Now, back to unnamed Republican lawmaker who thinks his party isn’t to blame. The frightening thing is, he probably believes it. When people hold certain ideological beliefs strongly enough, no amount of facts will get in their way. If you believe that the current deficit is the result of excessive government spending (passed by Democrats, even though they only controlled Congress and the White House for four out of the past thirty years*), no pile of charts will be big enough to convince you otherwise — just like if you believe that tax cuts increase tax revenues, that the deficit has produced high interest rates, or that Barack Obama was born on Mars, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise.

This is just fine if you are my daughter, who is four years old — although, actually, she admits it when she makes a mess (and helps clean it up). But if you are a legislator in the most powerful country in the world –and the one whose debt is the definitionally risk-free asset against which the yield of every other financial asset in the entire world is measured — it’s not good enough.

(Via The Baseline Scenario.)

Ideology is idiocy.  I can’t say that enough.

“So why is it that I have been disdainful of the Tea Party from its first manifestation in early 2009? The main reason is that so many of its members simply don’t know what they are talking about; they seem to think that strong opinions are a substitute for facts, research and analysis. Consequently, many Tea Party members hold views on various topics that are, frankly, nuts, and these views have been embraced by some Republican voters as well.”

(Via Capital Gains and Games | Washington, Wall Street and Everything ….)

Precisely.  I have nothing but contempt for Tea Party politics which to date, as far as I can tell, have been a foul mixture of screaming, hate, stupidity and anger which are neither reasonable nor respectable.  You can’t govern that way, nor do you deserve to.

Kevin Drum:

Whos Being Serious Here?, by Kevin Drum: Paul Ryan has taken to asking if President Obama is ‘an Erskine Bowles Democrat or a Nancy Pelosi Democrat?’ Well, if this is the best that Bowles can do, I guess it makes Obamas choice a lot easier:

….Mr. Bowles had harsh words for fellow Democrats. He dismissed the idea that raising taxes alone might help erase the deficit, saying ‘raising taxes doesnt do a dern thing’ to address health care costs that are projected to be a big driver of future fiscal problems.

If theres anything that could be called a wonkish consensus on the left, its this: we should eliminate the Bush tax cuts in a couple of years when the economy has recovered, and we need to rein in the long-term growth of healthcare costs. Its true that taxes dont address healthcare costs, but its just sophistry on Bowles part to put it like that. Taxes do address the medium-term deficit, and thats important. Quite separately, PPACA makes a start on holding down healthcare costs and thus addressing the long-term deficit, and I hardly know anyone on the left who doesnt agree that more needs to be done.

…Jon Chait has more on this, including a more detailed takedown of Bowles own proposals for healthcare, which are almost laughably inadequate.

I think we make a mistake by talking about this as though the goal of Republicans is actually deficit reduction. Its not, the goal is a reduction in the size of government and once you understand that, its clear why Republicans will not support tax increases of any kind. Theyd rather cut taxes now (and argue its about jobs or long-run growth rather than ideology), and increase the deficit even more because they still believe the beast can be starved. Anything that increases the pressure to reduce spending will be embraced, anything such as a tax increase that might allow the government to grow larger will be opposed. Logic about the best way to close the deficit wont win this argument because it has little to do with the deficit itself.

(Via Economist’s View (Mark Thoma).)

“And here we reach the limits of my mental horizons as a neoliberal, as a technocrat, and as a mainstream neoclassical economist. Right now, the global economy is suffering a grand mal seizure of slack demand and high unemployment. We know the cures. Yet we seem determined to inflict further suffering on the patient.”

(Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands.)

Political ideology trumps technocratic know-how.  In other words, non-professionals think they know more than the pros.  And we know where that leads.

Family budgets aren’t economies.  The government is not our parent nor does it fund the workings of the economy.  Yet we keep repeating that damn fool “tighten our belts” meme.  The price of ignorance, sophomoric ignorance at that is high.

Recently, I was taken to task about the morality of homosexuality and how the Bible “clearly” teaches it’s practice is a sin.  Frankly, I never believed that and having other priorities chose not to bother examining the issue other than cataloguing some verses.  Other things are important to me in my faith journey.  But given all the proud bigotry surrounding so-called “gay marriage” and the civil rights of LGBT persons I’m seeing, I decided to give it a look see.

What the Word Is Not: A Golden Calf

As a Catholic, I come from a faith tradition that recognizes human tradition (sometimes to a fault) in the organic relationship it has with reading the Word of God in the Bible.  Proper interpretation is known by its adherence to apostolic tradition, that is the tradition of understanding God as Jesus’ apostles do.  My Protestant brethren do not necessarily see this very well.  I have heard them quote Jesus as he quoted the prophet Isaiah in Matthew 15:9 or Mark 7:7 in criticism of my church: “In vain do they worship [God], teaching as doctrines human precepts.” (Of course, they neglect to read the previous two verses which speak of hypocrites who don’t love God and who only give lip service to him, but that’s another story.)  For my Protestant brethren, it’s the Word and only the Word and the Word says so!

There isn’t problem a problem with Sola Scriptura per se but often in my experience I see my brothers and sisters conflating the Word with their interpretations of the Bible and implicitly ignoring this fact, compounding that error.  What you hear is, “I believe in the Bible” or equivalently “I believe in the Word” (which strictly speaking is not true if there is an interpretation with which they disagree).  At that point they have forged a golden calf.  Belief becomes bibliolatry.  Simply reading the Bible is an act of interpretation inseparable from us and contains all our biases.  This is why I am deeply skeptical of any person who with any certainty claims to speak with God’s voice.  I am not speaking here of confessing one’s faith only problematic utterances that omit implicitly or explicitly the important caveat: “This I believe.”  

It takes discipline to give more than lip service to the notion that the Word is beyond our understanding and that we have but a dim view in God in the Bible.  We see through a mirror darkly.  It’s hard work to believe in something ardently and yet always open to change.  We instead want the quick fix, the emotional comfort that certainty through blind faith entails.  I am not immune to this.  So when we read the author of 2 Timothy writing in St. Paul’s name:

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Amen.  We can read into the verse that Scripture is all we need and get lazy about it.  We forget historical context is important.  What we are not often taught is that, at the time 2 Timothy was written, scripture consisted only of the Old Testament, the Septuagint as a matter of fact!  The Gospels had not been written yet, but were little more than disjointed oral stories and traditions about Jesus.  This verse is often used to make the classic appeal that the whole Bible refers to itself as the Word of God with no realization that in context, it did not.  If you ask the average Christian about this, they probably have no idea.  Theologians do.  Catholic priests do.  Seminarians do.  But rarely the folks in the pew do.  It’s problems like this that make talking about the Bible and its contents with my fellow Christians so difficult.  And this is just one tradition that goes unnoticed, invisible.

If I bring stuff like this up, I’m often met with all kinds of resistance, anger, name calling, etc.  My faith is questioned.  My love of Jesus is called into doubt.  My allegiance to Satan is implied.  Yet, all I’ve done is read the Bible as it is, in the context in which it was written.  People are invested in their traditions, they are loathe to give them up.  And that is a very human thing.  Again, I am not immune to this.  So I understand that it’s much easier to malign me or claim I’m in the thrall of all manner of delusions than to admit one’s cherished beliefs might be mistaken.

I say all this to say that things are not nearly as ironclad as is often asserted in the Bible.  God and his Word always seem to elude being boxed in.

What the Word Is: God’s Biography

So what the hell is the Bible?  For me, the Bible is to quote my Church, “the Word of God written in the words of men.”  It’s one of the central ways of getting to know God in the intimate, personal way Jesus said. A way that connoted the deep intimacy of sexual intercourse.  So, I cherish my Bibles, all of them.  They are sacred.  Not in some magical or superstitious way but in holiness, that is “set apart.”

And the Word is written in the words of men who were full human beings limited in time and space with personal beliefs, biases and understandings that are evident in the text.  That’s why the sky is a dome and the earth flat in Genesis.  This was the “scientific” understanding of its authors.

So when I go to Bible study, I have these facts in mind.  I’m looking for God to teach and correct and such but with the clear-eyed view that the Word is distorted by the words, by me.  Just as any biography can only scratch the surface of a person’s life and who they are/were or just as no words could ever fully describe my love for my wife and son, words as symbols fall short of reality.  And most importantly, symbols are not the reality.  This does not mean that symbols are less than reality.  Just as my Christian brothers are one with Christ as his body and represent him in this world, we are not Christ.  So too do I see the Bible and the Word.  It is deep intimate connection, not identity.  So I am very, very careful to separate the timeless from the time bound, the transcendent from the mundane, and frankly, the good from bad.

Homosexuality: “Clearly” a Sin

So let’s get back to “the gays.”  I want to be illustrative rather than exhaustive for the sake of brevity, but my main point can be applied to other parts of the Bible.  My point being that people who claim what the Bible “clearly says” is not so clear on further inspection.  Room for interpretation abounds.

First let me quote from the Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 6:9 in New Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition:

Do you know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived!  Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers–none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

and the New American Bible:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

(I love the word choice “practicing homosexuals” vs. sodomites. My church is PC.  LOL)  Sounds cut and dry doesn’t it?  I mean a sodomite is a sodomite.  But remember context.  This was a letter written in the Roman empire where man-on-man sex was deeply taboo because patriarchal as the Roman’s were, they couldn’t stomach a man penetrating another in coitus.  Men should penetrate lesser forms of human being, i.e. women and boys, since the penetrator is considered dominant.  Further, this fact is implicit in the footnotes for this verse in the New American Bible:

1Co 6:9(b) The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to catamites, i.e. boys or young men who were kept for purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world. In Greek mythology this was the function of Ganymede, the “cupbearer of the gods,” whose Latin name was Catamitus.  The term translated Sodomotes [This was rendered "practicing homosexuals" in the updated text but apparently the footnote was missed in my edition.]  refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. See similar condemnations of such practices in Romans 1:26-27; 1 Tim 1:10. [emphasis mine]

So we have important qualifying information about the biblical text.  Paul is literally saying that NAMBLA-esque pagan gay temple sex and those who engage in it are wrong and will not be part of God’s kingdom.  It is we  today who interpret and expand that to include, say, two men raising a family in a domestic partnership seeking to get married.

The Bible Reports: You Decide

And that is why I stand up for my LBGT brothers and sisters.  I believe such interpretation is wrong not because of bad exegesis (frankly it’s not) but because of the bigotry and hatred it engenders and gives joy to.  My Master teaches, “You shall know a tree by it’s fruit.”  The fruit ain’t good.  Because God is love and marriage is a public expression of love, to quote this verse to malign such between LGBT persons is proof enough for me that the interpretation is problematic at best, evil at worst.  We are supplanting our bigotry for the Word.  Not good.  Not good at all.

“It’s telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That’s because CRA didn’t bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA — or any federal regulator. Law didn’t make them lend. The profit motive did.”

(Via The American Prospect.)

“It isn’t, for instance, the fact that Sotomayor was raised in an era where government-backed redlining was still legal, it’s the fact that some students at Yale demanded a Chicano history course that’s the issue. Likewise, it isn’t the oppressive identity politics practiced by conservatives for the past 30 years that’s disturbing, but Sotomayor’s response to it. To be a true conservative is to be more disturbed by victimology, than actual victimizing. It is to claim to abhor evil–but to abhor the response to evil even more. It’s like in the NFL–it’s the second [guy sic] who throws the punch who draws the flag. “

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)

Great explanation of why conservatism is morally impoverished. Always standing against change necessarily means you collaborate with evil at some point. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” –Edmund Burke

“Conservatives and Republicans will disapprove of this effort. They will oppose it. Can they do so effectively?
Perhaps — if they can find reasons to obstruct and delay. They should do their best not to permit Obama to rush his agenda through this year. They can’t allow Obama to make of 2009 what Franklin Roosevelt made of 1933 or Johnson of 1965.”

(Via The Washington Post.)

How about offering alternative solutions? Oh yeah, you don’t have any that haven’t been offered! That’s when you know the GOP is completely bankrupt of any ideas. People are hip to the tax cut mantra since it did less than nothing to stop our current economic woes. (Quick note: Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.)

“In the meantime, if you want to keep up with the experts and their (sometimes quite technical) arguments for and against the stimulus plan, we suggest Krugman and former Clinton Treasury official Brad DeLong on the pro side and Becker and George Mason’s Tyler Cowen on the con side. The Atlantic’s new Atlantic Business page helpfully breaks down the experts’ arguments for the layperson.”

(Via FactCheck Wire.)

Check out both sides before arriving at an opinion.