Kirsten Gillibrand — earnestly enacting passion — stumbles over "breastplate" and "sword."

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand started preaching this morning during her remarks at NAN’s King Day Public Policy Forum. #NANMLK19 pic.twitter.com/Zp756P4uwD

— Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) January 21, 2019

I put some effort into looking for the text of the MLK speech I think she was quoting, but it is easy to find the Biblical passages that King must have been preaching:

1. Isaiah 59:

The Lord looked and was displeased
that there was no justice.
16 He saw that there was no one,
he was appalled that there was no one to intervene;
so his own arm achieved salvation for him,
and his own righteousness sustained him.
17 He put on righteousness as his breastplate,
and the helmet of salvation on his head;
he put on the garments of vengeance
and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.
18 According to what they have done,
so will he repay
wrath to his enemies
and retribution to his foes;
he will repay the islands their due.

2. Ephesians 6:

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister, and he was — or believed or pretended to believe he was — channeling the word of God. Beautiful for him. But I'm wary of politicians adopting rhetoric like "the breastplate of righteousness," and maybe Kristen Gillibrand was too. Honestly, I don't know how you can stand up in front of everyone and pompously intone the syllable "breast" if you're not sure you can say it crisply.

Jeff Sessions is making us talk about what the Bible says.

I'm reading "Sessions says the Bible justifies separating immigrant families. The verses he cited are infamous" by Kyle Swenson in The Washington Post. Asked to defend the separation of children from parents taking them illegally across the U.S. border, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said:

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes... Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent, fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”

Swenson observes:

The passage — “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God” — has been read as an unequivocal order for Christians to obey state authority, a reading that not only justified Southern slavery but also authoritarian rule in Nazi Germany and South African apartheid.

And what about other things in the New Testament? Stephen Colbert joked darkly:

“Hey, don’t bring God into this. I don’t think God picked you, because I don’t worship Vladimir Putin... Jesus said, ‘Suffer the children to come unto me.’ But I’m pretty sure all Sessions saw was the words ‘children’ and ‘suffer’ and said, ‘I’m on it.’ ”

Swenson collects other pro-immigrant Christian responses

“I guess Sessions forgot about the Gospels part of the Bible. Matthew 25:35 says ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,’ ” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said on Twitter. “Nothing in the Bible says to separate kids from parents. It teaches the opposite.”...

Theology scholar Mike Frost wrote in 2016 that Romans 13 should not be used to quell dissent because it comes from a period when Christians faced persecution from the Roman Emperor Nero.

“This is the guy who was said to have had Christians dipped in oil and set on fire to light his garden at night,” Frost wrote. “It makes perfect sense that Paul would commend the fledgling church to keep its head down, to avoid rocking the boat, to submit quietly to the prevailing political winds. They had no choice. They lived under the authority of a dictator.”

Quite aside from what the Bible says, should the Attorney General be using the Bible to defend a government policy? One might answer yes, because the policy was challenged morally, and even though it is theoretically possible to discuss morality without religion and some people can only discuss morality without religion, for many people morality is bound up with religion, and it should be at least permissible to discuss the morality of a public policy in terms of religion. There are consequences to using religion this way, though, of course. It may feel exclusionary to those who don't share the religion or who have a religious problem with interpreting scripture for a political purpose. And if you've got a passage for your position, then I'll have a passage for mine, and I can reinterpret yours and you can reinterpret mine, and we may find ourselves making garbage out of what we were only using in the first place because we posed as believing it was holy.

By the way, we all feel bad for the children, but I'm seeing a spotlight on the point when the children are removed from parents who are being sent to prison. If the separation is wrong, what is the less wrong thing that ought to be done instead?  I'm not seeing anyone talking about that. Am I missing everything that answers my question or are there reasons why no one wants to talk about that?

ADDED: At National Review, Rich Lowry explains the limitation imposed by the Flores Consent Decree (from 1997):

It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.

Obama — speaking at the Temple Emanu-El in NYC — says he's "basically a liberal Jew."

Is that cultural appropriation? It seems fine to me. I'm just asking because I've been following the culture of sensitivity to "cultural appropriation," and I need to put this post up, with the tag, because this is how I keep my notes these days.

By the way, Obama looks fabulous in the pictures. Relaxed, happy — as he usually looks, but amped up a couple notches now.

ADDED: Is Obama all things to all people? And, by the way, where does that phrase come from? It comes from the Apostle Paul:

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.  To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

It's not the most poorly timed NYT article ever, but this David Brooks article — "My $120,000 Vacation" — was published yesterday.

"Thanks to the Four Seasons’ new 24-day, round-the-world fantasy trip, you get all the indulgences of travel without any of its hassles. But like all fantasies, is this too much of a good thing?" Ugh. How embarrassing to find yourself — you, the moralizing columnist — asking that question on the day of the Paris attacks. I'd be smacking David Brooks around anyway, even if this were not published on a day when you pretty well know that the editors must have wished they could recall this one and publish it some other time.

It got me thinking back to September 11, 2001, a day when I spent the morning reading the paper NYT delivered to my doorstep. I calmly read it for an hour or two before setting off for work, not knowing what those who used TV or radio in the morning already knew. What was in the paper that morning? Maybe you remember: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen":

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings....

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'...

Mr. Ayers has always been known as a ''rich kid radical."... Thinking back on his life, Mr. Ayers said, ''I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope and history rhymed.''

Terrible. Terrible beyond terrible timing, but what mind-crushingly bad timing. Brooks's bad timing is almost nothing compared to that. But still, it must pain him with a pain with which no one can sympathize that his effort traveling the world and cogitating about it appears in print at a point when no one will be enticed to share his broodings.

But so what if the Four Seasons slaps its brand on a package tour and you flit from place to place on a chartered jet? I don't see what's particularly posh about this. They keep plying him with champagne. He goes around the world stopping in Tokyo, Beijing, the Maldives, the Serengeti, St. Petersburg, Marrakesh and New York, because these are all places with Four Seasons hotels, so that's where you stay. Who are your co-travelers, these people who pay $120,000 each to be shuttled around like that and always assured of a stay in a Four Seasons hotel?

Each morning you get to choose from an array of options — a visit to a Russian ballet school? A tour of Nevsky Prospekt shopping street? An excursion to the Fabergé Museum? The people on this trip loved the experience. They were very satisfied customers.... The people on this trip were by and large on the lower end of the upper class. One had a family carpet business. Another was an I.T. executive at an insurance company. There were a few law partners....

Yes, thanks, David. This is what anyone can figure out from the description. $120,000 isn't really that much to spend for all this. It's kind of a bargain, a bargain with nice branding that effectively sends the message that one can see the world from inside a cocoon of protection. Who with $120,000 to spare falls for a pitch like that? The lower end of the upper class. Brooks is looking down on these people.

[T]hey were socially and intellectually unpretentious. They treated the crew as friends and equals and not as staff. Nobody was trying to prove they were better informed or more sophisticated than anybody else. There were times, in fact, when I almost wished there had been a little more pretense and a little more intellectual and spiritual ambition.

Almost wished? You wished it every moment, didn't you? These people were beneath you. A family carpet business. They didn't even know to treat the servants as servants. And, you, David Brooks, didn't know how to treat rather ordinary people as people.

The guests were delighted by the intricate wall carvings in the Royal Harem building in Istanbul, by the vegetables in a Turkish restaurant, by 15 minutes of opera in a Russian palace. But over dinner, they mostly spoke with their new friends about their kids and lives back home, not about the meaning and depth of what they had just seen. 

The rubes. They looked to each other for friendship and human contact. I wonder what they thought of the disapproving eminence from The New York Times. They visit the Hermitage and see Rembrandt’s "Return of the Prodigal Son" but nobody talks about the meaning of the familiar Bible story. They visit Ephesus but don't air their opinions about St. Paul, so Brooks is forced to tell us what he might have told the carpet people and their ilk:

Paul must have been regarded as an extreme religious crank, preaching a life of poverty and love. His antimaterialistic and anti-achievement message was diametrically opposed to the prevailing ethos of classical Rome, with its emphasis on wealth, power and grandeur.... It would have been nice to stand amid these ruins reading Paul, or to talk about how to reconcile material happiness with spiritual joy as we were on the very spot where Paul preached, where the ethos of Athens met the ethos of Jerusalem. But our guide never really told us Paul’s story. He spent most of his time instead taking us through the royal palaces, with the grand chambers, frescoes and meeting halls. He gave us those material facts about the place that tour guides specialize in (who built what when), but which no one remembers because they don’t really have anything to do with us emotionally. The Ephesus visit was an occasion to have a good discussion about how to live and what really lasts. But if anybody was thinking such thoughts, they went unexpressed.

And the anybodies included Brooks himself. America is full of people who would love to talk as long as you want about the meaning of Christianity. Why would "the very spot where Paul preached" get you closer to any significant meaning... especially from folks who opted into the Four-Seasons-branded package tour? But if you thought it was important — mystical? — to talk about Paul's ideas in the very place where he had them, why didn't you see fit to talk? Why didn't you think the people you were living with were worthy of conversation? Imagine what you could have said: I paid $120,000 to stand here and think about Paul, but Paul's ideas are in a book and I can read that book again, but I've read it already, and I know it's perfectly obvious that it would have been better for me to donate $120,000 to charities that serve the poor and stay in America and find the people who truly believe in Christianity and to talk about Paul with them, but I'm here now, and you are the people who are with me, and I want to hear what you think about Paul.

But Brooks keeps his opinions to himself until he gets home and puts it in writing, opening himself only to those of us who encounter him on the other side of text.

UPDATE: Here's another post, dealing with some of the ethical issues.

"For some reason, I'm dedicating my pre-6-a.m. writing to arguing with chickelit."

I write, just now, deep in the comments thread for "What if the only people who took advantage of an unlimited leave policy were women?"

1. "'2 Thessalonians 3:10-13 is as good a retort as any to the "question" posited by Althouse.'" [Link to St. Paul's epistle added.] "Surely, Paul considered taking care of the household and the children within it as work! You think the reference to 'work' means holding down an income-producing job in the modern sense? That would be a nutty thing to believe."

2. "'Ritmo goes full Titus.'" [Reacting to this.] "No, Titus in his fullness would break free of whatever political obsession had its grip on the thread and give us real relief. You need a wild sense of fun and abandon to begin to replicate Titus."

"Hot & Steamy Buns."

"Faithful is not love. Faithful is a subservient position..."

"... in which insecure people can not accept that, despite their tremendous talents, they might be wrong. That's why I like cats and independent dogs."

So says Dante in at 3:01 a.m. in The Faithful Dog Café.

Faithful is not love? That made me think Love is faithful and kind... But it's "Love is patient and kind..."

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. 

Does that sound like a cat or a dog?

It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful....

Cat?

... it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 

Cat?!

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Cat?!!

Love never ends. 

That sounds like what we mean when we say faithful. (I know Paul goes on to put "love" in a category with "faith" and "hope" and says "love" is the greatest, but the love he describes includes complete faithfulness to the loved one.)

"Ponchos and sombreros: Partygoers don ‘insensitive’ attire despite student efforts."

Imagine! Student efforts failing to sear prick the conscience of the Mifflin Street Block Party people.

The student group that wants respectful seriousness and no horsing around on the subject of Cinco de Mayo calls itself Badgers Against Racism... or "BAR."

IN THE COMMENTS: pduggie said:

"sear the conscience" is the opposite of what you mean.

To have a seared conscience is to have one that is locked out from all claims of injustice.

I think you mean wound or prick.

He refers me to the New Testament, 1 Timothy:

¹The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. ²Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. ³They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. ⁴For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, ⁵because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.

I stand corrected. Prick is a much better word.

And by the way — I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice — there's a nice biblical argument for same sex marriage. St. Paul contemned the bad religionists who "forbid people to marry," and — right at that point — said "For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving." Did God not create gay people?

Here we are "in later times." Is your conscience seared or pricked?

AND: Though I've read the New Testament many times (though mostly the Gospels), my experience with searing the conscience is overwhelmingly from something written by Felix Frankfurter, in a passage I've used repeated in my constitutional law classes. The case is Baker v. Carr — a great Warren Court landmark — and Justice Frankfurter articulates what is, to me, the most memorable statement of judicial restraint in the Supreme Court reporters:

We were soothingly told at the bar of this Court that we need not worry about the kind of remedy a court could effectively fashion once the abstract constitutional right to have courts pass on a statewide system of electoral districting is recognized as a matter of judicial rhetoric, because legislatures would heed the Court's admonition. This is not only a euphoric hope. It implies a sorry confession of judicial impotence in place of a frank acknowledgment that there is not under our Constitution a judicial remedy for every political mischief, for every undesirable exercise of legislative power. The Framers, carefully and with deliberate forethought, refused so to enthrone the judiciary. In this situation, as in others of like nature, appeal for relief does not belong here. Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate. In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives. In any event, there is nothing judicially more unseemly nor more self-defeating than for this Court to make in terrorem pronouncements, to indulge in merely empty rhetoric, sounding a word of promise to the ear sure to be disappointing to the hope.

I'm quite shocked to discover Frankfurter misused the phrase! But then — did you know? — English was a second language for Felix Frankfurter, who was born in Vienna.

Photographing Obama/Clarence Thomas so he appears to have a halo.

I've seen many photographs of Obama that go for a halo image around his head. Photographers/editors seem to really love this kind of thing:



So it caught my eye when the New York Times — in "Groups Blanket Supreme Court on Health Care" — chose a haloed image of Clarence Thomas:



I exclude the possibility that this is an accident. The selection of photographs in the NYT is exquisitely deliberate. I exclude the possibility that the NYT adores Thomas. The halo cannot possibly reflect the religious awe that we sense in the Obama halo pictures. I doubt that is has anything to do with race, though Thomas, like Obama is black. That is, maybe strange notions of spiritualism arise in the minds of white photographers and editors when they gaze at images of black people. Maybe!

I can only come up with 2 explanations I think are plausible:

1. The Clarence Thomas halo is a really messed up halo, constructed of fuzzy dots and sagging at either end. It vaguely calls to mind a UFO. It therefore conveys a negative opinion of the man, especially if you also think of the extremely well-formed haloes that appear around the sainted President's head.

2. The NYT is trying to butter up Clarence Thomas. They'd like to influence him to uphold the health care law. The article begins with an elaborately set-up quote from Thomas, likening Supreme Court decisionmaking to shooting free throws in basketball: You focus on the rim and ignore all the crowd noise.

With three days of arguments scheduled for this week, the nine justices will need the steely nerves of a clutch free-throw shooter to block out all the noise surrounding a case that has generated perhaps the most intense outside lobbying campaign that the court has ever seen.

The article itself is part of that campaign, no?

Proponents of the sweeping 2010 law, working with the White House, have also developed “talking points” to emphasize the potential harm if the law is thrown out, including the reduction in coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and for young adults who wish to remain on their parents’ policies.

Yes, it will take an immense amount of nerve to throw out this uniquely momentous law. I don't think they can exclude all the noise. Maybe Thomas can, but none of the others. Maybe Scalia. But the question is whether the pressure against the law feels greater than the pressure for it. It's momentously valuable/momentously destructive. The noise could cancel itself out, leaving the Justices to decide using a purely legal methodology.

And if they could do that, they would all deserve haloes. But sophisticated legal folk don't think there is any such purity to be found among mortals.

“All that other background noise, I never — I don’t listen to all this stuff,” [Clarence Thomas] said. “I don’t read the papers, I don’t watch the evening news.” If justices let outside pressures distract them, he said, “in my opinion, you have no business in the job.”

Jesus said: "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." And Paul wrote: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

"One person with belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

The paraphrased John Stuart Mill quote that the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik tweeted before his murderous rampage.

In 2009 he wrote about the need to set up a counter to what he described as "the violent Norwegian Marxist organisations" that he believed terrorised the "politically conservative"....

Things Breivik blogged:

The vast majority of new faces in the Progress party are now politically correct career politicians and not in any way idealists who are willing to take risks and work for idealistic goals....

In Norway and Sweden extreme Marxist attitudes have become acceptable/everyday while the old-established truths of patriotism and cultural conservatism today are branded as extremism....

I have on some occasions discussed with… the [English Defence League] and recommended them to use conscious strategies. The tactics of the EDL is to 'entice' an overreaction from jihad youth/extreme Marxists, something they have succeeded [in] several times already.

So, here is one man, apparently acting alone but believing perhaps that his action is the equivalent of 100,000. What he did was emphatically not an "idea" — as Mill had it. I'm speculating that he imagined his action embodied an idea: That others like him could act on their own to great effect, for his cause. Why amass armies or even terrorist groups, when individuals, understanding the idea, can take up their arms and set out on the day they feel called and take down 100 (or more) selected individuals who represent these "new faces in the Progress party"  (or whomever the enemy is supposed to be)?

This is a powerful idea. Will we not hear it again and again, as Breivik receives endless publicity and his politics and motivations are plumbed and analyzed? It is a viral idea, and the media are catching the virus right now. As we talk about Breivik, we need to think clearly about what we are doing and whether we are promoting his cause.

By the way, the John Stuart Mill quote, unparaphrased, is: "One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests." It's from "Representative Government," which you can read in its entirety here. Here's the quote in context:

To think that because those who wield the power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. They who can succeed in creating a general persuasion that a certain form of government, or social fact of any kind, deserves to be preferred, have made nearly the most important step which can possibly be taken towards ranging the powers of society on its side. On the day when the proto-martyr was stoned to death at Jerusalem, while he who was to be the Apostle of the Gentiles stood by "consenting unto his death," would any one have supposed that the party of that stoned man were then and there the strongest power in society?

The Biblical reference is to the martyrdom of St. Stephen, and the Apostle of the Gentiles is Paul, then Saul, consenting to the stoning.