Maybe everybody knows this story.
In a college sex-education class, the professor showed a film about the fertilization of an egg. The film showed a magnified view of a sperm swimming, its tail whipping behind it. The film also showed an egg. Then the sperm again. Then the egg again. The sperm. The egg. Suddenly, a woman cried out from the back: "Run, egg, run!"
But it turns out that the egg could have stayed safe by walking.
1. Fertilization and birth-control pills after sex.
It turns out that pregnancy, if it happens, typically doesn’t happen right away after sex. The tiny sperm has a long trek through a fallopian tube to find its bliss in an egg.
I didn't know this fact until recently. And it might not be widely known to the public. (I’m just guessing; in my sixth-grade class, the boys played outside while the girls watched a movie.) This maybe-widespread ignorance makes it easy to believe that two after-intercourse birth-control pills actually induce abortions.
The best known of these pills is called Plan B. Plan B and its generic versions are also known as "the morning-after pill". That’s a misnomer. They actually works up to 72 hours after sex.
There is also Ella. Ella works up to five days after sex. It’s known by some as "the week-after pill". Because it’s effective only up to five days after sex, maybe it should be called "the work-week-after pill".
2. Plan B, Ella, and abortion.
The federal Food and Drug Administration states that both Plan B and Ella work by keeping an egg from being released from the ovaries. So like other contraceptives, these pills stop the fertilization of an egg.
But the the FDA also states that Ella (but not Plan B) can stop a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus wall. If that were to happen, the egg would simply exit the woman’s body. Abortion foes typically claim that a fertilized egg is a human being and should be protected. So destruction of a fertilized egg would make Ella, to abortion foes, a means of inducing abortion.
3. Plan B, Ella, and the journalists’ integrity.
But it’s not clear what that conclusion about Ella and implantation is based on. According to the New York Times, officials responsible for the decision to claim that Ella stops implantation, or who are knowledgeable about that decision, refuse to be interviewed.
And according to the New York Times’s June, 2012 article:
It turns out that the politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion, a divisive issue in this election year, is probably rooted in outdated or incorrect scientific guesses about how the pills work. Because they block creation of fertilized eggs, they would not meet abortion opponents’ definition of abortion-inducing drugs.
According to the New York Times, the National Institutes of Health has revised its web description of how Ella works to reflect the best scientific knowledge. It no longer claims that Ella stops an egg’s implantation in the uterus.
Presently, the Mayo Clinic’s website says:
[R]ecent evidence strongly suggests that Plan B One-Step and Next Choice [the generic version] do not inhibit implantation. It's not clear if the same is true for Ella.
But The New York Times interviewed the Mayo Clinic’s physician in charge of its website. He says that the hospital is "chomping at the bit" to revise its website to conform with the best scientific studies; it only waits for confirmation from government authorities like the FDA.
The conservative Weekly Standard goes the other way. It touts the supposedly un-deniable truth that Ella causes abortions. It does so in a web piece titled "Obamacare Mandates (Free) Coverage of Abortion Drug".
The Weekly Standard sourcing is weak. Sources for their conclusion include partisans like The Family Research Council; or a Dr. Justo Aznar, an ethics professor at a Catholic university in Spain. It also cites the generic web source WebMD that parrots the FDA.
The Weekly Standard insinuates much from reliable sources like CBS, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. These sources, according to The Weekly Standard, say that Ella is chemically similar to RU-486, which does induce abortions. RU-486 and Ella have the same chemical agent, but RU-486 is twenty times more potent. That’s the difference between sprinkling salt on your steak and pouring salt into your mouth. Dose is everything. The Weekly Standard puts too much weight on too little information.
4. Abortion and Obamacare.
The Hobby Lobby is a major retailer. They say that they will defy the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to supply their employees free with contraceptives like Plan B and Ella. They explain that they believe that these pills produce abortions, and that abortion is an offense to God.
They
stand on solid ground as to how Ella operates as long as the FDA continues to agree with them, in apparent defiance of the best scientific research.Their ground for objecting to Plan B is more shrouded. But if they choose they could take cover under The Weekly Standard.
5. Love and consequences.
A lot rides on Hobby Lobby’s decision to defy the law. Defiance comes with a penalty to them of $1.3 million a day.
Hobby Lobby lost its lawsuit in federal district court to liberate themselves from having to pay for Plan B and Ella for their employees. They have appealed. In the meantime, they face the fines. The fines start on New Years Day, 2013.
They went to the court of appeal to suspend the fines pending appeal. The court of appeal turned them down. They carried their plea for relief pending appeal to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court also turned them down. Nothing now stands between them and the penalty for defiance of the law.
Maybe this is an acceptable price for their clean consciences.
I don’t understand these people.
That’s not a dismissive remark. I mean it sincerely. Maybe their love for the unborn is so deep that the money doesn’t matter.
But even if their assumption about how Ella and Plan B work is right, their love is a love of life in the form of maybe six-hundred un-differentiated cells. This life that they protect at great cost to their wealth has no fingers, no toes, no eyes, nor even discrete organs. To me, life in a form that so little resembles a human or any other visible creature, and which has no feelings or thoughts, is not lovable.
Alternatively, maybe they are not moved by love toward any undifferentiated group of cells, but by a tenderness toward God and a Godly desire for God’s will on earth. Maybe this love moves them to part with nearly half-a-billion dollars a year.
If they have such love, I need to learn at their feet. And if they cannot trace by words their spiritual minds upon mine, maybe they would pray for me to know the tenderness and fullness that they know. God would answer that prayer of such righteous men and women, and I would be lifted up by their prayers. I wish that were so because I crave prayers and would like to be lifted up.
I do not judge them because I do not know them. But I would be naive if I were to automatically reject the possibility that they did not act with love but with a religious legalism, a probity by which they judge others. And I would be naive if I were to automatically reject the possibility that their Christianity is infused with a hard-right sensibility that conflates the love of God with hatred of anything Democratic. I have seen such Christianity.
Or maybe they're like me. Maybe they make moral decisions with some mixture of love or fear of God, love of others, legalism, and ideology.
6. Science and relief from $1.3 million a day.
Hobby Lobby's difficulty is not only a religious difficulty. It is also a scientific difficulty.
Hobby Lobby says that it has no moral difficulty paying for ordinary contraceptives. It quarrels with Plan B and Ella because they believe that these harm fertilized eggs.
But as we have seen, the weight of science is against that position. Hobby Lobby could accept the clear consensus of science and the findings of the FDA as to Plan B. They could accept the emerging consensus of the latest findings of the scientific community as to Ella. If they did those things, Hobby Lobby could come to agreement with their accuser. They would not have to choose between their consciences and painful fines.
7. Climate change, crime statistics, and the casual disregard of science.
But good science is routinely rejected in America.
For example, there is a broad scientific consensus that human activity causes global warming. How broad this consensus is is stated by the National Science Foundation. They’re the body of scientists that turned forensic DNA testing from a crap-shoot that could convict the innocent into something highly reliable. They did that by examining the science of DNA testing and perfecting it.
Here’s what the National Science Foundation says about man-made global warming:
(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [finding that humans contribute to global warming], and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. ["Expert Credibility in Climate Change" (abstract) (2010).]
Yet the two-to-three percent of deniers, who have substantially less expertise, command broad attention among the American public and right-wing politicians and the fossil-fuel industry.
And, of course, the techno-thriller writer Michael Crichton wrote a novel that purported to demolish the idea of man-made global warming (State of Fear). His undergraduate concentration was anthropology, although he later got a medical degree (1969). If, as an M.D., he had written a book about home-surgery, it probably would have done less harm than his novel about climate change.
But for many, a techno-thriller writer matters more than the National Science Foundation.
Selective hostility toward science taints public judgment of other scientific conclusions. Economists Donohue and Levitt wrote a paper that studied the effect of legalizing abortion on crime. They concluded that legalized abortion leads to less crime, including violent crime, as the generations subject to legal abortions come of age.
This conclusion was attacked. I cannot say that it was attacked by fringe science; but Donohue and Levitt’s principal opponent on this issue seems to have abandoned statistics and embraced moral arguments. Steven Levitt’s article that summarizes his argument and answers his critics is linked below.
There is a lengthy reply to Levitt’s piece that purports to be by Levitt’s committed opponent, Steve Sailer. He waives at statistics and presses into the tall grass of child "wantedness" and other un-measurable concepts. He’s bold to argue based upon what is "pretty likely" and what is his "guess". He speaks knowingly about what "the educated assume". He describes facts as "pretty murky" and then makes assumptions about those facts.
Of course, as a reason for or against legalized abortion, statistics do not end the discussion. A moral argument can justly outweigh an argument based on utility. Sailer calls abortion a "pre-emptive death penalty". Someone might or might not agree with him, but the argument is fairly made.
Fair point or not, we shouldn’t despise science because we hate its findings.
8. The politics of science.
A definition of politics is "The often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society." (American Heritage Dictionary of English Language (fourth edition).) There is a politics of science. We war with each other in the media, in courtrooms, in classrooms, and in legislatures over science and its usefulness in particular cases. We choose direction for ourselves and our society based on the outcome of these wars.
9. Bearing the burden of the politics of science.
Sometimes, disregard of science has no personal consequence.
A person might or might not believe in evolution. But not believing in it usually has no consequences. I remember, from my youth, an argument with a high school science teacher about evolution. He didn’t believe in it. Still he taught science.
Sometimes disregard of science has grave personal consequences.
In my youth, I sat in on the trial of a couple, the Parkers, who did not get treatment for their son Wesley’s diabetes. They did not believe in medicine. Wesley died, and the jury convicted the Parkers of manslaughter.
Sometimes disregard of science has grave collective consequences.
Man-made global warming is affecting America. Any given storm or drought cannot be reliably blamed on global warming. But the mechanisms of global warming and droughts and storms are well understood by climate scientists. And if the public largely rejects the science behind man-made global warming, still we live with the consequences of the steady rise in temperature since the industrial revolution. These consequences exist, for example, in the form of crop-destroying droughts and deadly storms.
Sometimes disregard of science starts out as a burden on others and becomes a burden on ones self.
10. Hobby Lobby and the politics of science.
The last case is the case with Hobby Lobby. While they initially clung to an outdated understanding about the workings of Plan B and Ella, the consequence fell, potentially, only on their employees. An employee might have used poor judgement during sex, or used good judgement and suffered an accidental failure of a condom, or exercised no judgment because she was raped. Hobby Lobby has made it more difficult for them to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.
But the burden of knowing the science of these contraceptives has now shifted onto Hobby Lobby. That, of course, is where it belongs. Facing huge fines, Hobby Lobby probably should use its vast resources to get the best possible advice about how these contraceptives work. It would pay them to believe that advice.
11. Science and faith.
If I had to choose between living in a society where God was known and science was not, or a society where science was known and God was not, I know which I would choose. Others would make a different choice.
But it’s a false dilemma. I believe that ignorance of God is a hazard to anyone in any place at any time. To anyone in our nation in our time, I believe that ignorance of science can have consequences. But science and faith don't exclude each other. Most Americans believe in God, and they accept much science. They readily use techology, which is based on science.
12. Conscience and Country.
A time comes when conscience must oppose law. And a time comes when conscience must yield to the national will expressed in law. I once prosecuted a man for driving without a license. He considered it an affront to accept a driver's license. He thought driving was a natural right, beyond government dispensation.
I would have a problem if the law compelled an employer to pay for abortion. There is no wide agreement in society as to that. But relatively few people cling to the belief that contraception is evil.
I hope Hobby Lobby keeps their piety and learns science.
_______________________________________
The New York Times on morning-after and week-after pills:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/health/research/morning-after-pills-dont-block-implantation-science-suggests.html?pagewanted=all
The Weekly Standard on morning-after and week-after pills:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-mandates-coverage-abortion-drug_581969.html
Steven D. Levitt on legalized abortion and crime rates:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/
National Science Foundation on man-made global warming (summary of findings):
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract?sid=c4aba312-61f9-4189-a37d-6062a033a93b
What?! Apparently, not everybody in America is a Christian. And some of these so-called "non-Christians" have strong opinions. This takes my breath away, but did you know that sometimes they express these opinions? In the media and in courtrooms! And they get away with that!
Thankfully, Fox News is on the story. They published a piece about it on Christmas Eve. It’s called Beyond the War on Christmas.
1. I wish all of my friends were believers.
But seriously, to my non-Christian friends: I wish that you were believers. I do. Since I believe in God and I believe in heaven and in hell, I believe that it would be better if you knew God and he knew you.
2. When unbelief is better than belief.
But, here’s a little walk-back. I would rather that you didn’t believe than that you believed and harmed children. I would rather that you didn’t believe than that you believed and were hateful to your parents. I would rather that you didn’t believe than that you believed and loudly rejoiced about dead American soldiers and murdered children in Connecticut.
Because I believe that then to God your belief would make little or no difference. And your behavior would disgrace the Lord.
3. The perfect logic of unbelief.
And let’s be clear: if you don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that’s not fainting-spell illogical.
Jesus’s own family tried to restrain him because the crowds were saying that he was crazy. (Mark 3:21.) And those who knew him as he grew up and as a young man were generally unimpressed. ("‘Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?’ And they took offense at him." (Matthew 13:55-57 (NRSV).)
As the gospels point out, those who knew Jesus as he grew up and as a young man saw nothing that to them said God-is-with-us. (Although young Jesus was well thought of. (Luke 2:52).)
Yet you, my non-Christian friends, didn’t know Jesus before his ministry, so you don’t have that excuse to be unimpressed. But you might have a better excuse: you know us, your Christian friends.
4. We Christians are unimpressive to your detriment.
The hand in the glove of my wishing that my non-Christian friends believed is that I wish that my Christian friends were more Godly. (Not that any of them do the vile things that I talked about earlier.) I wish also that I were more Godly. Like, I wish I weren’t so selfish.
It’s true: Christians make rude, single-fingered gestures at other Christians on the freeway. We take advantage of others. We look out for ourselves, and we resent having to look out for others, especially if it’s not family, and sometimes even if it is. Our compassion fails. If I meet someone and he calls me "brother", my guard goes up.
Not to say that I have no tenderness toward my fellow believers. In my church, we have a custom in each service of greeting each other and blessing each other with the peace of God. I enjoy this ritual and feel blessed by it.
But of course, these people that I shake hands with, bless, and am blessed by are, for the most part, people who value their religion enough to attend worship every week. I’m grateful to worship in their company. They certainly aren’t Chreasters (folks who show up in church only on Christmas and Easter).
Still, weekly church attendance and gripes when someone says "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" don’t necessarily show that someone has more than a twisty, winded walk with God.
So I concede this: you unbelievers might have some logic and some facts on your side when you’re unimpressed with Jesus because you’re unimpressed with we Christians. And that’s because often we Christian ain’t all that impressive.
5. A pious defense, and its rebuttal.
Now, here I could say something pious like, "We’re not perfect, we’re just forgiven." But I suppose you’d have at least two retorts to that.
First retort: "Not perfect? Try [rude plural noun]!" And that’s right. The news is full of failed and predatory and too-falsely-pious Christians.
Second retort: "Not perfect? Why the hell not?" Fair enough. If Jesus is all that he’s supposed to be, why aren’t we all paragons?
6. Marines: a metaphor.
This issue reminds me of being young and with a young friend. We saw a group of three young, uniformed Marines. They were skinny. My friend said something like, "Those are Marines? I’m not impressed!"
Yet we didn’t know those Marines. We didn’t know their past. We didn’t know how the Marine Corps had shaped them for the better. We didn’t know their present. Just by looking at them, we didn’t know what they knew, what they were capable of. We didn’t know their future. We didn’t know what they would become, which most certainly was more than they were at the moment that my friend and I squinted at their physiques.
And we judged the whole Marine Corps by the three specimens in front of us. Certainly if we had studied Marine Corps heroes, or the history of the Marine Corps, or even if we had seen an example of a Marine who had excelled and thrived in his profession – that would have impressed us.
7. Marine Corps: standards.
Yet among Christians, there usually is less rigor than in the Marine Corps.
Because in the Marine Corps all recruits famously go through boot camp. They get a new vocabulary. They exercise. They learn skills like close combat, how to shoot. They learn all about their weapons. I haven’t gone through boot camp, but by wide reputation I know that it’s hard.
8. Christianity: flab.
But anybody can call himself a Christian who feels like it. By far most churches take whoever walks through the door and finds a seat.
And Christian discipleship isn’t very much. The Bible is our book, but few Christians have read it from cover to cover – never mind more than once. I suspect that our prayer-life is often weak, and so are other exercises through which God might shape us.
Our deliberate building of a relationship with God might be so lackadaisical that it’s a wonder that God has built what he has built in us. If our discipleship is lackadaisical, we might or might not hold onto these gains when trouble comes. Scripture is pessimistic about this.
And modern American Christianity teaches that entry into heaven is easy for all who confess Christ. This tends to sooth believers into a flabby Christianity. If we gain heaven with no effort, why make effort?
This teaching is a historically-recent blight on American Christianity. In a pastoral class I took, the professor told us about a wealthy businessman who was kicked out of the Presbyterian Church at the beginning of the 20th Century. He was kicked out because he claimed assurance of his salvation. The then-prevailing theology was that we may hope in our salvation, but heaven is not assured. I think that that’s the right way to think about salvation
Knowing the love of God is good and needful. But having no fire under us, so to speak, we Christians often let only our upbringing and the happenstance of life shape us – like almost everyone else.
9. Paragons show what’s possible with God.
The results of leisurely Christianity are what they are. But don’t judge God by leisurely Christians. Judge God by the more-than-mediocre Christians.
Judge God by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a German pastor and theologian. He was a pacifist. But he did not cling to his pacifism in the face of his anguish over the crimes of the Third Reich. He joined the plot to kill Hitler. The plot failed. He was arrested, imprisoned, and hanged.
Judge God by St. Francis of Assisi. He rejected his advantaged life as a wealthy heir. He lived in poverty to the glory of God, and he taught others to do the same. He founded the Franciscan order.
Judge God by Corrie ten Boom. Her father and her sister and she were Dutch under the Third Reich occupation of their country. They hid Jews in their home. There was a little Jewish baby who cried. No other rescuer would take the baby because he cried so much that there was great danger of discovery. Corrie ten Boom’s father considered it an honor to risk his life and the life of his daughters for the welfare of a Jewish baby who cried too much. Sadly, before the war ended, they were discovered. Of her small family, only Corrie lived to leave the concentration camp. She spent the rest of her time on the earth spreading the gospel.
Judge God by Sister Margaret McBride. She was excommunicated because, as a member of a hospital ethics committee, she and others approved the abortion that saved the life of a mother of four.
Judge God by Sister Rachele Fassera. In 1996 the raping, torturing, murdering Kony’s army kidnaped 139 Ugandan schoolgirls. Sister Rachele pursued them through the jungle on foot, caught up with them, and convinced the 200 cutthroats to release the great majority of the girls.
Few Christians are Dietrich Bonhoeffer or St. Francis or Corrie ten Boom or Sister Margaret McBride or Sister Rachele Fassera. But some that you’d meet in ordinary churches in ordinary places are impressive in their faith and in their walk with God. Or they’re on the way to being impressive in their faith and in their walk with God. I can’t say how many these are, or what percentage these are among believers. But they are there.
10. Realistic possibilities: a swimming metaphor.
Few people who think about swimming to get fit really expect to end up dolphining across the pool with the speed and grace of an Olympic champion. But that doesn’t keep people from swimming for fitness.
And you wouldn’t judge swimming, either, by the guy who jumps in the pool, swims a couple of lazy laps, strikes up a long conversation with another wall-hanger, swims another couple of lazy laps, and calls that a workout. You would judge it by the person who, even if they started out that way, kept at it until they could swim serious workouts on a regular basis with visible results.
Knowing God takes effort and grace. So look for a Christian who makes serious effort and gets visible results. Judge Christianity and its potential by those who strive and who have about them a penumbra of grace.
And when you become such a person yourself, pray for the rest of us.
For Christmas Eve, here are the top reasons why Santa Clause comes only when everybody’s asleep.
1. He’s got warrants.
2. He’s doing the Lady Godiva thing.
3. He’s ashamed of his neck tattoos.
4. He’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. People would freak.
5. He has a strict no-autograph policy.
6. He wants to be able to avoid paparazzi when he vacations.
7. He doesn’t want to run into his ex-wife. Or her lawyer.
8. He owes money. To organized crime.
9. He has a male part where his nose should be.
10. He can’t go out in sunlight because he’s a vampire.
I worry before I post some pieces. Sometimes I worry because what I write might make people judge me. Sometimes I worry about stirring anger without any compensating benefit.
But I hesitate to post this prayer because I am writing about a tragedy as an outsider. I don’t want to add any empty piety to the internet traffic about Newtown, Ct. I don’t want a copy of this to end up in the in-box of a parent of one of the Newtown victims, for them to call me a fool or worse.
I publish this prayer with this disclaimer, and I commit it to the judgment of my friends.
Newtown, Ct.
To wake from horror
Would be rebirth
To the parents of the dead,
To the desolate in spirit.
What you think and feel, my God,
I do not grasp, cannot know.
Do you wait in stillness
Until the reckoning?
Your son, who died, died in pain.
But at Golgotha you saw Easter.
What convulsion came from three days
Of a body that knew no rot?
So I weigh Golgotha against Newtown.
Where wounds gape at heaven.
Where earth covers the young.
Where earth crushes the old.
But I have not touched sweat like blood.
I have not died under darkness.
I know no hell nor its hurt.
My hand has not probed your wound.
Heaven is nearer to earth
Than earth is to heaven.
Your thoughts are nearer to ours
Than ours are to yours.
Your angels are quick,
But their light is unseen.
Cosmic wheels turn, eternal winds blow,
But they are unheard, they are unfelt.
A reckoning will come
Between you and us.
Another reckoning will come
Between those who grieve and you.
If God didn’t mean for Barack Obama to win the 2012 presidential contest, how do you explain Clint Eastwood?
1. Unsought benefit: Clint Eastwood and the empty chair.
That question is meant only half in jest. Nominating conventions typically boost a presidential candidate. But Eastwood’s performance sucked the energy from Mitt Romney’s would-be momentum.
Not that things were going placidly at the Republican nominating convention up till then. Hurricane Isaac caused the Republicans to bail on the first day of their Tampa-based convention. Some wonder that the Republicans chose as their venue Florida in the hurricane season.
Hurricane Isaac at the beginning of the general-election season was seconded by Hurricane Sandy at the end of the general-election season. I don’t make claims about the intention of God in these two hurricanes at the beginning and at the end of the short general-election season. I look at that and I wonder, but I draw no conclusions. Too many people claim to know the intention of God in natural disasters; and it always happens to match their own personal religious agenda. That kind of theology, without pretty clear and plain communication from the Almighty, is in the domain of douches.
Instead, I’ll talk more about Clint Eastwood and his last-minute choice to do the unexpected. His empty-chair speech energized Democrats. It gave them the perfect metaphor for all of the attacks that they had heard and would hear against their candidate. Eastwood’s speech illustrated the disconnect between the Obama of reality and the Obama of Republican scorn. "See?" we could say after Tampa. "Another attack on empty-chair Obama."
So it’s possible to see a divine hand pushing Clint Eastwood to the front of the convention stage with the subliminal prompt, "Son, let’r rip!"
2. Unlikely outcome: A boon from the Supreme Court.
But God had other means, if he had a say in this election. The Supreme Court that handed victory to Bush in 2000 had a hand Obama’s victory twelve years later.
Months before the general election, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare. After that, public opinion shifted in Obamacare’s favor.
Victory in the Supreme Court made Obama look like a winner. Victory kept Obama’s most high-profile legislative victory from becoming smoke. It kept Obama and all of his effort to pass that law from looking like a dog chasing its tail.
And in hindsight, the victory looks unlikely. This is true for a couple of reasons. First, Obama had voted against John Robert’s nomination to the Supreme Court. (Though he later voted to confirm Robert’s rise to Chief Justice.) In the Obamacare decision, Roberts provided the crucial fifth vote for a majority of the justices.
And experts look at Robert’s published Obamacare opinion and say that it looks like it started out as an opinion against Obamacare. Its center of gravity is its argument that the constitutional commerce clause cannot bear the weight of Obamacare. The section upholding Obamacare under the taxing power of the federal government might have been an afterthought. Experts surmise that the taxing-power section flipped the opinion from a vote against Obamacare to a vote for it.
And Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's concurring opinion has sharp language common in a dissent rather than the typical language of a concurrence. This leads some experts to suppose that it might have begun as a dissent, meaning that the justices initially voted to reject Obamacare.
Maybe God directed Robert’s conscience and shifted his position, changing him from the leader of the justices against Obamacare to the writer of the lead opinion that upheld it.
3. Unexpected ally: Governor Chris Christie.
Let me say a second time: I’m not making pronouncements about God’s will, this election, and hurricanes. That said, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie helped Obama by changing from a high-profile sneering critic of Obama’s leadership to a high-profile enthusiastic extoller of Obama’s leadership.
That transformation, that praise was not a foregone conclusion. After Hurricane Isaac, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal did what many Republicans wanted Governor Christie to do. Jindal took disaster aid from the federal government but publically carped about it.
4. Obstacle: the first debate.
Then there was Obama’s catastrophic first-debate performance. That might seem to cover up God’s footprints in this election. But it’s possible to see otherwise.
In the Old Testament Book of Judges, the tribes of Israel turned on one of their own. The tribe of Benjamin committed a notorious crime. Then the other tribes battled against Benjamin. They almost extinguished it.
God sent Israel into battle against Benjamin twice before giving Israel victory over Benjamin. Both of those times, Benjamin inflicted slaughter on Israel.
So sometimes God hands out failure before victory. Like Obama’s first debate performance. Maybe such failures supply needed humility before a blessing.
Conservative Christians might take this idea of God-in-failure as an explanation for the 2012 outcome contrary to mine. They are welcome to. I claim no special oracular powers.
4. What this exercise is and is not.
My friends who are un-believers will argue that I am foolish to find proof of God in the 2012 election. They are exactly right. This is no proof. This essay is instead a way of looking at the world. It is an interpretation of events. It is no more than that.
5. Aftermath: the hand of God.
I interpret events after the election with the hand of God in mind.
Nobody was more eager to defeat Obama than the Christian right. Some conservative Christians literally fasted and prayed for the triumph of Mitt Romney.
Maybe God transformed their curses into blessings. Something like that happened when Balak king of Moab summoned the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites. The story is told in the Book of Numbers.
But here’s the point. Franklin Graham is a prominent conservative evangelist. He’s the son of Billy Graham. He is no Obama enthusiast. In the 2012 election cycle, he fanned speculation that Barack Obama is a Muslim. He did this even though Obama professes Christianity and was a long-time member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.
But Graham has now called for Evangelical Christians to support the president with their daily prayers.
Surely God is in this.
The Southern Pacific Masters had their regional swimming championship on November 30 through December 2, 2012 in Long Beach. I swim with the San Diego Swim Masters. We took first place.
1. Strivers and coasters.
Some swimmers on the team are very dedicated, very skillful, and very fast. Some of these swimmers carried stress at times during the meet. These stress-carriers tend to be the high performers, but not necessarily all of the high performers. (It’s a big team; I don’t yet know everyone.)
I’m toward the low-intensity end of the spectrum. We range, though I would say we tend toward the striving end.
2. Roles.
Different people on the team have different roles; some have several. These showed in the meet.
We have a relay czar. He devised a brilliant program that uses a database of team-member times to craft relay lineups. This program maximizes our chances of winning relays. Relay victories were a profound part of our overall success at the meet.
We have our exhorters who encourage others. We have smart people who share tips on stroke-technique and racing-technique.
We have our champions, the ones who always do spectacularly; the ones who qualify for the yearly national masters meet; the ones who hold records.
We have our folks who are good to hang with.
And everybody contributes points to the final outcome. Everyone fills out the team.
3. Aging up.
Those of us who do not routinely place high at championships get satisfaction by competing against our previous times. If we improve over a prior time, we’re glad.
This improvement can’t be taken for granted. When you compete when you’re a child, moving up to a new age group is a fraught event, because suddenly you are competing against older children who have had more time to develop strength and skill. That puts you at a relative disadvantage, which you overcome in time, until you age up again.
It’s different with we older swimmers. Aging up is a good thing, because aging up means competing against folk who are, well, getting older. People always seem glad when they’re about to age up.
But this gladness exploits our universal habit of slow decline. So in the midst of the vigor that our workouts and our competition represent, in the midst of our celebration of strength and skill – and these are joys – there is this whispered reminder of mortality.
I don’t know why someone hasn’t done a video documentary on masters swimming. The season goes year-round. They could start in the spring, and focus on the younger swimmers. They could follow the meets into the fall, and focus on the older swimmers. It would be a film of effort and joy in the passing of seasons.
Some swimmers compete into their nineties. They even compete in distance events, like the 1500 meters freestyle (a race of almost a mile). They compete even when someone else needs to stand next to them at the starting block for them to hold onto to steady themselves.
You see in these meets a strand, a sense of turning the clock back. In the fact of competition itself, in the physical effort, we older swimmers invade the prerogative of youth. This turning-back also shows in a sometime-sense of playfulness. Some of the seasoned women on the Las Vegas team wore to keep warm knitted caps patterned after animals. I told one woman that I liked her pink pig with its purple nose.
4. Olympic hero.
Olympic heros show up. This year it was Matt Biondi, an Olympic champion from the Olympics of 1984, 1988, and 1992. Word spread that this swimming standout-great would be at the meet.
He swam in the 50 meters butterfly and 50 meters freestyle. People left their seats to stand and watch from the deck as he stood behind his starting block, ready to race. Some people were surprised at how lanky he was.
In both of his races, he raced in the last heat, which is the fastest heat. In those heats, he raced against much younger men. He didn’t win his heats, but he lost only by one-or-two tenths of a second. In the butterfly, he was 6/100th of a second off the world record for his age group. Wikipedia calls him a "former competition swimmer", but someone should change that.
5. Triumphs.
I was on two first-place relay teams. Before winning my relay-team medals, I happened to compliment a teammate when I saw two medals dangling from their neck-bands in his hand. He was dismissive: "They’re only for relays".
This is a guy who’s been generous to me with suggestions for my stroke technique, so I know that he has an interest in others. But he seemed to – seemed to – embrace the common idea that only personal glory really matters. Some people live by, "Don’t touch my things." I prefer the old-time, American national motto: e pluribus unum ("out of many one"). So I will be glad of my relay-team medals.
While a teammate videotaped us, in imitation of Olympic glory, I stood with two of my winning relay-teammates with our medals around our necks, and we sang The Star Spangled Banner. (Our fourth had left.) One of us seemed to mumble the words; well, he's Canadian. One of us started chorus-line kicking to the national anthem, so I joined him in that. Then, with my free hand, I pantomimed the words. The singing showed poor planning – we started singing in a middle register, which was catastrophic on the high notes.
That video is now posted to Facebook. It’s amusing. But since many Americans are deadly serious about our national anthem, it pretty much guarantees that I can never run for public office. At least not in a district where people lack a sense of humor.
6. An embarrassment.
Personally, I was happy with some of my times, but the meet was not an un-alloyed triumph, even by my modest standards. I was disqualified in the 400 meters individual medely.
The error was on my backstroke leg. The modern backstroke flipturn involves rolling onto your stomach before the wall and flipping to plant your feet on the wall, then pushing from the wall, once again on your back. This is new to me – we didn’t do it that way when I was a kid. Apparently, you have to start your flip immediately after you roll onto your stomach. I glided too long before starting the flip.
The next leg was breaststroke, and as I swam it, I happened to see the referee at the foot of my lane, writing on my entry sheet. I finished the race, but I dialed back my effort after I saw that I had come to the referee’s attention.
It wasn’t a happy moment to be disqualified; but it didn’t crush me like it would have many decades ago. That’s one of the benefit of being a low-intensity swimmer. Or just being older. Fortunately, the high-intensity swimmers tend to avoid the mistakes that we low-intensity folks make. They tend to.
7. Gathering with friends.
It’s a joy to compete with a team. It’s camaraderie; it’s mutual encouragement and aid; it’s shared success and shared happiness. It’s spending time with people from different backgrounds and different national origins and with different ideals. I like my teammates, and I wish them well in life.
