Two acts of vandalism were committed in recent days against facilities associated with the debates over homosexuality—one on each side of the issue.

In Arlington Heights, Illinois, bricks were thrown through the glass doors and windows of the Christian Liberty Academy. That night, the Christian school was to host a banquet put on by Americans for Truth about Homosexuality (AFTAH), a pro-family organization led by Peter LaBarbera. The banquet was to feature presentation of an award to Scott Lively, another pro-family activist who heads Abiding Truth Ministries.

In the other incident, an office door and two display cases of the GLBT Center at North Carolina State University in Raleigh were defaced with spray paint, including an anti-gay epithet.

Both acts of vandalism were contemptible, and Family Research Council (FRC) condemns them both equally. The debates over homosexuality, however emotional they may become, should be carried on peacefully by those on both sides. Physical attacks on people or property are never justified. (Will liberal groups join us in equally denouncing both acts? The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is quick to accuse conservatives of “hate,” chose to blame the victims, criticizing the attackers in Illinois primarily for “[a]dding fuel to a fire started and stoked by anti-gay activists.”)

So are there any differences between these two incidents? Yes. There is not the slightest evidence that the spray paint attack at NC State had any connection with any religious or political organization or public policy issue, or that it was perpetrated by anyone other than a lone thug.

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David Gushee, a self-professed “progressive” Evangelical who supported Barack Obama in 2008, yesterday published an elegant piece on the sacredness of human life, in which he previews his forthcoming book on this topic.  Conservative Evangelicals can applaud Gushee’s argument, as summarized in the following:

The moral witness of the early church gives us stark evidence of what our forebears understood life’s sacredness to mean. Theirs was a comprehensive sacredness of life ethic that recoiled at the shedding of blood and opposed Christian participation in practices ranging from abortion to infanticide to murder to gladiator games to torture to war.

As to war, the record of the early church is much more mixed; over time, there were many Christian soldiers in the Roman legions, and the text of the New Testament indicates that military service is consistent with God’s plan for both government and His redeemed people.  But Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Georgia’s Mercer University, should be given his due: He is a political liberal whose commitment to Scripture is such that he cannot deny the witness of God’s Word - that personhood begins at conception.

In a 2009 op-ed in USA Today, Gushee described his disillusionment with the then-nascent Obama Administration:

“Mexico City, conscience clause, Sebelius, embryonic stem cells. In each case, I have been asked by friends at Democratic or progressive-leaning think tanks not just to refrain from opposing these moves, but instead to support them in the name of a broader understanding of what it means to be pro-life. I mainly refused … a society that legally permits abortion on demand is deeply corrupt. It pays for adult sexual liberties with the lives of defenseless developing children. That practice, in turn, desensitizes society to the implications of paying for prospective medical cures with defenseless frozen embryos, which themselves are available because our society pays for medically assisted reproductive technology by producing hundreds of thousands of these embryos as spares.”

As he puts it in yesterday’s Associated Baptist Press op-ed, “My biblical explorations find building blocks for this belief (that human life is sacred) in the Old Testament and New Testament. These include the creation narratives (including the imago dei concept), Old Testament laws and prophetic writings. It also includes New Testament narratives about Jesus and the early church as well as the theological significance of God becoming human in Jesus Christ and dying for sinners such as us.”

Amen, brother.  Amen.

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The American Interest is running a piece by the distinguished scholar Peter Berger about Christian reflections on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 9/11.  After citing the various and sometimes guilt-laden responses, Berger says this: “In all these texts there is not one word about the obvious moral reality of the event: That the United States was brutally attacked by an enemy of unmitigated evil, against whom violent force was fully justified. Both the goal of Jihadist terror—the establishment of a tyranny with systemic violation of human rights—and the means to get there—indiscriminate mass murder and torture—are utterly evil in the perspective of Biblical faith. That should be at the center of any Christian reflection about September 11.”

Amen: Whatever the missteps of American policy regarding our response to the slaughter ten years past, nothing should surmount, as a response to it, the reality that the terrorists were killers on a mass scale and that their acts against our country were heinous.  Without qualification, without justification.  Period.

American Christians embarrassed by the occasional reactive response from some of their fellow believers often go much too far in the other direction, engaging in lugubrious self-reflection and near-flagelative anti-Americanism.  I am reminded of something the late Carl Henry wrote years ago: ”Not to oppose a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mao would be an act of Christian lovelessness.”  The same is true for the Taliban, al-Qaeda and their associates in the fellowship of human evil.

Should we hate them?  No.  Should we defend ourselves from them?  Yes.  The means of this opposition might be open for debate, but if America refuses to thwart those who would destroy it, we demonstrate our unfitness for the independence and liberty our fathers have, at the cost of many of their lives, bestowed to us.  Let us be worthy of them.

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For those of us who have to read the Washington Post, it can often be a trial. We are used to having our political, economic, social, and foreign policy principles trashed on a daily basis. We know that the Post considers us “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” Our hometown paper regards us Christians as, at best, interlopers here. One of the prime examples I cite was the cartoon done by the late Herblock. He depicted anti-abortion demonstrators as decidedly déclassé. The woman bearing a placard looked mean-spirited and frowsy. But at least she was a woman. The man in the cartoon wore a ragged black frock coat, a broad-brimmed hat, and nasty little granny glasses perched on his long and disapproving nose. Here was the best part: in the pocket of down-at-the-heels preacher was a snake. Oh my. How very tolerant the tolerance troopers are.

For sheer leer and sneer, however, you’d be hard-pressed to top the Post’s TV critic, Tom Shales. Shales has made a career of looking down his nose at just about everything that we cherish. They are the beliefs of tens of millions of us from outside-the-Beltway (and tens of thousands inside-the-Beltway, too)  Shales came down like the big ball in Times Square this new year on Brit Hume.

The former FOX News anchor, now a senior commentator, had the temerity to recommend to Tiger Woods that he get right with Jesus. Oh, the humanity! Oh, the horror! Shales thought Hume was “dissing” all the Buddhists in the world by stating Christianity offered forgiveness and redemption that exceeded that of other faiths. And he said it—gasp—on camera.

Okay, Mr. Shales. Let’s talk about Christian forgiveness. I’d like to take you to the Lincoln Memorial. There, the words of the majestic Second Inaugural are inscribed on the wall. President Lincoln offered this thought about the slavery issue that had convulsed the country through four long years of civil war: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”

Where do you think that “judge not” phrase came from? Was it a saying of Buddha? Or Mohammed? Or might it possibly have been found in Matthew, Chapter 7, verse 1, and offered by You Know Who?

Frederick Douglass was the first black man ever invited to an inaugural reception at the White House. Unlike today, where the uninvited get in, guards tried to keep President Lincoln’s guest out. When the President saw Douglass after he had climbed through the window, he hailed him. “There’s my friend Douglass.” He motioned for the champion of black Emancipation to come to the head of the line. He asked for Douglass’ opinion of the Address. “Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort.”

What? Sacred efforts undertaken on the Capitol steps? Wasn’t Lincoln attempting to shove religion down Americans’ throats? If Tom Shales had been there to report on that scene, would he have carped: “He doesn’t really have the authority, does he, unless one believes that every Christian by mandate must proselytize?” Was Lincoln trying to—shudder—proselytize?

How else could Ulysses S. Grant treat Robert E. Lee and his ragged rebel hosts with such tenderness, such dignity, at Appomattox? What else could explain Lincoln’s policy of “letting `em up easy” than an understanding of forgiveness and redemption—as taught in the Christian Scriptures?

I am not saying Lincoln and Grant were evangelists. Or born-again Christians. But at their best they lived and acted in a world formed by biblical ideals. They were—as millions of Americans then and now—shaped by scriptural truths.

If Brit Hume had gone to Thailand and there told a TV audience that Buddhism was inadequate, there might be room for protest. If he had confronted the Dalai Lama and urged him to give it all up, there might be room for Shales’ haughty harrumphs. But Brit was reaching out in a most tender-hearted way to a man whom he admired greatly—whom we all admired greatly. Brit was offering Tiger Woods balm in Gilead. You can enter the Kingdom of Heaven with that—and even pass through airport security.

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