The Dilettante's Dilemma

I was reading innocently along. I’ve been interested in school funding since the 1980s when I worked for an education planning agency in Oregon. I know how complicated it is; I know there are no perfect answers.

Even so, the alarm bells went off when I read this paragraph in an October 11 piece by Troy Closson in the New York Times.

“The new system has raised ethical questions. Is it fair, for example, for a girl with the same academic and behavioral troubles as a male classmate to be classified at lower risk, simply because girls overall tend to have better outcomes than boys?”

Here’s what the reference to “the new system” means. An AI program provided by a company called Infinite Campus combs through a huge amount of data [1] about students and calculates which are most likely to graduate without additional help and which will need more help—the “help” comes in the form of additional state funding.

As you would expect, the goal of the program is to used state money efficiently. Nothing wrong with efficiency, certainly. But the paragraph that startled me places efficiency and equity as potentially opposing values. Did Nevada really hire an AI program to determine the most equitable distribution of state funds? I’m quite sure they did not.

And how, exactly, would you determine equity in the context of gender? Is it fair, the cited paragraph asks, to spend less money on girls on the grounds that they are more likely than boys to graduate from high school.Well, let’s see. You could ask a program to propose a program that allowed equal numbers of boys and girls to graduate from high school. The algorithm would be inexact, but the goal would be clear. Is that—equal graduation rates by gender—what Nevada is trying to achieve? Certainly not.

This is a triage problem. If there were a catastrophic explosion with hundreds of victims and if the girls affected by the explosion were more likely to recover than the boys, would you give more medical attention to the boys? Of course you would. Is that fair? Nope? Does it save lives? Yup.

Now what?

I know there is no answer to this dilemma. You cannot simultaneously optimize efficiency and fairness. You can choose one or the other or you can try to balance one with the other, but you cannot optimize both. And, if you are a state school funding system, you also cannot say candidly what you are doing.

[1] According to the Times article, “It weighed dozens of factors besides income to decide whether a student might fall behind in school, including how often they attended class and the language spoken at home.”

There is a lot of day to go, but as I write this at 6:30 a.m., I feel that it has already been a success. Not an achievement, mind, but a day with rich satisfactions. Those wonderful feelings and the upbeat feelings about the rest of the day come from this paragraph, which is part of a column in yesterday morning’s New York Times by Princeton professor Robert P. George.

He is, according to his assessment in this column, a well-known conservative on a very liberal campus. Conservative students who feel they have been mistreated by various collections of liberals on the campus, come to him with their complaints. A good deal of the column is his advice to them. The rest of the column describes his notion of what a liberal arts education is all about and how he plays his part in that larger drama.

Here is the paragraph

Grievance identitarianism — be it of the left or the right — impedes the very thing a student is attending university to do: namely, think and learn. It turns a person into a tribalist, someone who, rather than thinking for oneself, outsources one’s thinking to the group.

First, I have never heard the term “grievance identitarianism” (hereafter, GI) before and I embrace it fully. To me, it means something like this: I have grievances and they are so central to me that I have organized my self system around them. There is a difference, as C. S. Lewis noted in his The Great Divorce between grumbling and being nothing more than a Grumble. I think that is what “grievance identitarianism” means to Professor George.

And I think, further, that it does what he says it does. As I see it, Professor George makes three conclusions in that paragraph. The first is that GI it impedes thinking and learning. Of course it does. A grievance is a support-seeking missile. If a finding is about the right topic and if it provides support for the issue to which you have attached your grievance, then it is golden and is to be embraced without restraint.

Notice that there are two tests there. The first is the test of salience. If my grievance has to do with social class, for instance, and the data on offer have to do with race, I just keep walking. I don’t reject it; I am just not interested. I am searching for information that will support what I am angry about; I just don’t care about the other stuff. The second is the test of effect. Given that it is relevant, does it support the case my grievance requires/allows me to make?

Notice that neither of these tests supports open inquiry, much less disinterested learning. When Professor George writes the best pro-life argument he can and then assigns the best pro-choice (anti-life?) argument he can find, he is promoting open inquiry. The students will feel it is a burden to have to read both. Even at Princeton.

The second of Professor George’s conclusions is that GI turns the student into a tribalist. What he means by that is that he “outsources his thinking to the group.” “Tribalist” means a good deal more to me than that, so I am going to treat this as two effects, rather than one, as the column does. There are three potential benefits to tribalism. The first is that the other members of your tribe believe in the same thought structures you do; their world has done them wrong, just as yours has.

The second is that there is a great deal of emotional support from the tribe. It isn’t just that they have the same views; they also have the same emotions about those views. We deeply resent this and wholly support that and are sure we are being disrespected by our opponents. The third is that when there is work that needs to be done—projects that are directly implied by our shared grievance, there are colleagues to do that work with.

What I am calling the third effect is that a GI “outsources his thinking to the group.” By that, I mean more than having access to people who will agree with my beliefs and my feelings. I mean that these people, my fellow grievants, are the source my my thinking. They provide from one time to another, the data I count on; the cause and effect logic by which I connect one issue to another; and the actions that are clearly implicated. It is not that I could not have come to those conclusions by myself; it is, rather, that I never have to. My philosophy is right there on the tribe’s library shelf. It’s all plug and play for me.

Professor George is lamenting the prospect of teaching students whose attention is so directed and whose emotional commitments are so volatile. I sympathize. Thinking carefully and drawing tentative conclusions is an acquired taste. But the university is where those tastes are supposed to be acquired. It is hard to think where else it could happen and if it is going to become a habit of mind, it is going to have to start early and it is going to have to be confirmed by friends and enemies.

I mean, here, only to celebrate the expression “grievance identitarianism” and to offer Professor George my thanks for doing the work he does. All of us benefit from that work, even those who oppose the conclusions he draws.

I have resisted the word “pronatalism” for quite a while now. On behalf of the clarity of the language will all use and on behalf of all the people who want to talk reasonably about political issues, I am leery of words that don’t have natural opposing terms. No one is “anti-choice,” for instance; or “anti-life” and that makes their common opposites unhelpful.

That is the way I have been thinking of “pronatalism” until this morning, when I read this sentence in Victor Kumar’s column in the New York Times.

“But right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response.”

For me, there is a lot to like about this sentence. First, it distinguishes the condition to which some people response with policies that are called pronatalism. What conditions are we talking about? Second, Kumar distinguishes between the response to these conditions and the “packaging” of the response. It is not hard to imagine that the response might be perfectly valid even if the “packaging” is unfortunate. Furthermore—second and a half—it is a very common experience to be in conversations in which everyone has stopped at the packaging level and no one is dealing with the condition.

That’s quite a lot to like.

The condition Kumar is dealing with is depopulation. It is a substantial problem for reasons he deals with in his column, but his point is that right wing politicians have taken over the issue and “packaged” it in ways that are consistent with their own ideology. This packaging has made the issue so distasteful to progressives that they have simply left it alone.

Not only that, but quite a number of liberal western nations in Europe are adopting measures to deal with this issue and are finding very little success. The exception seems to be France, for reasons that are worth paying attention to. France has adopted, according to Kumar, “national policies that provide parents with financial benefits like tax breaks that scale up with the number of children in a family.”

It is not hard to ridicule such a policy as “paying people to have children.” My own inclination is to make having children a more attractive prospect and I say that with no idea at all how to do it. But if young people are foregoing children because of the economic penalties associated with it, it does seem reasonable to reduce the penalties so that those who want children will choose to have them.

Ridiculing the policy as “paying people to have children” is an excellent example of “responding to the packaging” and paying no attention at all to the underlying issue. The fact that it was my own first response is sobering.

Politics in the United States is never what you think it is going to be. It is a system put together out of the remnants of half a dozen yard sales. It is made up of completely weird compromises between two positions, each plausible, but not acceptable for some reason. Oddly, it turns out that it fits us pretty well.

We seem to have been able to survive the maldistribution of electoral votes. There are active urban majorities and the rural minorities serve as a kind of cultural safety net.

So far, we have been able to survive the ideological integrity of our major political parties. Who would have thought it? The balance of each party—largely demographic—came at the cost of unconscionable compromises within each party. Our liberals sacrificed their principles to show our good faith to our conservatives and thereby keep our party electorally competitive. And so did yours.

But the parties traded their junior partners like NFL teams trading draft picks and we came up with parties that had ideological integrity; coherence. At least for a little while. A bunch of liberal (ish) Democrats over here; a bunch of conservative (ish) Republicans over there. A small crowd of Undecideds and None-of-the-Aboves in the middle.

But the party system that amazed us all by being strong enough to want very different things so long as all the wants were positive, turned out not to be strong enough to contain hatred. When no goal my party has is as strong as my wish to see the other party destroyed, we have reached the outer limits of our fabled political resiliency.

Robert Reich has captured this in his retelling of an old Russian story. Two peasants had been neighbors and poor for a long time. Then one had a stroke of good fortune and was able to buy a cow. A whole new economic future awaited him. The other neighbor prayed urgently to God to save him and meet his needs and God appeared and said He would do whatever the poor peasant asked. The peasant’s choice? “I want my neighbor’s cow to die.”

As a kind of democracy—imperiled, but not yet disowned—we stand at a point where we must ask for what we truly want. We have luxuriated for so long now in what we do not want that it will be a strenuous test.

It is sobering to remember that one of Hitler’s best used tools was reviling the liberal democratic government of Germany. In the early years, when Hitler could not credibly promise the volk of Germany anything to make their lives better, he offered them hatred of the Weimar Republic and he offered himself as the personification of their hatred. Had the Germans of the 1930’s kept the strength to bend their efforts toward what they wanted Germany to be, their future would have been much different from what it actually became.

And I think that can be said now of us. Whatever work and sacrifice we are called on to endure, if it is in order that we may achieve something we truly desire rather than simply to vent our hatred on those who want something else, I think we can achieve it.

President Biden announced today that he was going to “step down” as a candidate for the presidency in the 2024 elections. He named Vice President Kamala Harris as his choice for candidate of the Democratic party. We’ll see. The Democratic party should choose who its candidate will be, however much they love Joe Biden. And however fully he has earned their love, he has not earned their voice. Only one of the candidates for president has openly said that he, alone, is the voice of the whole party. It is not Joe Biden.

I hope the Democratic party chooses Kamala Harris as their nominee. I hope just as ardently that they do not cede this decision to their elder statesman as his price for having stepped down. That is too high a price.

The quadrennial yard sale will pick up its signs any hour now. Many things will go back to normal. The U. S. political system, cobbled together out of historical scraps, will have another chance to work.

We should know soon.

I have long come to terms with the idea that my life is not going to last forever.  I have not given any thought until today to the idea that my marriage is not going to last forever either.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that I thought it would; I just never thought about it at all.

In my running years, I ran a lot of road races; 10K mostly.  I ran enough of them to notice the point in the run when I stopped thinking about carefully saving enough resources to finish the race (very conservative) and began to think about using up the resources I still had by the time I crossed the finish line (very radical) [1]  So there have been, active in how I think and how I feel, the conservative maintenance of resources for the early phase and the radical spending of resources in the later phase.

So…for a happy marriage, when is “the later phase?”

I have always imagined without actually thinking about it that my marriage to Bette would end when one or the other of us died.  But that is like thinking that the race is over when you die.  What happened to that later phase where you wonder just why you are saving resources that could be spent to improve your performance in the race? You want to have a time to be proud of, don’t you?

So now I am thinking about it.  Bette and I are old.  Granted, I am a good deal older than she is, but, in all fairness, we are both old.  The marriage—which we count from the first date, not from the exchange of vows—will be 20 years old this coming January.  If I am not in the “later stage of the race” now, when on earth will I be?  And if the behavioral consequences of that category—use it now!—are to be put to any good use, when is that little light going to come on or that little bell ring that will signal that it is time to change tactics?

That is what is at stake in the seemingly innocuous idea that occurred to me this morning.

So imagine that for some reason you need for a visitor to conclude that you have a fantastic marriage.  If you have watched the range of TV shows I have, you will have no trouble coming up with a fantasy episode in which there will be a visitor for…say…a week and you need for the visitor to leave thinking that the two of you have the best marriage ever seen.  That’s the goal.

Now imagine what you would do to create that impression.  After all, it’s only for a week.  And there is no need to create impressions that are false.  You just need to shift over from the cast of mind in which you stop “ thinking about carefully saving enough resources to finish the race (very conservative)” and change to a cast of mind in which you “began to think about using up the resources [you still have] by the time [you]  cross the finish line (very radical). That change of awareness ought to do the trick.

See how that works.  The marriages I see where I live and the way I see my own marriage most of the time, is under the “save the resources” model.  The investments in the marriage need to be…oh…”sustainable.”  That makes a great deal of sense under the conditions that I called, above, “conservative.”  But this fantasy of trying to impress someone who is here for a week is like the finish line scenario.  Clearly, the things you want to do to impress this someone are not “sustainable.”  Are they?  On the other hand, the finish line is looming—or in the realistic case of our lives the finish line “might always be looming”—then sustainability is the wrong criterion.  “Use it all” and “what were you saving it for?” are much more appropriate.

As I finish this little thought experiment, I have no concrete ideas about what moving to “unsustainable” levels of investment in my marriage would look like.  They would require considerable information about what the marriage was really like.  They would require a clear commitment to honor the self you know yourself to be.  Still, you don’t have to do it forever.  Just until one of you dies.  

Cool, huh?

[1]  There is, of course, no reason why you should want to be exhausted at the finish line.  On the other hand, I never found a reason why I should hoard resources that will replenish themselves almost immediately, given adequate hydration and rest.  Might as well use it all, I thought.

I have a word I would like to share with New York Times columnist Pamela Paul. The word is “monolatry.” It is not as well known as “monotheism” but it is crucially necessary in Old Testament studies.

Here is a quote from Pamela Paul’s column in this morning’s New York Times:

“And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true god.”

“No other gods?”

The idea of monotheism is that there is one god. One God? That is certainly what the apostle Paul had in mind when he assured the sophisticates in Corinth that there was actually only one God and the others were all fakes. It is not what Moses had in mind when he passed along the tablet that says, “no other gods.”

The Moses position is that there are lots of gods. Every nation has one focal deity and many have a whole choir of them. Perfectly fine. However we—the Israelites—are to worship our God.

You can say all the great things about this God that you want to say. God created the world; God is the source of all life and of all virtue. And then you place those claims by saying, “for us.” These claims are all part of our story of the world. We understand that they are not part of your story.

That is why the little-known word “monolatry” is so useful. WE worship this God. There is no other God for us. Worshipping any of the other gods—notice the reference to other gods in the commandment—is wrong for us.

Pamela Paul’s point is that the Christian Nationalists are appealing to “Judeo-Christian values” as the norm for the whole nation. The “we” in “we worship this God” is, in their view, all Americans. But if it relies on the Ten Commandments as the source of her notion of monotheism, it will crash of its own weight.

The word that will destroy it is “other.”

And happy independence day. The Declaration of Independence has been voted on and established for two whole days already. Let’s get that sucker signed today.

I just finished reading a survey of opinions on forgiveness put together by Christina Caron, who writes about mental health issues for the New York Times. She, and the experts she cites, are looking at forgiveness as a tool. I am taking one further step back. I am looking at this genre as a tool.

To do this, I am going to imagine that Ms. Caron has all the resources she might need to examine the issue and that she has chosen some and not others. Of the resources she has chosen, she has passed along some parts of what they have provided, and not other parts. I know this will sound like a criticism, but it is not. I am looking at the broader issue—forgiveness—and using Ms. Caron’s choices as sign posts.

Here are three things I learned, reading this column as an example of the genre. I learned that forgiveness has nothing to do with God. A lot of people, myself included, have come to the question of forgiveness, with this logic: you owe a massive debt to God and he has forgiven you, so by what right do you refuse to forgive a fellow human who have transgressed against you. Sound familiar?

Note that in this formulation, forgiveness is not a strategy. It is a good of its own and it is something you are obligated to do. It is crucially important that God forgive you. God will not forgive you unless you forgive your neighbor. Forgiveness is therefore always the right thing to do. Nothing you can discover about forgiveness will change that status. You can discover that it is costly beyond imagining; you still must do it. You can discover that it is ineffective; you still must do it. It is RIGHT and you will be punished if you do not.

None of that makes sense, of course, if forgiveness is a tool that is best used for some purposes and that need not be used at all if the cost is too high.

The second thing I learned is that forgiveness is something you do alone, unless, of course you count counselors and authors as ways of not being alone. Nothing against the counselors, but it is very rare that there is an offense against you that does not also affect others, sometimes many others. Because in this view, forgiveness is something you do with reference to yourself alone, there is no consideration of whether the others who are involved or who care about how the issue affects you should be part of the act [1] of forgiving. The participation of these others need not make them part of what Susan Schapiro calls “the blanket forgiveness industry.” If they are part of the community of people who are affected, it is reasonable to think that they might helpfully be part of the process of forgiving or of choosing not to forgive.

Before I leave this point, I would like to pause to note the little sting in “the blanket forgiveness industry.” Usually a discussion has been going on for awhile before a category of villains is needed; and it is a separate step to label the people who are pushing the wrong strategy as an “industry” or a “complex.” In Schapiro’s view, the forgiveness discussion has arrived at that point.

If the person who has been wronged is part of a community—even if it is only a community that has coalesced around this grievance—then there are other options. You would not have to manage all the necessary resources alone if the community could ask: a) what shall we do? and b) how can we help? [2] Taking this article as indicative of the whole genre of such writing, I would learn that engaging such a community is not to be considered.

Finally, I learned that there may be effects on the aggrieved person that are valuable and worth pursuing. Forgiveness is now a strategy and we can ask the old familiar questions: what will it cost and what will it get me? Here are some possible benefits cited in the article

Frederick Luskin says that the eventual goal is “to be at peace with your life.” Such a goal enables you to consider all the forgiveness options in the light of whether they produce this attitude in you.

Ms. Caron includes the four values included in this summary.
“Some studies suggest that forgiveness has mental health benefits, helping to improve depression and anxiety. Other studies have found that forgiveness can lower stress, improve physical health and support sound sleep.”

Obviously these are values that can be assessed by the person who has been offended. What has worked for me? Should I keep trying it. Would something else work better?

In fact, Rosana Bakari sees it as part of the process of empowerment. Forgiveness should leave you more in charge of your life and better able to act on your own values. And you are the one who assesses the strategy to see whether it does.

Conclusion: if this column is a good example of the genre—which I take for granted—then we can learn a lot about our options when we have been wronged. And we can make sure we do not become part of the blanket forgiveness industry.

[1] Or the process. That’s one of the issues, but it is an issue that is discussed in the article.
[2] “We” is the first question includes you. In the second question, it includes everyone else, but not you.

My career has obligated me to hear a lot of commencement addresses. None, I will say, quite like this one. As a tennis fan, I’ve always found it easy to like Roger Federer and it would not have been hard to imagine that if he were called on to give a commencement speech, that it would be something like this.

You will not be surprised to learn that his speech had three points. Here they are:

“Effortless is a myth.”
“It’s only a point.”
“Life is bigger than the court.”

If you take the trouble to transplant those simple remarks to a tennis career, you will see immediately how he used them. It is how he used them that most interested me. Here are some illustrations.

First:
I’m happy to be here! Happy to be with you, here on the Green. As you might have heard… grass is my favorite surface.

Second:
Today, I want to share a few lessons I’ve relied on through this transition. Let’s call them… tennis lessons.

Third:
But talent has a broad definition. Most of the time, it’s not about having a gift. It’s about having grit.

Fourth
In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%.

In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play. When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. You teach yourself to think: OK, I double-faulted. It’s only a point. OK, I came to the net and I got passed again. It’s only a point.

And finally:
Tennis… like life… is a team sport. Yes, you stand alone on your side of the net. But your success depends on your team.

Pretty good, I thought. I would have loved to have heard it live.

Every now and then someone makes a remark that crystalizes a lot of information that was just sitting there unpatterned and unnoticed. A remark like that happened to me recently. I was describing a nagging difficulty I was having with the ABC channel in Portland. Their by-line, the characterization they add to nearly anything about the station is, “KATU is on your side.”

I was complaining about this to my son Doug one morning and I said that the part of that designation that bothered me was the “sides” part. The way I hear it, it presupposes a stable opposition of interests. That is why there are “sides.” It stops a little short of saying that there is THEM and then there is US. It stops well short of saying who THEM is, so just who they have in mind by US is unclear.

What I was musing on in my conversation with Doug was that my mind seems to slide so quickly from the claim “We are on your side” to the presupposition, “There are sides and whatever side you are one, we are on that one too.” It was the “sidedness” of the claim that caught my attention.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “You always do that.”

I scarcely noticed at the time. We went on talking about whatever it was we were talking about. But it kept coming up in my mind and I began to catch myself treating other topics that way. Since then, I have been thinking, “Was he right? Do I always do that?”

Let me try to put the question in a way I will understand it better. A claim is made. The claim has presuppositions. I understand what the claim is but my attention is drawn to the presuppositions, or—to be fair—to one of the many possible presuppositions.

My daughter, Dawne, was recently in a conversation where she identified herself as “pro-choice.” A woman in the group “corrected” her. [1] The woman informed her that she should say “pro-abortion” rather than “pro-choice.” This part of me—the part Doug identified as characteristic of my thinking and processing of information—went immediately to “Really? This woman thinks that the right to choose and the decision to abort a fetus are the same question? Really?”

It seemed to me that you could make a decision about what decision was the right one or you could make a decision about whose decision it was to make. You could focus on the choice or on the chooser. Not both.

So now I am interested. I’d like to poke around in this question a little. If you are a regular reader of this blog, consider this an alert. There may be lots of these coming up.

It is at this point that, in fairness to the regular readers, I should say just what topics are going to be coming up. But, of course, I can’t do that. The sequence of events that would produce these blogs would be: a) a claim is made, b) I am drawn to the presupposition of the claim, and c) judge it to be an appropriate claim or not. That’s really it. In coming to some judgment about it, I am not going to be concerned whether the claim is valid. That’s a whole other matter. I want to look at the presuppositions and to the extent I consider the claim I want to see how the claim is derived from the presuppositions.

I got a real lift, some years ago, from Gordon Kaufman who was, at the time, a systematic theologian at Harvard. He was writing a chapter on “the divinity of Jesus” and his point was that the standard approach is to postulate what “the marks of divinity” are and to show that Jesus bears those marks. His question—the one that produced the lift for me—was this: How do we know what the marks of divinity are?” Or, more exactly, “Is there some other source of information we trust more and that we can apply to the matter of adjudicating the claims Jesus made?”

This topic has gone long enough and I have been clear enough that you know the question I am dealing with is not whether Jesus is “divine” or not. The question is how we would know. The minute Kaufman pointed out that the conventional method of establishing the divinity of Jesus requires another, a purportedly superior, source of knowledge, I heaved a great sigh of relief. My first reaction was, “He’s right.” My second one was, “Now I can let that question go.”

So we go, in ending this blog, from the question of whether he was or not to the question of how we would know if he was or not. That is the same shift I see in moving from “pro-abortion” to “pro-choice.” It changes the question. And it is the same shift I see in going from “on your side” to “why are there sides?”

We’ll see.

[1] Had the woman asked me, I could have told her that Dawne would not respond well to that.

The state of Louisiana intends to be at the forefront of a “growing national movement to create and interpret laws according to a particular conservative Christian worldview” according to journalists Rick Rojas, David Chen, and Elizabeth Dias. In a New York Times article published on June 21, they review a collection of laws the current governor, Jeff Landry, has signed but that were vetoed by the previous governor, Democrat John Bell Edwards.

I was taken, as I often am, by the language used to support and criticize these bills. According to the Times writers:

“Dodie Horton, the state representative who sponsored the Louisiana bill, said that having the commandments posted would allow students to ‘look up and see what God says is right and what he says is wrong’.””

Currently, the laws forbid discrimination on the basis of “religion.” I suspect that would not bother Rep. Horton, who sees these commandments as “truth,” rather than “religion.” When you start off with “God says…” you speak for citizens who have other gods, who have no god at all, and who are sure that no reasonable decision can be made on such questions. You also preempt Christians who are quite sure that when God said [whatever was said], God did not mean what you think was meant. I am drawn particularly to the commandment that says you shall not covet any of your neighbor’s property, including his wife.

Several civil rights organizations with a particular interest in church and state questions have issued a statement saying “Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools.” Note that what was “God says…” in Rep. Horton’s argument, has become “the preferred religious doctrine of some politicians” in the civil rights response. I liked especially the insertion of “preferred” in their critique. It adds another step away from the position they are opposing. “God says” has become “a religious doctrine” and even worse, “the religious doctrine they prefer,” as if other citizens “preferred” other religious doctrines.

Rep. Horton wants a war between God and sin to be waged in the public schools. The civil rights groups are pointing out that the “war” is between the doctrines I like best and the doctrines you like best and they are arguing that it is not the business of the schools to judge between my favorite doctrines and yours.

The Christian nationalists of Louisiana do have an advantage, however, that the ACLU and their allies do not have. They have an enemy. This year, that is more important than it has been in any year since I began paying attention to politics in 1960.

Here is Jason Rupert, formerly a state senator in Arkansas and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. “This is all born of the leftist culture war tearing down the fabric of the country, and we are saying, ‘Enough’.”

This argument strikes me as ingenious. In the first place, it identifies an enemy so familiar it needs only to be referred to to sound ominous. It is “the leftist culture war.” This is not a charge that would withstand persistent inquiry. The idea that a Christian sect has the right to force its theology onto public school children and that trying to protect the children is a “leftist culture war” is not an idea that is obvious to a neutral observer. Of course, it was not designed for neutral observers.

Second, it is the United States that is the victim of the leftist culture war. We know that because the effect of the war or, even better, the goal of the war is to “tear down the fabric of the country.” The “fabric,” just in case you were wondering, is not made up scrupulous secularity in the public schools. The fabric is God’s plan for America, which, I strongly suspect, it to make America Great Again. Just guessing.

Finally, this tearing down has been going on for a long time. We have tried being patient. We have tried being reasonable. Now it is time to say “Enough.” In this way, all these new legislative devices are really just defensive. They have been warring against America and we have been patient. Finally, our patience has run out and it is time to do something.

Those three emphases, tucked neatly in to Jason Rupert’s remarks, are rhetorically powerful to anyone who begins where he begins. He is arguing for the rightness of his movement. He is not trying to persuade leftists.