"We are producing a new tyranny."

British historian David Starkey, an atheist and homosexual, is standing up for a Christian couple being persecuted under British law for refusing to rent out rooms in their bed & breakfast to homosexual couples.  Here's the story, courtesy of the UK Catholic Herald.

It is one thing to attack injustice when it it affects one directly, it is another to attack an injustice that is being perpetuated against somebody that you might disagree with.  In a civilized society, injustice against anyone is considered an injustice against everyone.  David Starkey is to be applauded for standing up for justice for others, even those he disagrees with.  And why is Starkey doing this?  Because he understands what the persecution against Christians in Britain means.  As he puts it:  "We are producing a new tyranny."

Abraham Lincoln was not the father of big government

That's the point brought out in in this piece over from the Heritage Foundation:  Was Lincoln the Father of Big Government?   As author Julia Shaw notes, it was not Lincoln who developed the idea of big government, but later progressive leaders like John Dewey, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who crafted the modern idea of big government.  While the government did expand under the Lincoln administration, that was to deal with the emergency of the Civil War.  Lincoln had no desire or intention to craft a permanent expansion of the federal government once that crisis was over.

Interestingly enough, Shaw's point is echoed by one of current history writers most hostile to Lincoln, Thomas E. Woods.  Woods, author of a host of articles and a book praising such ante-bellum ideas as state nullification of federal laws, described the point at which the executive branch of our federal government became so powerful.  As he wrote in his book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask (Crown Forum:  2007), pg. 136:

Was there a turning point that brought us down this road?  Abraham Lincoln certainly exercised extraordinary executive powers during the Civil War, as his supporters and critics alike acknowledge, but the very fact that the sixteenth president acted during wartime limits his usefulness as a source of precedents for peacetime chief executives (although to this day the "even Lincoln did thus-and-so: argument is still to be heard during episodes of government mischief).

If we had to pinpoint a single individual as being responsible for the modern presidency, it would be a man who in word and deed, in theory and practice, brought unprecedented vigor and visibility to the presidential office.  It would be a figure loved and admired to this day by mainstream Left and Right alike.

It would be Theodore Roosevelt.

Big government is the result not of Lincoln's presidency or his policies, it is the product of the progressive era in American politics, the late 19th and early 20th century period that nationally coincides with the administrations of TR, Taft and Wilson.  It is at their doorstep that credit for a dominating executive branch and an expansive federal government needs to be deposited.  Leave poor old Abe Lincoln alone.  He simply wanted to save the Union for constitutional government.  Big government was neither his intent nor his effect.

Related item:  here are some more popular but incorrect ideas about Lincoln, debunked over at the Washington Post by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer:  Five myths about Abraham Lincoln. 

Malcom X on self-defense and the Second Amendment

An interesting video from one of the great voices in the struggle for equal rights in our society.  His comments on self-defense and the importance of the Second Amendment are of timeless value -- some of his other comments (particularly his denunciation of integration), not so much.  But all of it is worth watching:

Christian activism, the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

John Fea explains the links between those three topics:  The "Christian America" of Martin Luther King, Jr.  As Fea explains:

King's fight for a Christian America was not over amending the Constitution to make it more Christian or promoting crusades to insert "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance (June 14, 1954). It was instead a battle against injustice and an attempt to forge a national community defined by Christian ideals of equality and respect for human dignity.

Most historians now agree that the Civil Rights movement was driven by the Christian faith of its proponents. As David Chappell argued in his landmark book, Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, the story of the Civil Rights movement is less about the triumph of progressive and liberal ideals and more about the revival of an Old Testament prophetic tradition that led African-Americans to hold their nation accountable for the decidedly unchristian behavior it showed many of its citizens.

I have read Stone of Hope and I think it is a very insightful reading of the history behind the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 1960's.  Of course, by the late 60's, after the assassinations of both Malcom X and MLK, the civil rights movement took a turn away from its religious roots and towards "new left" secularism, a turn that left much of the movement without a moral or spiritual core.  That, I think, is at the center of the tragedy of the civil rights movement -- just when its greatest victories were at hand, it abandoned a key component of its identity as a movement, the integration of faith and public policy when it came to questions that involve fundamental human rights and human dignity.

It can never be said too often that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision was a profoundly religious one -- and a profoundly Christian one at that.   His activism was grounded not in ideology but in faith, not in a secularism devoid of moral intuition but in a Christianity that inspired moral imagination.  King dreamed of world where the dignity of each person was respected because he believed in a God of love who had suffered, died and rose again so that each human being might have life, and have it more abundantly.  For those of us who are people of faith, we should never forget that vision, never let that dream die.