New Warhorn Media post by Brian Bailey:
4 Likes
Federal courts have philosopher-king status because of the history of race in this country, and the actions of federal courts to bring segregation to an end. The Supreme Court and its powers became unassailable. If you oppose its power it means you want to bring segregation back. You want to bring discrimination back. These are the arguments liberals use against conservative nominees.
The Democrats don’t have the votes to pack the court. Even if they did, I see a silver lining in it, much like you do. Trying to intellectually convince people to limit the Supreme Court’s power is impossible because racism is bad. It’s an unwinnable argument. But packing the Court will destroy its power. It’s the nuclear option. Don’t stop your enemy as he makes a strategic blunder.
Maybe we can’t win. But we might begin the self-destruct sequence.
Actually the godly say federal courts have Third Reich status because of the history of child-slaughter in this country and the actions of federal courts to promote this bloodshed of tens of millions of innocent and defenseless babies. The Supreme Court and its powers were obscenely abused to serve paganism and its rituals of child sacrifice. If you oppose its power it means you want to save the innocent from genocide. You want to bring the protection of our nation’s most vulnerable and helpless living at the margins of society back. These are the arguments the godly use against our federal courts and SCOTUS.
My memory goes back to the days of the Moral Majority, and I’ve concluded that the Moral Majority failed because the majority never was that moral. Railing against the Supreme Court has been a long-standing political tradition that’s accomplished nothing but getting social conservatives to vote Republican while receiving nothing in return. The reality is that the Supreme Court is not a collection of philosopher-kings but instead a group of people who are able to work out the logical implications of the moral system held by a large majority of Americans sooner than the average citizen can and are willing to push it out as policy a bit earlier than the average citizen is ready for. Fundamentally, the Supreme Court is a political institution that ultimately goes with rather than against the dominant moral system of the day.
That said, the strategizing of the original post misses the point. The only way the suggested reforms of the Supreme Court could be carried out is if there is a strongly principled pro-life majority in Congress. But a strongly principled pro-life congressional majority will only occur if there is a strongly principled pro-life majority of the electorate to vote them in. But if the majority of Americans became strongly principled pro-lifers, we would see the Supreme Court start issuing pro-life decisions with no need for congressional reforms.
Actually, how old are you? You’d have to be my age, but you’re not, right?
The moral majority failed maybe partly because they weren’t as moral as they presented themselves, but two other reasons.
First, because they focussed their leadership on getting the people of God belligerating with them, rather than producing fruit of righteousness starting in the church. Church flock holiness was not the focus of pastors, but “out there” which is precisely what’s been happening this last year. And this doesn’t mean I’m opposed to protest and calling civil authorities to integrity and justice. Not at all! But that without preaching to the consciences of one’s own flock is a fool’s errand. Let judgment begin IN the house of God. Listen to belligerators’ sermons and they are never to the conscience, repentance, and sanctification of their own flocks.
Second, like our legal code, the rulings of courts and rulers such as SCOTUS corrupt the populace, and back at the time of Roe v. Wade, especially the people of God. The Supreme Court is to be honored and so the church decided abortion must be fine. No one remembers this, but it’s what happened. Similarly with Obergefell. The reason we wrote The Grace of Shame was to expose and warn God’s people like you men here concerning the sea-change men like Moore, Mohler, Desiring God, and others were leading among God’s people following SCOTUS’s ruling. Have you men read the book? If you haven’t, sadly, you’ll think you don’t need to and understand me quite well without doing so, but actually you won’t get it. Only the Koop/Schaeffer expose (Whatever Happened to the Human Race films and book) woke Evangelicals, and the church today needs the same. Love,
3 Likes
No, I graduated high school in 1985. But I remember the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell as political players in the Reagan era.
That’s not how I would put it. Rather, the morality of the majority was not deeply rooted and thus unable to withstand the corrupting influences you mention. And I agree with you that nothing is going to change until, starting with the church, people become more concerned with righteousness and holiness than happiness and success.
Very right that the Supreme Court’s ruling advanced corruption among the people.
And that Americans, including Protestant Christian’s, deferred to the Court because of its prior history as “racial healer”.
Sorry, but no Evangelical anywhere cared the least about this. It was SCOTUS’s authority, governmentally, and not any moral authority, that led Evangelicals to accept and practice abortion, just as the courts’ decisions about Comstock laws and contraception decades earlier had led Evangelicals to accept and practice birth control. In the late sixties and early seventies, no Evangelicals gave a rip about blacks and racism. In the middle of the race movements, no one gave any love to Dad for his column calling out Bob Jones University for racism, arming their campus cops with submachine guns. Love,
Pastor Bayly,
I’m curious about this. My understanding was that the SBC, and possibly other somewhat conservative protestants were pretty comfortable with abortion prior to Roe.
The article linked below has the following quotes:
“In 1970, a poll conducted by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity and 71 percent in cases of rape.”
"A 1971 SBC resolution on abortion appeared to capture the consensus. It stated that “society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life.”
But the resolution added, “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”"
This is basically the language of Roe.
Those bad decisions you cite are based upon expansive 14th Amendment jurisprudence which began with the Warren Court’s decision in Brown vs Board.
Fifty years before Roe, the Supreme Court began using the incorporation doctrine to arrogate to itself the power to review state laws. Gitlow v. New York was a 1925 case that held the First Amendment Free Speech right was incorporated by the 14th Amendment due process clause. The Court used this erroneous basis to review the New York law, which it eventually upheld. The problem was the Court didn’t really have this authority under the 14th amendment. It just kept incorporating more and more of the Bill of Rights and purported to apply it more and more against the states, schools, and local governments.
Far from acting as racial healer, the Court’s forced bussing decision in 1971 to achieve de facto racial balancing (mandatory bussing of white kids to majority black schools and black kids to majority white schools) aggravated racial tensions and division. It wasn’t just the Southerners who were upset. The National Guard had to be called out to Boston to enforce federal busing orders in 1974. I can’t imagine urban Evangelicals were any more healable than Irish and Polish Catholics.
3 Likes
My use of “racial healer” was sarcastic. The Court’s meddling and improper use of the 14th Amendment caused a lot of damage.
My overall point is that popular desegregation decisions are tied up with the bad jurisprudence and expanded judicial power that gave us Roe vs Wade. That is part of why it has been so difficult for Roe’s opponents to overturn it. To overturn it you would have to touch on all kinds of other things in the unwritten civil rights constitution. This is just an observation.
Maybe I have missed the point. Still, I can’t think of a Biblical principle or narrative that teaches a national majority must repent before reforms are attempted or lives are defended. God seems to prefer using weak and insignificant people and at times “micro-minorities,” like Gideon’s army and Jonathan and his armor-bearer, to accomplish His ends.
In my reading of American history, I don’t get the sense a majority of antebellum Americans were abolitionists. The Lincoln-Douglas debates almost make it seem there wasn’t a majority of abolitionists in the Illinois Republican party. I don’t think Lincoln himself was abolitionist. (But it’s hard to tell what he really thinks based on what he says.) I’m not sure a majority of the North was abolitionist before Fort Sumpter was fired on.
In recent history, the Soviet Union suddenly crumbled to the ground. Pat Buchanan was a staunch anti-communist and had a front-row seat to American foreign policy in Nixon’s and Reagan’s administration. One of the last chapters in his 1988 autobiography covers the Soviet threat. There is no sense, unusual for him, that Buchanan has a clue what’s coming. To him, the Soviet Union, despite a setback in Afghanistan, with enormous muscle and resolve was rolling up gains in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. It betrayed no signs of impending catastrophic demise.
If there was a national Russian repentance preceding the Soviet Union’s fall, I’ve never heard of it. What I do remember from that time was Yeltsin standing on a tank. No, that wasn’t all that did it. But that was a chairos moment.
The people and their rulers have a reciprocal and iterative effect on each other. Is that too obvious a thing to say? The law, including man’s law, does have a teaching function. And at times a preaching function. Justice Kennedy’s opinions in Lawrence and Obergefell are actually sermons that, as Max Curell would say, “wax elephant.” The Supreme Court and its shifting cadres of personnel over the decades were doing more than anticipating with uncanny prescience where the country was moving. The Court manipulates, corrupts, prods, whips, oppresses, and depresses the people’s moral sentiment through its orders and its rhetoric.
This is not a Republican thing. I’m more than done with watching the quadrennial Republican morality play about electing presidents to maybe put solid justices on the court to maybe form a majority to maybe overturn Roe.
Congress has the whip hand already and needs to use it.
Fifty years before Roe, the Supreme Court began using the incorporation doctrine to arrogate to itself the power to review state laws. Gitlow v. New York was a 1925 case that held the First Amendment Free Speech right was incorporated by the 14th Amendment due process clause. The Court used this erroneous basis to review the New York law, which it eventually upheld. The problem was the Court didn’t really have this authority under the 14th amendment. It just kept incorporating more and more of the Bill of Rights and purported to apply it more and more against the states, schools, and local governments.
Far from acting as racial healer, the Court’s forced bussing decision in 1971 to achieve de facto racial balancing (mandatory bussing of white kids to majority black schools and black kids to majority white schools) aggravated racial tensions and division. It wasn’t just the Southerners who were upset. The National Guard had to be called out to Boston to enforce federal busing orders in 1974. I can’t imagine urban Evangelicals were any more healable than Irish and Polish Catholics.
7 Likes