Monday, September 23, 2024

Part I

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Mark Robinson and the Yuck Factor: The Moral Wisdom of Repugnance That’s Now Influencing the North Carolina Gubernatorial Race

Well, about this time in every four-year election cycle, some strange things break out, some big headlines appear, unexpected developments. What we’re going to talk about today is a big unexpected development, and this does not have directly to do with the presidential race, but rather we have to look down ballot at the state of North Carolina and the governor’s race there. The Democratic candidate, Josh Stein, was already running several points ahead of the Republican candidate, the incumbent Lieutenant Governor, Mark Robinson.

Now the situation is going to probably be decided in very different terms than people expected. That’s because just as the nation went into the weekend, a big story broke. It was broken first by CNN, but then it was picked up by other major media insinuating, in fact, directly accusing the lieutenant governor of having, years ago, participated in a pornographic website, public postings, a bulletin board, and quite frankly, for The Briefing, I can’t even go into the kinds of things that were posted, but there was also an association with the word Nazi. There were other things that, let’s just say, are extremely troubling. Especially when you look at some of the most crucial issues in which public policy is going to be decided, such as on the transgender movement, let’s just say there are all kinds of mixed signals that are being sent here.
Now, the lieutenant governor said that this did not come from him, but CNN is backing up its story with documentation, and quite frankly, even Republicans there in North Carolina are sending a very clear signal that the lieutenant governor needs to withdraw from the race. So one of the senators there, Republican senator Thom Tillis, has said that if indeed the Lieutenant Governor is not responsible for these postings, then he needs to file a lawsuit charging those who are behind it with fraud and perhaps other charges as well. But the fact is, no one really expects that to be forthcoming. The reason why this is playing out the way it’s playing out right now, and it’s playing out, in one sense, with President Trump, who had largely backed the Lieutenant Governor, and that’s why he won the Republican nomination to run as governor. Well, President Trump went to a major event in North Carolina, and guess who he did not invite to be with him.

We’re going to talk more about that in just a moment. But when you have Donald Trump distancing himself from someone because of this kind of moral complexity, well, I’ll just say, honestly, that has to tell us something. In this case, it tells us something very big. So I’m going to say, again, I can’t go into the graphic detail, and frankly, it’s really ugly stuff, and CNN is backing up its documentation by saying that if this was not Mark Robinson, it was someone who knew how to use his account years ago and post in his name. Frankly, the documentation is pretty overwhelming. So it becomes clear, even as the major media and local media there in North Carolina are reporting the story, people are shocked, but given other developments, they’re not completely shocked. That’s because this is a candidate who was already known for, let’s just say, some eccentricities and for a very eloquent presentation on many issues, but frankly, saying things that alarmed even many on his own side.

So in one sense, he was presenting himself as something of an African-American Donald Trump. Only he went beyond Donald Trump. Let’s just say when we’re talking about this kind of moral complexity, it’s easy to see many people saying, “Well, we are talking about Donald Trump here.” Yeah, but you are talking about someone who is known also for other features, for other factors, for other issues in terms of American political life. When it comes to Mark Robinson, there is no such understanding. Quite frankly, there’s something else to this. Once again, as you look at Donald Trump and many other candidates, there is some degree of this in a lot of recent candidacies, but at the top of the list, you’d have to say Donald Trump himself. But Donald Trump is distancing himself from Mark Robinson and distancing himself in a big way.

One person formerly very close to Donald Trump, that’s former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. He had been pretty close to Trump in the 2016 campaign. He said that Donald Trump has an absolutely unerring sense of smelling rotting flesh, and once he smells it, he stays away from it. In political terms, that really tells you something. The New York Times, in this case, even though it’s a very liberal paper and let’s just say it is prone to criticize Donald Trump, it also knows him pretty well. That’s reflected in the headline, “Trump’s Impulse in Robinson Controversy is to Ignore and Push Ahead.” As many people close to Trump said, “The one thing you can count on is that Donald Trump is unlikely ever to utter his name again.”

Okay, so if in this context Donald Trump is unlikely ever to utter your name again, guess what? In political terms, you’re probably dead on arrival. But to put it in larger worldview terms, I simply want to turn to something, and the best reference for this is actually a Jewish philosopher at the University of Chicago. Now, I think this Jewish philosopher at the University of Chicago probably did not see himself being invoked in this conversation, in this presentation, but I’m about to invoke him. His name is Leon Kass. He was chairman of the Commission on Bioethics during the administration of George W. Bush, and he’s a very respected Jewish intellectual. He has one category that I think plays into this and explains it marvelously, accurately. It’s what he calls with full intellectual justification and sophistication. A professor at the University of Chicago, what does he call this? He calls it a very important moral principle. He identifies as the “yuck factor.”

Yeah, that’s right. He says that one of the issues of being a moral individual, one of the demonstrations of the moral sense is, that there are certain things, which, once you see them, the only response is revulsion, and see, I might say, just sense. You might hear something, you might see something, you might smell something, you might be told something, and your immediate response is, “Yuck.” This is the wisdom of repugnance he says. It’s a moral wisdom, which comes to people. Of course, as a Christian, I want to say it’s an evidence of the image of God, of the Imago Dei. It’s an evidence of the fact that God made us in his image as moral creatures. There are certain things that bring a near universal disgust.

Okay, so here’s something else about the yuck factor. It’s very hard, thoroughly, comprehensively to explain it. The best word for some things is simply “yuck.” Now, you can take parts of it and explain it in these terms. You can take another part and explain it in that term. You can look at aesthetics. You can look at ethics. You can look at, say, philosophical justification. You can look at reason. You can look at morality. Let’s hope you look at all those things. But the bottom line is, sometimes some things are just yuck. I think it’s just really important that someone with the intellectual stature and sophistication of Professor Kass, is candid enough to say sometimes yuck is actually the best philosophical judgment. I raised it in this case because I just want to say there is enough here. There’s enough here. Trust me on this, that yuck is going to be the overwhelming response. That’s why Republicans in North Carolina are already, even as the official party as we went through the weekends, pretty much sticking with the nominee. It’s pretty clear no one really expects him at this point to win.

The big question is, will there be other damage to Republican prospects in the state of North Carolina? Because most people looking at the electoral map believe that Donald Trump must carry North Carolina if he is going to win the presidential race. So we’re headed into some interesting territory. There surely could be unexpected developments, but I think it’s fair to say at this point anything that would exonerate Mark Robinson is fairly unforeseeable. We are stuck probably with the situation of the yuck factor. And we’re stuck, voters in North Carolina are likely stuck with this, because there are big questions as to whether even if he were to resign from the race, his name would be taken off of the ballot.

The reality is, the party is probably stuck with him. This raises another issue, and this brings us back to Donald Trump. I mentioned that the former president did not appear with Mark Robinson. He didn’t utter his name. The campaign was doing everything. Even as it was at a major event in North Carolina, which it must win, the campaign didn’t want to talk about Mark Robinson. We can understand why, but as you look at this, you also recognize that Donald Trump bears a lot of responsibility for the fact that Mark Robinson is the Republican nominee for the governor’s seat there in North Carolina, and this raises the whole issue of candidate quality. Long term, if the Republican Party wants to maintain any kind of credible, consistent argument, it is going to have to present credible, consistent candidates. There’s simply no other option. When you have candidates who produce headlines like this, you’re likely to end up with the ballot results that honest folks in North Carolina now already expect.

Part II

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Abortion at the Center of Harris’s Campaign: Kamala Harris is Running the Most Pro-Abortion Ticket in History, and It’s Not Even Close

But next, I want to shift to developments in the presidential race, and what I want to look at in particular is an appearance by Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta on Friday. Now, in one sense, this wasn’t so much a new development as it was a new marker, so to speak, in the 2024 presidential race. I want to tell you the clearest evidence for that is the fact that CNN, in reporting on the appearance there in Atlanta, simply put out a headline that says “Harris Puts Abortion Rights at the Center of Her Campaign.” I think this is exactly what she’s done for some time, but I think there’s no mistaking, when you look at the Atlanta event and at an event live-streamed with Oprah Winfrey the day before, I think there’s no doubt that we are looking at someone who told us in advance she was going to put abortion at the center of her campaign, which is to say that to a considerable degree, it’s hard to avoid the fact that Kamala Harris puts abortion at the very center of her political identity.

So much so that when you had Joe Biden, the incumbent President of the United States, who was, of course, expected to be the 2024 Democratic nominee. He was expected to run at the top of the ticket. Kamala Harris was to continue at the second place on the ticket as vice president. Nonetheless, Biden publicly designated Kamala Harris to run point in the Biden Harris campaign on the issue of abortion. She took the issue eagerly. She became the first president or vice president to make a public visit to a Planned Parenthood Center. She became very vocal, and she’d already been very vocal. She became even more vocal on the issue of abortion rights. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision handed down by the Supreme Court in 2022, she ran point for the entire Biden administration in terms of the issue of abortion. Let’s just say the Biden administration is, at this point, the most radical pro-abortion administration in American history, and a Kamala Harris administration would be–just listen to her, listen to her promises, look at her position–even more radical in terms of its support for abortion. So I want to talk specifically about how we should understand this.

Now, one of the things that was said about Joe Biden is that in his own evolution, that’s a word he used himself at one point, in his own evolution on this issue, he adopted a far more pro-abortion position, say, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020 than he had over nearly 40 years in the United States Senate. That’s true. There’s no doubt that he shifted his position. For instance, Kamala Harris. How’s that for an irony? Kamala Harris, who was running against him in the 2020 Democratic primaries, publicly accused him of holding a position injurious to women through his support of the Hyde Amendment.

Now, that’s an amendment to federal funding legislation that prevents any taxpayer monies. That it’s money taken, legally taken, from American taxpayers. It prevents the taxpayer from being coerced into paying for abortions through policy. Joe Biden was intimidated by Kamala Harris in the 2020 cycle to drop his opposition to the Hyde Amendment and get on the team, and that’s exactly what he did.

Now, since being elected president, he’s run into a far more radical abortion rights position. As we’re going to see in just a moment, President Biden said that what he wanted was to codify Roe. That is after the Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court was reversed in 2022. He said all he wanted to do was put Roe back in place. Well, Kamala Harris has continued that language. But I’m going to state this boldly, she doesn’t mean it, and we know she doesn’t mean it by other things she says and the trajectory of her entire political career. Add to that the realities of her own political party. Codifying or legislating Roe is going to be impossible. It’s going to be impossible because her own party is not going to accept anything this top short of full funding, full support, and unrestricted abortion access, period.

It is interesting, by the way, that President Biden was criticized for not using the word abortion. He was criticized by, of course, the abortion rights movement for not using the word abortion, not using it very often. As a matter of fact, the Atlantic ran an article sometime back basically celebrating the fact that in one speech, Kamala Harris used the word abortion 15 times. How’s that for a marker of civilization? You have a major article celebrating the fact that the Democratic Vice President of the United States is so pro-abortion, she said the word over and over and over again, 15 times. That’s what made the story.

But it is interesting that right now what Kamala Harris is going after is two things. She’s going after a big turnout from the pro-abortion segment of the population, and she is also going for the ephemeral and perhaps even imaginary, at this point, undecided voter. So she’s changing her language. She’s using the word abortion, yes, but increasingly, she’s putting it in the language of a woman’s reproductive health or women’s healthcare. That’s exactly what she did in Georgia. She pointed to a couple of cases. The case there in Georgia most pressingly had to do with a woman who was pregnant with twins and was seeking an abortion. She went to another state, North Carolina, to get an abortion, but she got there too late for the procedure. So she was given pills for a medication abortion. She took those pills, and then she developed complications with this medication or pill-induced abortion. She eventually died from those complications, and that was blamed on Georgia’s restrictive law and abortion, no abortions after the sixth week of gestation.

Now, pro-life activists were quick to say there is nothing that would prevent a medical doctor from treating a woman in that kind of situation. But you understand in propaganda terms how this plays, and the vice president was playing it to the hilt. Now, I want to be very clear that the death of this woman was a tragedy. No doubt it was a tragedy. No doubt her family experiences it as a tragedy. We need to acknowledge that. It’s a tragedy because she’s a human being made in the image of God, and she died when she otherwise would not have died because of the complications from this medication abortion. So that’s a tragedy. But let’s face what isn’t mentioned in this story. Let’s face what certainly is evaded by the vice president, and that is that the death of those two unborn human beings was also a tragedy. But those deaths were not unintended. They were intended. They were brought about because this woman was seeking to terminate her pregnancy. You look at this, and you recognize this is where the pro-abortion logic leads.

You have the vice president there making a very emotional case, a case for abortion rights, but the only way to do that is to treat the unborn human beings as if they don’t exist at all. They’re not even morally significant. They’re not even acknowledged. So the death of this woman is, we should all affirm, a tragedy. But it also raises the question of how this death should have been avoided. Once you begin to investigate that question with moral seriousness, well, the vice president’s presentation begins to fall apart. It is seen for what it was, a political case made in a political context, but it is not acknowledged for the radical nature of the argument she presented.

Part III

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‘Government Should Not Tell a Pregnant Woman What to Do’ – Kamala Harris’s Vision is to Remove All Restrictions on Abortion. Period.

This gets down to the radical nature of Kamala Harris on the question of abortion. Now, what she has said, or what her campaign more often has said, is that what the vice president wants and would seek as president is what President Biden said he would seek. And that is the legislation or codification of Roe v. Wade. But as I said, that can’t be honest. It can’t be honest because that’s not where Vice President Harris has been. It wasn’t where she was as Attorney General of California. It wasn’t where she was when she was in the United States Senate. In one role, she really sought to go after the pro-life movement. In the other role, she went to go after the right of states to restrict abortion. She wanted the federal government to have a form of clearance on any state restriction on abortion. Guess what? That clearance was never going to come. What we’re talking about here is a radical pro-abortion position.

You want to see further documentation? Look at her choice for running mate, governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who, as governor, signed into law legislation that basically accepts absolutely no restriction on abortion whatsoever, which calls a person pregnant as a pregnant person rather than a woman. Again, you see where that leads, and furthermore, doesn’t even require parents to be informed when their minor daughter goes for an abortion and receives one. So we’re talking about a bill that offers absolutely no restriction on abortion whatsoever, and it was that governor that the vice president chose as her running mate.

Furthermore, you look at her party. Her party’s just abundantly clear. You also look at pro-abortion activists. They are cheering the prospect of a Harris presidency precisely because they are counting on national, that is to say federal legislation, virtually without restriction on abortion. That’s what they want. That’s what they demand, and they’re very excited about the prospect of a Harris administration.

Now, today, I wrote an article on this at WORLD magazine. I dare raised the question, “Is Kamala Harris running for President of the United States or a planned Parenthood?” WORLD Opinions, you can find that article. But I want to raise another issue here on the briefing, and that requires president said at the event on Friday. She said this, “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree, government should not be telling her what to do.” After that was a lot of applause. Then she continued, “If she chooses, she will talk with her pastor, her priest, her rabbi, her imam, but it should not be the government or Donald Trump telling her what to do with her body.”

Okay, I just want us to look as Christians. I want us to consider what this means. Here, the vice president invokes religious faith or deeply held beliefs. So there’s the parallelism. She has faith in one column, deeply held beliefs in another column. You can see what that means. But she also begins by saying one doesn’t have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to do what? To agree, government should not be telling her what to do. The her here is a pregnant woman. Again, at least with the pronoun her, she acknowledges it’s a female. But nonetheless, we’ll take a small victory when we see it. But here, the bigger issue is the attack upon the dignity of human life. It is presented as something that government should not restrict when it comes to a pregnant woman. A pregnant woman should have no government restriction.
You say, “Well, she doesn’t say that.” But that’s exactly what she says. She says the government should not be telling her what to do. You notice, there’s no footnote. There is no except there. That’s a categorical statement is followed by a period, as it was also followed by applause from her crowd. You see how, as a campaign strategy, the vice president is saying, “Donald Trump’s the one who’d be telling her what to do.” She says, “It should not be the government or Donald Trump telling her what to do with her body.” And again, it’s what to do with her body.

You’ll notice what’s missing here. You notice who’s missing here? The unborn human life’s just missing here. It’s just the woman and her body. That’s all there is. It’s absolutely bizarre. It’s very sad. It’s incredibly telling. It might be a strategy. It might very well be a strategy to try to gain some ground with those so-called middle voters, those undecided voters, and some of them undoubtedly have some kind of religious identity. But you know what? I hope they have, at the very least, enough common sense to look at this kind of language and recognize it for what it is.

Kamala Harris, however, is running an unexpectedly strong race. I want to say that. I need to say that. She’s running an unexpectedly strong race. She is running as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024 with a political skill she showed virtually none of in the cycle for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Now, that might tell us a lot of things, but for one thing, it tells us that she has learned something during the year she has been the Vice President of the United States in a Democratic administration, and she has learned, at least she thinks she has learned, that what she needs to do to win, is to put abortion at the very center and forefront of her entire campaign. She’s doing so, at least, in one sense, very effectively, very effective, certainly with the press. Just look at that CNN coverage. Just look at Oprah Winfrey and the Hollywood, the entertainment, the creative class just fawning all over her. Look at Silicon Valley. So excited. Look at the pro-abortion organizations, practically ecstatic.

Part IV

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The Battle of the Pro-Life Movement: Pro-Lifers Face the Same Fundamental Battle for the Sanctity and Dignity of Life from Conception to Natural Death

All of this taken together reminds us of what is at stake in the 2024 election. We started out by looking at this absolutely bizarre and frankly shocking story. We’re still capable of being shocked, morally shocked in the United States, a shocking story out of North Carolina, and the same old story continuing in terms of the battle for the sanctity and dignity of human life when it comes to the issue of abortion in the United States. It’s playing out a bit differently in 2024 than it did in 2020 or in previous presidential election cycles.

But then again, here’s where Christians have to understand, given our worldview, our theological commitments, the biblical authority on which we stand, it’s playing out pretty much the same once you understand it. Once you cut through some of the new language, some of the new strategies, some of the new arguments, it’s still pretty much exactly the same thing. Is that unborn life in the womb going to be respected, acknowledged, and protected at any point for any reason, or is that unborn human being, that unborn human life in the womb, absolutely irrelevant, and for that matter, not even necessary to acknowledge in moral terms? That’s the battle we face, and that’s the battle we’ve been facing for some time.

If we’re honest, it’s the battle that shaped the abortion issue back in 1973 when the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. It’s the same issue that frames the moral reality after the Dobbs decision reversing Roe. Guess what that decision from the Supreme Court did not do? It was an achievement in overturning Roe v. Wade. At the same time, the events that have unfolded after that decision remind us that we still have a long way to go. We are in a very long fight indeed. The 2024 election is vital in terms of our understanding of this issue. But we face an enormous task and, honestly, a continued generational struggle. I honestly believe that Christians in our generation are going to face the judgment of God for how we address that battle and fight in that struggle and contend for the dignity and sanctity of human life. We also have to remind ourselves, just look across our northern borders, not just in the beginning of life. It is also at the end of life. All those issues are a part of our responsibility.
In that sense, the election is just one part of that responsibility. But thinking these things through in terms of public policy and seeking to be faithful in terms of our political and electoral decisions, that’s no small thing. With the days passing so quickly and with the clock ticking on the 2024 election, I can assure you this is a battle that is summoning us all.

Thanks for listening to The Briefing.