here she is now at the tomb, crying alone, stooping in for another desperate look at the empty tomb. Here she is now, clutching onto Jesus so tightly that he has to say to her, "Do not hold on to me."

It seems in many ways crucial to this passage that Mary is a woman. Only a woman can have the same love for Christ which the church ought to have for him. The Lord has found his bride. Her tears are the manifestation of a fully realized faith, one which outshines the implicit rationalism of the male disciples--"for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead." The disciples returned home because they dismissed what they could not understand, leaving the hysterical woman to grieve alone. But Mary could not leave, not because she had some secret knowledge, but only because her heart burned within her. Love held her there, love which prefers the bitter agony of tears to the quiet contentment of reason. Surely she could not bring her beloved Jesus back with tears; but love needs no such justification.

Mary here represents faith; the male disciples represent skepticism. Indeed, in just a few more lines we read that Thomas will not believe "unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side." What is faith, then? Faith is a woman clinging to the man she thought she had lost forever. Faith is a vulnerable woman with no status or credibility announcing to the world of men, "I have seen the Lord." Faith is the epistemology of grace, which finds that which is worth knowing without earning it. Faith is the epistemology of love, which refuses to give up seeking the heart's desire. Skepticism, by contrast, is the approach of the powerful, the method of men who have status and credibility, the belief that righteous men have wisdom and foolish women don't. It is an epistemology which has no tears, but only resignation: we can only accept what is proven, and perhaps what is proven will never come.

Christian faith, then, is a feminine epistemology. The church is the bride of Christ. In her purest form, she has no status, no credibility, no presumption; she has only tears and a broken heart, followed by the beautiful sound of her master's voice. "Mary." That is the word which changes everything. The adulteress has been restored to her husband. Zion has been vindicated. A new creation has begun.

Christ does not denounce the skeptics; he calls them "my brothers." Christ, the Lord of the universe, calls men his brothers. Go to them, he says. Tell them what you have seen and heard. They are my brothers. It does not matter, as Matthew reports and as John elaborates in the story of Thomas, that "some doubted." They, too, are his bride, though "as yet they did not understand."

It is not for any of us to say which role we actually play in this story. Some of us are really skeptics even though we fancy ourselves faithful. Some of us are blindly faithful though we believe ourselves to be utter skeptics. Some of us look down on others for being too proud of their reason, and some of us look down on others for not having intelligence. In different relationships, the weak may become the powerful, or the powerful become the weak. We cannot identify ourselves as permanently fixed in an unchanging power structure. Perhaps, then, we can and we should identify with both the masculine and feminine, the skeptic and the faithful, in this passage. But the point is this: we all have a place in the story of Christ remaking the world, and that story is beyond human control. It is a story told first by those who were thought least deserving. I suppose that no matter how many times I hear it, I will never find it a simple matter to believe; but that is simply because I have not yet attained the wisdom of Mary's tears.

More on health care and bureaucracy

Dr. Donald P. Condit writes in The Detroit News:

The sugar-coated rhetoric from HHS cannot disguise the bad medicine in this part of the Affordable Care Act, which intends to bureaucratically cut as much as $960 million in Medicare spending over three years. This Obamacare prescription threatens patients, the physicians who care for them, and the common good.

The only clear winners are the consultants and lawyers busy trying to decipher this 429-page tome.

Medicare beneficiaries will be "assigned" to 5,000 patient-minimum organizations to coordinate their care. While HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius talks about improvement in care, the politically poisonous truth is that Medicare is going broke and ACOs are designed to save money.

The words "rationing" or "treatment denial" or "withholding care" are not part of her press release, but reading the regulations reveals intentions to "share savings" with those who fulfill, or "penalize" others who fall short of, the administration's objectives. The administration's talking points include politically palatable words that emphasize quality improvement and care enhancement when the real objective is cost control by a utilitarian calculus.

Read the rest here.