Replies

38 posted on Monday, January 23, 2012 7:15:09 AM by jagusafr: “I have noted in the last week of being here in D.C. on reserve duty that many of my friends believe the meme that “the Bible has been translated and retranslated so many times that nobody really knows what the original meaning was”. I’m just shocked that these really bright people would fall for that crap.”

Agreed.

I find it helpful, when dealing with intelligent liberals who are sincerely confused, to hand them a copy of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, and ask them why, if they believe it is impossible to translate the text accurately, do they believe it is quite possible to accurately translate business contracts and military documents from Arabic into English and vice versa? After all, the Defense Language Institute does spend lots of money training Arabic translators and most people in the Pentagon think that money is well-spent.

The issues of translation and textual integrity simply aren't legitimate issues in biblical scholarship. Yes, we can point to a few verses here or there which are potentially problematic, but the main points of Christian doctrine are clear and obvious from the plain text of the Bible.

40 posted on Monday, January 23, 2012 7:19:32 AM by C. Edmund Wright: “I agree with D James Kennedy (and you) on this issue, but it’s not the foundation upon which to build a Presidential campaign. I don’t need a President to tell me what is right in regard to this issue. I don’t need Rick Santorum nor his campaign staff to tell me either. I absolutely resent the implication you made that because I think this is totally stupid campaign strategy that I disagree with you on the foundational truths. It’s that exact kind of judgmentalism and stridency that is such a turn off to RS (like Bachmann before him).”

Okay, I take you at face value regarding your agreement with me and Dr. Kennedy on homosexuality, and since I resent it when people misrepresent me, I have no desire to do so with you.

My point was not that you support homosexuality, but rather that I think we have a real disagreement on whether opposition to homosexuality is politically viable. Am I understanding your position correctly on this issue, that in your view Republicans shouldn't focus on homosexuality or other moral issues because it confuses the role of the church in preaching against sin with the role of the state in punishing lawbreakers?

I don't want to go into details about Dr. Kennedy's political positions with regard to homosexuality without citing specific statements he's made, but regardless of what Dr. Kennedy believed, I believe you and I do have a serious and significant disagreement about whether opposition to homosexuality is a winning political strategy. I believe it is clearly a winning strategy in Republican Party circles in most of our red states and probably in a national election.

I'll cite an example in my own Congressional district where I was on he losing side of the issue, and one where many Freepers will disagree with me. Vicky Hartzler, the spokeswoman of the anti-gay-marriage amendment to the Missouri Constitution, used that issue to win victory over the conservative Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee who authored “Don't Ask, Don't Tell,” throwing out a man with more than three decades in Congress who has brought not just hundreds of millions of dollars but literally several billion dollars of federal military spending to Fort Leonard Wood, Whiteman Air Force Base, and the Missouri National Guard.

Hartzler won the Republican Party primary based on her Christian conservative credentials over a pro-military conservative Republican in the primary election despite being a member of a Mennonite church (which changed its name during the election campaign) and being married into a prominent Mennonite family. Then she won the general election despite nearly all Republicans in my county near Fort Leonard Wood publicly supporting the Democrat or staying quiet in public while working for the Democrat behind the scenes. I was a finalist for a national reporting award for my coverage of that campaign, and I saw firsthand the power of an anti-gay agenda to propel a Republican candidate to victory who ordinarily would not have a chance in either the Republican primary or the general election.

I'm not going to stand here defending Ike Skelton on Free Republic — that election is over, I've said for years that my main problem with Skelton was he should have become a Republican long ago, and I wrote repeatedly in 2010 that our county's voters need to decide whether we should vote in our own self-interest to defend Fort Leonard Wood or the country's long-term best interest in getting rid of Democrats. Our strongly Republican county voted mostly Democrat, most of the rest of the district voted Republican, that election is behind us, and our district now has a member of Congress on the House Armed Services Committee whose main prior political credential is opposition to homosexuality.

My point is that if opposition to homosexuality can propel a Republican candidate with a very thin resume to victory over a very senior Democrat who was regarded as not being sufficiently anti-homosexual and kowtowing too much to Nancy Pelosi and her agenda out of San Francisco, I think opposition to homosexuality is a winning campaign issue in lots of other places in the United States.