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The Difference Between a Conservative and a Liberal

After walking quite a distance, my wife and I sat to rest in a large tent where someone was serving Turkish coffee.  We both sat on little stools and the terminology “classic liberal” came into the conversation.  After someone else commented, I was asked by a hippie-looking younger man what I thought liberal was.

I said that I relate conservative and liberal to the U. S. Constitution when it comes to a political definition.  The liberal takes what many call a “loose construction” of the constitution.  With that approach, the liberal can conform the meaning of the words to what he wants.  The constitution is malleable.

You have heard progressive applied to liberals.  The Constitution is an evolving document.  According to liberals., it can progress in its meaning.

Related to a loose construction of the constitution is a view of government that says man gets his rights from democratic government.  Man gives and takes away rights.  They can change.  Meaning changes, because it is subjective.  Taking it to an extreme, a man can self-identify as a woman and vice-versa.

Since power comes through human construct, forms of power are human constructs, using language.  This can change using language through deconstruction.  Some would say by synthesizing an antitheses with a thesis, forming a new thesis.

On the other hand, a conservative takes a strict construction of the U. S. Constitution.  His goal to to find what the authors meant by what they said.  This is sometimes called originalism.  The conservative looks for author’s intent.  The constitution is objective in its meaning.  It can’t change in what it means.  The goal is to find out what they meant, not read into it something that he wants it to mean.

I continued by saying that this approach to reality and truth affects everything.  An engineer building a bridge or an airplane must follow the laws of physics.  He can’t read whatever he wants to natural laws.  This was a good hopping off point into evangelism.

Our rights are not given by government, but by God.  Meaning is objective because it proceeds from God.  Natural rights from God are self-evident truths.

Theological conservatism or liberalism are not much different, except that instead of the constitution, someone interprets scripture according to either a strict or loose construction.  Someone can look into the text of scripture and see what he wants, everyone having his own take, his own opinion.  Or, he interprets the text of scripture according to original intent, what God and His human authors intended, what they meant by what they said.

An Analysis of Supreme Court Overturn of Roe and the Lie of the Dissenting Opinion

Early Friday my phone notified me the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.  It brought great happiness, comparable to the 2016 election.  I knew it was happening, but it got off my radar, so when I saw it, it was adulation.  Praise God!  I looked for a copy of the decision, downloaded the pdf, and started to read.  My mind gobbled Alito’s text with delight and refreshment.  Outside of the Bible, this doesn’t happen much.

I celebrate Samuel Alito and the four other justices.  They showed great courage.  They did something that I will never forget, a highlight of my life.  I was eleven years old at the Roe v. Wade decision and did not even know it happened.  I’ve lived almost my entire life under its evil effects.

Even as I say that, the most courageous was Clarence Thomas.  I separate him from the entire group with his concurring opinion.  Same sex marriage is not in the constitution either.  He wrote (p. 119):

For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous.”

Obergefell decided same sex marriage.  The court passed that on the same basis as Roe.  On the other hand, Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion, to distinguish himself, wrote:

First is the question of how this decision will affect other precedents involving issues such as contraception and marriage—in particular, the decisions in . . . . Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015). I emphasize what the Court today states: Overruling Roe does not mean the overruling of those precedents, and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.

I hope he reconsiders this point if same sex marriage comes to the court again.

The decision showed three basic opinions, represented by a majority of five, minority of three, and then Chief Justice Roberts alone.  The majority said nothing personal about the morality of abortion.  The five wrote the Constitution says nothing about abortion and contains no right to abortion therein.  The Constitution neither commends or condemns abortion.  Roe v. Wade found a right where there was none.  It was unconstitutional.

Roberts upheld the Mississippi law as constitutional based upon a generous interpretation of Casey.  Even though the arguments required to choose one way or the other, he chose silence on an abortion right.  Roberts kicked the abortion can down the road, siding neither way on its constitutionality, attempting, it seems, to please both sides.

The minority of three wrote:

Today, The Court . . . says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.

The Court did not say that.  These three Supreme Court justices lied.  The Court said nothing about whether a woman has a right to abortion.  It said the Constitution does not say anything about a right to abortion.  The Supreme Court does not decide what rights people have or do not have.  It does decide constitutional rights.  Is a constitutional right to abortion in the constitution?  The majority said, no.

Right now a state cannot force a woman to bring her pregnancy to term.  She can travel to another state with legal abortion and get one.  Everyone knows this.  The governor of California says it will give sanctuary to pregnant women who want to kill their babies.

As you and I read opinions such as written by the minority, perhaps you ask, “What is a woman?”  Or, “Who is ‘her’?” The three liberal judges function according to outdated language and meaning.  Doesn’t the patriarchy force its bias and its meaning of existence and reality through gendered language?

Feminists could support the Dobbs decision.  It establishes the existence of women.  For the court to force women to have their babies, there must be women.  What does that mean for transgender rights?  The Casey decision argued in 1992 a constitutional “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  These words followed Justice Anthony Kennedy’s now very famous sentence from the Casey opinion:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Yes, Kennedy was apparently one of the conservative faction of justices, seen as a moderate, appointed by Ronald Reagan.  Kennedy was no conservative in the spirit of William Buckley.

Donald Trump did a better job choosing justices than Ronald Reagan, who also chose Sandra Day O’Connor.  Take a moment to thank Donald J. Trump. He picked three of these justices in the majority.  Three for threeLet’s hear it for Trump. True conservatives should give Trump credit, but many won’t.

Mitt Romney tweeted out support of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe.  Could we trust him to have made the choices Trump did?  I don’t think so, but he could impeach Trump for an appropriate call to the Ukrainian president.

The Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe was no thanks to Anti-Trumpers, who did not vote for Trump in 2016.  Most are further to blame for the horrific consequences of 2020.  This includes John Piper and David French.  I concur with this Mollie Hemingway answer to French.

George Bush selected David Souter and George W. Bush did Chief Justice Roberts.  Thankfully the latter also picked Samuel Alito, the author of Dobbs.  This decision would not have happened under Romney or McCain and didn’t under the Bushes.

Liberty Magazine writes the following about Anthony Kennedy’s words in Casey, the infamous abortion decision after Roe:

Though sounding more like a discourse on Spinozean metaphysics than on constitutional jurisprudence, this sentence has reached the level of notoriety among judicial and political conservatives that “separate but equal” once did among civil libertarians, or “material substratum” did among post-Enlightenment idealists.

No U.S. Supreme Court dictum in decades has faced such vilification as has poor Justice Kennedy’s 28 words. Robert Bork called the phrase indicative of “New Age jurisprudence”; William Bennett derided it as an “open-ended validation of subjectivism” that paves the way for drug abuse, assisted suicide, prostitution, and “virtually anything else”: George Will said it was “gaseously” written; Michael Uhlman labeled it a “thing of almost infinite plasticity”; the editors of First Things called it the “notorious mystery passage”; and on and on.

Kennedy’s take on liberty fits very nicely with a naturalist’s view of the world, turning language and meaning into one’s personal Gumby toy.

If I could brag about any one aspect of a reading of Dobbs by Samuel Alito, it’s the return to objective, plain writing.  He wrote like words meant something.  No one can follow that sentence by Kennedy, but it allowed for the perverseness we see in modern culture.  Your truth is your truth.  Your liberty is your liberty.  That’s not a baby, but a fetal, clump of cells.

The argument buttressing a right to abortion now undermines the definition of woman.  Most of those out there protesting the decision could and should protest both sides of the decision.  Both sides used oppressive and sexist language that uphold the patriarchy.  The liberal side does it in a more subtle and insidious way, thereby causing even worse damage to the LGBTQIA agenda.

The new, correct word for mother, or its replacement, abandoning the former meaning of woman, is gestator.  It’s obvious that this movement does not have everyone on the same page.  Their gender is fluid and the movement itself is too.  It’s changing and mutating so fast, it doesn’t have time to finish its handbook.  This forces liberal judges to use the outdated terms like “woman” and “her.”  You think I’m joking.

In a refreshing bit of honesty, unlike Roe and Casey, a gestator calling their self Sophie Lewis, in answer to Dobbs provides unmitigated clarity with her The Nation article:  “Abortion Involves Killing–and That’s OK!”  This entity (person, whatever) says:  “Dishonest sugar-coating did not work.  Let’s stop.  It didn’t work.  Let’s call it what it is, killing.”  Another word I would use, that Sophie did not, is “murder.”  So here we have it.  Samuel Alito was clear and so was Sophie Lewis.  Exhilarating truthfulness.

When you and I look at the protestors, they represent a profane culture.  They wear their piercings, falsely colored hair, and they speak streams of expletives and destroy private and public property.  This reflects the postmodern philosophy of Sartre, the French existentialist, who said that existence preceded essence.  Humans have no essential nature, thus no morality besides what every man makes for himself.  They don’t see themselves as accountable to God.  The appearance of Dobbs protestors mirrors this existential philosophy aligned with the Anthony Kennedy statement in Casey.  Their costumes are the uniform of their view of reality.  They define their own essence.

Not everyone will say it like Sophie Lewis, but the reason why an assassin could show up at Justice Kavanaugh’s house after the leak of the Dobbs opinion was because “killing is OK.”  That is also why a large majority of the media says little to nothing in opposition.  Their liberty allows for murder.  A baby may exist but cannot define his essence.  A critical theory justifies killing as the essence of liberty.

Since the Supreme Court announced the ruling on Friday, plain language came to the surface.  At a pro-abortion protest a man says, ala Sophie Lewis, he “loves killing babies.”  Many women call it the best decision they ever made.  Over ten years ago, I walked in a large pro-life march in San Francisco.  Those protesting the march on the side of the road were the most vile and lewd people I’ve ever seen in my life.  Their signs, language, and appearance were as bad as I’ve ever seen as an attempt to intimidate the march.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is so good.  The war, however, is just begun.  Hopefully, it won’t be a real war with real bullets, one that the Supreme Court provided the previous day with its concealed carry decision.

Reality and Truth: Celebrity Conservatives Versus True Bible Believers

Perhaps you, like me, as a Christian, pay attention to certain celebrity conservatives, who take many of the same or similar viewpoints as you.  You know there are differences.  Where is the overlap?

In diagnosing a worldview, there are various components to understanding it, as some people have or might put it, to see the map of the world.  Some of them are knowledge, ethics, purpose, and epistemology, but among the others, I want to explore two of them, reality and truth, as they relate to celebrity conservatives versus true Bible believers.  In general, very often true Bible believers are interested in the celebrity conservatives without their being interested in them.  Part of their “fan base” are Christians, who listen to their podcasts and watch their shows.
One of the celebrity conservatives, Jordan Peterson, the famous PhD professor, author, and public intellectual and speaker from Canada, doesn’t even call himself a conservative.  Celebrity conservatives today might call themselves classic liberals (you can look up classical liberalism).  Maybe he really isn’t conservative, but you also shrink your audience if you call yourself one.  As well, “liberal” might mean you keep your job and other opportunities.  Peterson does resonate with true Bible believers and they listen to, watch, and read him.
When I write, celebrity conservatives, I’m especially saying, Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, the late Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Candace Owens.  There are many others.  There is overlap between their worldviews and the worldview of a true Bible believer.
Before Covid hit and also before he had major health issues, my wife and I and another couple got tickets to hear Jordan Peterson in person in San Francisco, sponsored by the Independent Institute.  As I was listening to him, I enjoyed many things he was saying.  However, I knew he and I did not have the same worldview.  I was glad he could say what he did in public, but it wasn’t nearly enough for me either.  The celebrity conservatives like him are disappointing.
In the last week, I was thinking about the difference between the worldviews of celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers.  Even as I write this, I think about how a true Bible believer could even be a celebrity in our world.  I don’t think it’s possible.  The greater the celebrity status, the more you must be doing something wrong, and that includes evangelical leaders who have their own celebrity. They in part got there through capitulation and compromise.  Their greater celebrity doesn’t speak well.
The common ground in worldview, I believe, is that there is more proximity between celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers in their view of reality.  I would say that they both attempt to function according to reality, even if it means abandoning the truth.  The truth and reality do go together.  They overlap completely for a true Bible believer, but they don’t for celebrity conservatives.  Even actual reality and the reality of celebrity of conservatives don’t overlap identically.  To stay a celebrity, like everyone else who isn’t a true Bible believer, celebrity conservatives forsake actual reality and even more so, the truth.  Let me explain.
I want to use Jordan Peterson as an example.  Jesus either rose from the dead or He didn’t.  Jesus can’t be the greatest figure who ever lived if He wasn’t truth and He lied about the resurrection.  Peterson says that he’s not sure if he believes Christianity, but he tries to live like one.  He’s also saying, he’s not committing to the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, while living like Jesus did resurrect from the dead.  He borrows a reality based upon the truth without actually believing the truth.  Other conservatives do that, and it’s easy to see.
The world we live in is the real world.  Celebrity conservatives more than the mainstream culture try to explain positions according to reality, even if they deny much of the truth or many truths, depending how you want to put that.  You may live a reality of Jesus and defend a life that fits His existence and deny the pivotal truth of His resurrection.  Peterson does that.
Complementarianism is the truth and celebrity conservatives borrow from a complementarian reality without the truth of complementarianism.  Gender fluidity proceeds from egalitarianism.  God designed men and women differently.  That’s the truth.  Celebrity conservatives deny complementarian truth while defending a complementarian reality.
Let me get more simple.  Whether you think he’s a conservative or not, let’s consider President Donald J. Trump as if he were a conservative.  Trump operates according to a certain Christian reality that results in Christian support, including from true Bible believers.  Trump thinks that one thing is better than another.  Certain behavior is wrong.  He believes that America as a standard of living better than other countries, which can be and should be protected at the border.  This is one of the most fundamental conservative beliefs and it is a reality that borrows from the truth.
Former President Trump doesn’t believe the truth, but he functions as though there is truth. He is a realist in that we must have standards.  Things won’t be better when we can’t discern the differences of one thing from another.  This is a reality according to a Christian worldview.  The truth is more important.  However, people who eject from reality are much further away from the truth. These either practical or positional nihilists must be rejected for something short of the truth, if that’s the choice.  The path to the truth won’t come through their relativism.  It can come through someone who at least embraces reality, even if it doesn’t mirror actual reality.
The answer for humanity is still the truth.  It isn’t the reality of celebrity conservatives.

AUTHORS OF THE BLOG

  • Kent Brandenburg
  • Thomas Ross

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