Family Research Council

Chen, China, and New York University

by Rob Schwarzwalder

June 17, 2013

FRC has advocated for the blind Chinese attorney Chen Guangcheng for several years. Chen, a self-taught lawyer, received brutal treatment from the Chinese government because he refused to be silent about the forced abortions and inhuman treatment of women intrinsic to China’s notorious “one-child” policy.

Allowed to leave China with his immediate family last year, New York University gave him a fellowship and an apartment. Now, NYU is demanding that Chen leave. According to Chen:

… as early as August and September, the Chinese Communists had already begun to apply great, unrelenting pressure on New York University, so much so that after we had been in the United States just three to four months, NYU was already starting to discuss our departure with us. The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back. Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.

The university denies that pressure from Beijinghas driven its decision. University spokesman John Beckman “insists that Mr. Chen’s law school fellowship was always meant to be for one year … The fellowship’s end, Mr. Beckman said, ‘had nothing to do with the Chinese government — all fellowships come to an end’.”

Chen’s departure from NYU comes in the wake of NYU’s newly developed campus in Shanghai, which plans to start offering classes this fall. At the same time, other reports indicate that Chen always knew his fellowship would draw to an end and is currently deciding between two professional offers.

Let’s hope this is a case of a brave man overreacting to the previously agreed upon conclusion of his one-year opportunity. But speculation as to NYU’s motivation is understandable. As noted in today’s The New York Times:

In the United States, many colleges have grown increasingly reliant on the tuition from the 194,000 Chinese students who enrolled at American universities last year, a 23 percent increase over the previous year.

FRC’s friend Bob Fu of China Aid, who only recently lectured at our D.C. headquarters on China’s human rights violations, had this response on his organization’s website:

American universities are out chasing the China dollar and are very reluctant to work with dissidents who have a strong voice in China. It does not always have to be direct pressure from Beijing, there is also self-censorship, particularly if a college president believes their China campus or the future enrollment of Chinese students will be sabotaged.

Even if this incident is as benign as NYU claims it is, the fact that it would receive so much attention shows the extent to which China’s “get tough with America” policies has gained genuine, if unwelcome, credibility in the U.S. For example,China’s recent “cyber attacks” have “hit key U.S. weapons systems.” The damage these attacks have done is not public, but they have been targeted, coordinated, and extensive.

One thing is without dispute: Chen is right to refer to “Chinese Communists.” Free enterprise has become an increasing part of China’s urban life, but true liberty is repressed daily as Chinese Christians are persecuted and anyone perceived to be a threat to the post-Maoist government is monitored or, as in the case of Chen, brutalized. Educational content is scripted; political freedom is non-existent, and media censorship of all types widespread.

If eventually it comes out that NYU has ended its relationship with Chen due to Communist Chinese bullying, it will be another telling reminder that moral courage – the bravery to do what’s right, even in the face of financial or some other kind of loss – is never out of season.

What an Unborn Baby Learns

by Rob Schwarzwalder

June 4, 2013

In the fall of 2011, science writer Annie Murphy Paul gave a lecture at a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in Edinburgh, Scotland that demonstrates with moving clarity that the unborn child is a person, capable of cognition and emotion from its very early stages.

Based on her book Origins, Murphy explains that the child in the womb absorbs all kinds of information that affects his or her life once born.  Here are some excerpts:

First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers’ voices … And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. Once the baby’s born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else’s …From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it — its mother. It even makes its cries sound like the mother’s language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.

In addition to sound, unborn babies also learn taste and scent:

But it’s not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. It’s also tastes and smells. By seven months of gestation, the fetus’ taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning … They’re being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture’s cuisine even before birth.

The baby’s mother has a profound bearing on the life of her child, biochemical but much more:

Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she’s exposed to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. And often it does something more. It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside …The pregnant woman’s diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus’ brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.

Ms. Paul inexplicably insists on calling the unborn baby “the fetus;” if he or she is not a baby, who cares what a “fetus” does and doesn’t know?  Regardless, she has done a tremendous service to all who care about the sanctity of unborn life.

“We are fearfully and wonderfully made,” writes the Psalmist, made in God’s image and likeness.  Doubt it?  Watch Annie Murphy Paul’s lecture and share in the spontaneous, humble joy that accompany the miracles of conception and birth.

A Response to “Why Tolerate Religion?”

by Rob Schwarzwalder

May 3, 2013

Freedom of Religion encompasses more than intellectual assent and private, enclosed worship services. It includes the integration of one’s faith into all spheres of life, such that one’s deeply held religious convictions are allowed to animate, unhindered, speech and conduct in the public, professional, and community spheres.

It is for this reason that the Bill of Rights lists freedom of religion as its first enumerated freedom: The Founders recognized that allegiance to God has to precede allegiance to the state, or else the state itself would usurp the role of God. This is directly opposed to the essential principle of America’s very existence, that our rights come from our Creator, not the government.

University of Chicago law professor Bruce Leiter thinks otherwise. In his new book, Why Tolerate Religion, Leiter asserts, “no one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument for tolerating religion qua religion - that is, an argument that would explain why, as a matter of moral principle, we ought to accord special legal and moral to religious practices” (p.7).

I wonder if Prof. Leiter has every read a survey of Western history, perhaps one that contains sections on the persecution of the early church, the Inquisition, anti-Catholic violence, or the Holocaust? Perhaps he should spend a few minutes reading official federal government reports on the ongoing and massive oppression of Christians and other people of faith around the globe.

The assertion that a “principled” case for religious liberty remains unmade is so striking in its ignorance that it invites the derision a serious academic should find embarrassing. As my friend Joe Loconte, professor of history at The King’s College in New York, writes:

The author seems astonishingly unaware of the Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition and its contribution to the foundations of liberal democracy. The scientific revolution, the concept of human dignity, an ethos of compassion for the poor, the political ideals of equal rights and government by consent — all of these developments are unthinkable without the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. (Source: Standpoint Magazine)

The University of Chicago Law School often is hailed as one of America’s premier institutions of legal thought and training. It’s luster has been dimmed by Prof. Leiter’s uninformed and prejudicial rant. However smooth his prose, the absence of logic, factuality, and dispassion - ostensibly the very foundations of legal reasoning - does not deter him from publishing one of the most troubling and intellectually discreditable books by a serious American scholar in some time.

My distinguished colleague Bob Morrison summarizes the case for religious liberty this way: “One’s right to worship God and follow his conscience according to the principles of his religious faith was foundational to all morality. A man whose religious faith was repressed could never be a loyal citizen, since the state was usurping his first allegiance and costing him his primary, or first, freedom.”

Anyone presenting himself as an interpreter of American law and justice who fails to grasp these truths should read an interesting couple of texts he might find rather arresting, namely the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Remembering the Creator to Whom the Declaration refers and Whose bestowal of rights and liberties is the steel beam of American public life might prove useful to Prof. Leiter and all who, like him, would reduce religious and, thereby, all liberty to the whim of the state, the very thing against which a brave and thoughtful generation of Americans revolted in the 1770s.

Gosnell, the New York Times, and Moral Squalor

by Rob Schwarzwalder

April 19, 2013

Abortion champion Andrew Rosenthal, who happens to be editorial page editor of what historically has been the nation’s flagship daily, The New York Times, has written a peevish, “how dare you question the Great Oz”-type op-ed defending his paper’s insubstantial coverage of the Kermit Gosnell trial.

About his piece is the air of a young child, his hand stuck firmly in the cookie jar, who rather than regretting his error is infuriated at being caught.

Unable to bring himself to describe the crimes “Dr.” Gosnell committed – such things as snipping the necks of crying babies – instead, Rosenthal reduces these little persons to “viable fetuses.” How very medical, distant, pristine, and deadly.

Mr. Rosenthal indicts Gosnell for his “appalling crimes” (what makes them appalling, Mr. Rosenthal? You regard Dr. George Tiller, who did the same things as Gosnell only in unsoiled conditions, as a hero) and links to a piece about them. However, he cannot bring himself to describe these crimes. To do so would demand intellectual integrity and moral courage, since it would involve an acknowledgement of the humanness of the unborn baby – a bridge the stolid advocates of unrestricted access to abortion on demand cannot cross. The insistent recreation of moral reality means holding one’s ground, even if it is crumbling beneath his feet.

In the 1930s, Lady Astor confronted Stalin on his unimaginable enterprise of mass murder, asking him, “When are you going to stop killing people?” He responded, “When it is no longer necessary.” Read Mr. Rosenthal’s article and ask if this same spirit does not seem latent in every line. Abortion is, for him and those on his side, not the loss of a life or the scarring of a woman’s body. It is a post-modern rite, a baptism not of water or the Spirit but of death, an act of defiance and self-exaltation which does not represent purging from sin but the calcification of the soul.

Mr. Rosenthal’s concern is not for the unborn and born children slaughtered like chubby pigs by Gosnell and his minions, or the women whose lives were lost and health misshapen because of grotesque treatment they received. Rather, Mr. Rosenthal’s major complaint is the unsanitary conditions of Gosnell’s clinic.

It is nice to see Mr. Rosenthal’s mellifluous outrage over Gosnell’s inattention to the germ theory. I’m sure the good editor keeps Purell on his desk and sanitary wipes in his car.

With audacity so great it stifles the cry of honesty, Mr. Rosenthal goes on to write, “Last I checked, there’s no rule that a newspaper, or that paper’s editorial page, has to run one piece about a bad clinic for every piece celebrating a good one.”

Fair point. But I wonder why the Times, as it did with the trial of Tiller murderer George Roeder, did not cover such things as jury selection or pronounce endlessly on the assorted issues involved in the Gosnell case.

Finally, here is Rosenthal’s peroration:

Dr. Tiller was performing safe and legal abortions when he was gunned down in the foyer of his own church. The reopening of his clinic, which will not perform late-term abortions, is an act of courage on the part of Julie Burkhart, a former colleague of Dr. Tiller, and others. She is already receiving death threats from people who believe that murder is an acceptable way of protesting legal, constitutionally protected abortions. Through this sort of intimidation and through legitimate political action, anti-abortion forces have been alarmingly successful in restricting women’s access to reproductive health services, including birth control, cancer screening and other services. That is the real issue.

Making “this sort of intimidation” (which is roundly condemned by the pro-life movement and always has been) equivalent to “legitimate political action” is so inflatedly unctuous the reader is reminded of a passage in Wodehouse in which Jeeves is chided for burning Bertie Wooster’s toast. It’s sort of like saying, “cyanide and aspirin are both drugs,” technically accurate but essentially, and gravely, misleading.

“The real issue” is access to birth control, not the murder of children? As others have written, no one asks, “Is your fetus a boy or a girl? Have you given the fetus a name? Is the collection of blood and tissue and DNA growing in your womb your first?”

The term is baby. The issue is murder. The culprit is Kermit Gosnell, and not because he didn’t use clean forceps.

Calling an unborn child a “fetus” makes him or her no less human. Indignation over cleanliness (is it truly next to Godliness, Mr. Rosenthal?) and predation as one’s fundamental response to moral horror is like the man who was offended he couldn’t wear a hat to his hanging. It rather misses the point.

I am as troubled by Mr. Rosenthal’s stentorian resistance to calling murder “murder” as I am by the absolutist position he takes on abortion itself. When a public opinion-leader can stare at transparent evil and pronounce it benign, does “civilization” itself have any continued meaning?

“When Real Love Collides with Our Selfish Hearts”

by Rob Schwarzwalder

April 8, 2013

Growing up in a home where one’s parents are divorced or whose marriage is characterized by hostility can lead to deep pain and an unsurprising skepticism about marriage itself.

My colleague, Carrie Russell, in a blog post for the new “Marriage Generation” movement, has addressed this issue directly and graciously. “Marriage should be treasured for the value it brings to husbands and wives, to their children, and for the character it develops in them,” writes Carrie. “But, for all those little kids who will grow up like I did, with a mistaken idea of what marriage is, and without an understanding of the self-giving that builds character and love, I cheer on the rebuilding of a marriage culture.”

Read Carrie’s full, moving article here.

Does Anything’s - or Anyone’s - Size Matter to God?

by Rob Schwarzwalder

April 2, 2013

The observable universe is about 93 billion light years in diameter. According to NASA, “To obtain an idea of the size of a light-year, take the circumference of the earth (24,900 miles), lay it out in a straight line, multiply the length of the line by 7.5 (the corresponding distance is one light-second), then place 31.6 million similar lines end to end. The resulting distance is almost 6 trillion (6,000,000,000,000) miles!”

When we go to the other end of the size spectrum – to atoms – their almost infinite quantity presents us with a mathematical evaluation equally stunning: The federal Energy Department’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility says that an average adult is composed of “approximately 7*10²⁷ atoms. That is, 7 followed by 27 zeros.”

For all practical purposes, the size of the universe and the number of atoms in a single body has this in common: Our universe, our world, and our physical beings are composed of units so enormous as to be pragmatically incalculable. From near-infinite smallness to near-infinite breadth, not to mention near-infinite numbers of stars and planets, the counts are so exhaustive as to be mind-numbing.

These things point to a central truth about the nature of God. To Him, size as we understand it is immaterial. He created the smallest sub-atomic particle as well as a universe so large that astronomers qualify it as “observable” and “non-observable.”

It’s important to realize that God does not live in the universe; He made it, and lives outside it. If He made it, our grasp of its immensity is not commensurate with His perspective but only our own, a grasp limited by human finitude. Such finitude is immeasurably miniscule compared to God’s.

Some critics of Christianity charge that the notion of God becoming a man is pretentious to the point of being laughable because who are we, on this tiny planet in a vast galaxy. ABC News reports that “of roughly 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, a new analysis of Kepler (Space Telescope) data shows that around 17 percent of them have Earth-sized planets orbiting them, meaning there could be as many as 17 billion Earth-sized worlds.”

Yet if we understand the insignificance of size to the God presented to us in the Bible, the location and circumference of the earth become irrelevant. The New Testament claims that God came to our planet in human form. He was Jesus of Nazareth, through Whom the Father created the world and sustains its existence (John 1:3, Hebrews 1:2), incarnate Deity, a first century laborer from a little town in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. This assertion would be ludicrous were not the evidence for it so convincing.

If we use our view of size as a means of defining value, the tallest and fattest person on earth is the most valuable and the littlest and thinnest is the least. How far this is from the biblical estimation of human value. According to Scripture, we were knit-together in our mothers’ wombs, and our “unformed bodies” are seen by the eye of God (Psalm 139). From conception onward, we are persons of such value that God superintends every moment of our growth.

A God like this – One who speaks the grandeur and complexity of the universe into being, Who composes DNA with hundreds of billions of atoms – is bound by neither the size of the created order nor the complexity of the human body. He intervenes daily in both, affirming the magnificence of His character and the tender care He has for those made in His image and likeness.

Lack of Data on Same-Sex Parenting Should Be a Major Caution to Supreme Court

by Rob Schwarzwalder

March 27, 2013

The brilliant legal scholar Nelson Lund, who co-authored FRC’s amicus brief on the President’s health care plan with the director of our Center for Religious Liberty, Ken Klukowski, has written a landmark op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal on the lack of any sociological data on how same-sex marriage affects children. Professor Lund, who teaches at George Mason University’s School of Law and formerly was executive editor of the University of Chicago Law Review, notes that “There are no scientifically reliable studies at all, nor could there be, given the available data,” with respect to the affects of same-sex parenting. He concludes, “If the Supreme Court constitutionalizes a right to same-sex marriage … there will be no going back,” says Professor Lund. “The court cannot possibly know that it is safe to take this irrevocable step.” Read his compelling analysis here.

Madonna Still Scouting - for Herself

by Rob Schwarzwalder

March 21, 2013

A woman who has built her career on extravagant self-debasement continues to find ways to demean and coarsen herself.

A few days ago, Madonna appeared at the GLAAD awards dressed in a Cub Scout uniform. With a Scoutmaster’s hat affixed to the back of her head, cowboy-style, she virtually purred with self-satisfaction at yet another few moments on the glistening stage of pop culture.

It should be clear that she was wearing a Cub Scout, not a Boy Scout, uniform. The former is worn by little boys who, by the way, wear caps, not broad-rimmed tan hats. Am I the only person troubled that a woman whose entire career has been premised on the continuous, ever-more graphic sexualization of herself would wear a child’s outfit to make a point about homosexuality? To objectify oneself is certainly an option in our society, however dehumanizing it might be. But is it really necessary to bring children into such an endeavor?

The uniform was, of course, secondary to the singer’s “look at me!” purpose. That she peppered her comments with obscenity and, in her remarks, reduced Scouting to such things as pitching a tent and building a fire says a great deal. Although these and many other practical skills are important to Scouting, building character is the chief goal of the BSA. Sadly, this is an objective concerning which Madonna seems both ignorant and unconcerned.

Rather than anger, Christians should feel pity for an entertainer desperately seeking public affirmation, but avoiding discovery of what it means to live as a person made in the image and likeness of God.

A Meditation on the State of the Union and Having It All

by Rob Schwarzwalder

February 13, 2013

President Obama wants nearly 30 new government programs, but says they won’t cost anything. He wants to encumber businesses of all sizes with an unworkable health care plan whose thousands of pages are only now beginning to be fully understood, but says he wants to reduce health care costs. He calls for creating a stronger, more vibrant middle class, but wants to put four year-olds in pre-school. He calls for fatherhood as a moral imperative, but wants to redefine marriage. He applauds America for being a land of laws and justice, but his Cabinet officers ignore multiple Freedom of Information Act requests from around the nation.

I guess I’m kind of like the President. I’d like to eat prime rib and ice cream several times a day without gaining weight. I’d like to climb all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks without cracking a sweat. I’d like to win an Olympic gold medal without having to train. And why doesn’t someone just give me a Ph.D. without my having to study or write dissertation? After all, I want it.

Mr. Obama lives in a twilight world of utopian dreams and impractical policies. His goals, his means, and his ideas are about as compatible as Mike Tyson and Tiny Tim.

Politics, like life, is about choices, often hard ones. Mr. Obama’s self-contradictory policy proposals collapse under the weight of incoherence. Our nation loses as a result.

Pandering on Sexual Morality = Church Decline

by Rob Schwarzwalder

February 6, 2013

John Lomperis at the Institute of Religion and Democracy has written a convincing, tightly-argued piece that old-line Protestant churches that compromise their allegiance to biblical moral truth are failing. It’s well worth reading. Here are two particularly potent quotes from it:

** “The spiritual and existential end of a Christian denomination (United Church of Christ) with such a rich heritage should drive any disciple of Jesus to mourn.”

** “Recently, some voices have argued that if non-mainline evangelical churches are to survive among younger generations of Americans, they too must move their approach to sexual morality closer to that of the UCC. In light of the above, the best response this young adult can offer is: Seriously???”