Land of the free? Death by Regulation

I get way too much email. I received a copy of the following story back on April 29. It was first published on April 4th. Now that members of my family have begun to raise chickens in their yards, I have to confess this one hits a bit too close to home for me!

I will begin a very brief partial quote at the fourth paragraph:

The whole ordeal began only a few years ago, when [Andrew] Wordes [of Roswell, Georgia,] began to keep chickens in his backyard. His property was on 1 acre, but it was surrounded by secluded woods. He loved the birds, sold and gave away eggs to people and enjoyed showing kids the animals. He was also very good at this job, and being something of a free spirit, he chose to make something he loved his profession.

The city objected and came after him. In 2008, the zoning department issued a warning about the chickens on his property. This was odd because he was violating no ordinance at all; indeed, the code specifically approved chickens on properties of less than 2 acres. Even the mayor at the time objected to the department’s claim, but the department went ahead anyway. A year later, and with the assistance of former Gov. Roy Barnes, Wordes won in court!

But then look: The city council rewrote the law with no grandfather clause. It forbade more than six chickens on any lot, and specified that all chickens have to be in a permanent enclosure. He had tried to get approval for an enclosure, but because his house was on a flood plain, the city would not issue an approval. In the midst of this controversy, a flood did come to his house, and he had to use a Bobcat to move dirt around to save his house and his chickens.

Sure enough, the city then issued two citations for moving dirt without a permit and having illegal, unrestrained chickens. Then, the city refused to submit to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) his request for reconstruction funds after this storm (individuals on their own cannot get money of this sort). Next, the city contacted his mortgage holder, who was a friend and who had carried his mortgage for 16 years, and pressured her to sell the mortgage to stay out of legal trouble.

Do you get the sense from this that Mr. Wordes was being targeted? Absolutely. And he knew it, too. The Roswell Police Department pulled him over constantly and issued as many tickets as possible for whatever reason, tangling him in more difficulties. Police cars would wait in front of his house and follow him. And when he didn’t cough up enough money (he was nearly bankrupt after all this), they would book him and throw him in jail. This happened on several occasions. Meanwhile, the city itself filed several more suits against him.

It gets worse. The city planners came up with a “Roswell 2030 Plan” that posited a parks area exactly where his home was. Hearing of this, Wordes offered to sell his home to the city, but the city refused. They clearly planned to drive him out of it with this legal barrage. It didn’t matter that Wordes won every legal challenge or managed to get the suits thrown out in court — that only made the city angrier. Eventually, the city managed to a get probated sentence, setting up a tripwire that would eventually destroy his livelihood.

He posted on his Facebook account that he was going to be a attending a political event. While he was gone, his chickens were poisoned. Also poisoned were the baby turkeys, 10 of which were actually owned by the mayor, who was a friend. At this point, he had lost his means of support. While panicked about what to do, he missed a probation check-in. He was ordered to serve the remainder of his probated sentence in jail for 99 days.

While in jail, his home was ransacked and looted. Of course, the police did nothing. In fact, they probably approved it. Also while in jail, the new mortgage holder foreclosed on his home. His entire life was now in shambles. . . .

Read the title of this article. The story doesn't end prettily. And, sadly, I'm afraid it provides fodder for the comments Fabius Maximus makes about people's preferences concerning freedom and slavery. Are we really willing to fight for freedom? Or, are we more like Martin Niemoller in his famous observation:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

I'm afraid Maximus is correct (for the very reasons to which Niemoller alludes):

A theme of the original Star Trek is that humanity was not meant for slavery; we always rise up and fight for freedom. That seemed plausible when I watched those shows as a child. Unfortunately, history shows that rebellions against internal elites are rare. Successful revolutions are still more so (even partial successes, such as France 1789). In fact subjects in well-managed societies (eg, tyrannies, oligarchies) wear the yoke comfortably.

More common is evolution in the other direction, our subject for today. The transition from citizen to subject is a bitter one.

A history of slavery in the U.S.

I first began to view slavery (as practiced in the U.S.) from a different perspective perhaps 15 or more years ago, while I was developing the American history program for Sonlight Curriculum. Up until that time, I had never heard or seen any attempted defense of what, up till that moment, I had assumed was an indefensible Southern perspective and practice--a perspective and practice that, for a morally compelling reason, led the United States government to prosecute a war against morally corrupt Southerners. And, of course, most of us know that war today as the American Civil War.

It was back in the mid-90s that I first heard

• Of alternative names for the Civil War (the "War of Northern Aggression"; the "War for Southern Independence"; and so forth [I had heard of the "War Between the States"]) . . . and reasons why various historians prefer one name over the others.
   
• That
   
  • The members of the United States were very much independent states prior to the Civil War. Look at the founding documents. Look at popular documents of the first half of the 19th Century. Reference is almost always made to "these United States" rather than "the United States."
     
  • Prior to the Civil War, the United States was, much like the European Union is today, a confederation of independent nations.
     
  • It was only as a result of the War that the consolidated national federal government we know today was created in the United States.
   
• The War may not have been fought solely or even primarily over slavery.
   
• That the horrible abuses of slaves were most definitely not the de facto standard treatment under which slaves suffered throughout the South and that, instead, much of what I had been taught was the equivalent of partisan political posturing in which anti-slavery/abolitionist advocates used the most horrifying news stories of the day to proclaim that the abuses were the "standard"--much as anti-homeschooling zealots today use the most horrifying examples of abuse to suggest that these parents' behaviors are the "norm" among homeschoolers. (When newspapers begin headlining articles, as this one does, "Another Homeschool Killing," you know what the author and/or editor thinks about homeschooling!)
   
• That the majority of citizens in Northern states may have actually been more racist than the citizens of Southern states.
   
• That Northern states had horribly racist laws.
   
• That many free blacks in the South owned black slaves.
   
• And so on and so forth.

This was all new to me. And deeply disturbing. That I had never even heard of these things. That I had never been presented with arguments either in favor of or opposed to these various perspectives. No. Rather, the way I was brought up, it was as if these perspectives didn't exist.

And so last Saturday I came across an article titled Why The War Was Not About Slavery by Donald W. Livingston.

I am very impressed.

Some key points:

• "The first thing to appreciate is slavery was, from the very first, a national enormity, an American sin for which every section of the Union bore some responsibility. This, however, is not how we have been trained to think. . . ." --See pg. 2 in the article to find out how far you want to agree or disagree with the author's claims.
   
• "Slavery . . . was a national enormity integral to the entire economic and political structure of the United States from the beginning. Its elimination, therefore, morally demanded a national solution where all would share, to some degree, in the sacrifices and costs necessary to remove it.
  
  "From our perspective, the morally right thing would have been a nationally funded program to emancipate slaves, compensate slave owners for their loss, and integrate the African population into American society as social and political equals. Yet, throughout the entire antebellum period, no national political party of any importance ever proposed emancipation, much less compensation and integration.
  
  "The South could not have seceded and fought to reject a morally responsible solution urged by the North because no such program was ever proposed or even contemplated."
   
• "Most all antebellum Americans believed two propositions.
  
  "The first proposition is that slavery abstractly considered (that is independent of positive law, circumstance, and custom) is a violation of natural law. This was as true of Southerners as Northerners.
  
  "Lincoln makes this clear in one of his debates with Douglas: 'Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it.'
  
  "Why not? Because Southerners, like most Americans, thought that slavery abstractly considered is a violation of natural law.
  
  "The second proposition held by most Americans and especially by Northerners is the African population was never to be part of the American polity.
  
  "These two propositions are not contradictory, but they exist together in tension. If slavery, abstractly considered, is a violation of natural law, then slaves in America should be freed. But if America is a white European polity to which Africans are never to belong, then, even if freed, they would be in a permanently servile position without the protections of the master who had, if nothing else, an economic interest in the welfare of the slave."
  
  --Quite the claims! But fraught with deeper implications and meaning. --I commend the original article to you for your consideration. Was the North especially dedicated to the proposal that the African population should never be a part of the American polity?
   
• Hard for many of us to imagine today, following Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and 70s, but, "The only place where the African population was accepted as part of society [prior to the Civil War] was in the South. There blacks were integrated into society through the family, i.e.; the plantation household. Southerners had come to think that the native soil of blacks was Virginia and Georgia, not Africa. There was subordination in the Old South but not segregation."

I could go on, but I really encourage you to read Livingston's article itself. It's a bit longer than what you are likely normally to read in a magazine, but well worth the effort. You may find yourself walking away with a new perspective on one of the most significant events in American history.

Bible translation #4: Protecting the masses (??)

I all but concluded my last post with a lengthy quote from Henry G. Graham's Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church.

I stopped quoting where I did not only because Graham was virtually finished with the primary topic at hand, but because the next words--a continued quotation on Graham's part of Karl Pearson's article from the August 1885 edition of Academy--brought up a related (but very separate) subject.

According to Graham, Pearson continued: "Indeed, we are inclined to think [the Catholic Church] made a mistake in allowing the masses such ready access to the Bible. It ought to have recognized the Bible once for all as a work absolutely unintelligible without a long course of historical study, and, so far as it was supposed to be inspired, very dangerous in the hands of the ignorant."

"We do not know what Mr. Pearson’s religious standpoint may have been," Graham continues, "but he goes too far in blaming the Church for throwing the Bible open to the people in the 15th century, or indeed in any previous age.

No evil results whatsoever followed the reading of that precious volume in any century preceding the 16th, because the people had the Catholic Church to lead them and guide them and teach them the meaning of it. It was only when the principle of ‘Private Judgment’ was proclaimed that the Book became ‘dangerous’ and ‘unintelligible’, as it is still to the multitudes who will not receive the true interpretation of it at the hands of the Catholic Church, and who are about as competent to understand and explain it by themselves as they are to explain or prophesy the movements of the heavenly bodies.

Having created a course on the history of the church (or, as I call it, "God's Kingdom") from Christ to the present, and having attempted to permit qualified spokespeople for the various factions to speak for themselves (rather than permitting opponents or non-members to speak for them!), I believe I am somewhat sensitive to the points that Mr. Graham is here attempting to make.

For example, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the Protestant movement as a Protestant Revolution rather than Protestant Reformation. As many have argued, and I am inclined to agree, the Protestant movement created a thoroughgoing social revolution, but (sad to say, from my perspective at this time!) it failed to create a true reformation of the Western church as a whole.

[Off topic a bit, but I should include this note: If you're interested in pursuing the theme of social revolutions, I heartily recommend Harold J. Berman's Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. It outlines the several social/legal revolutions that shaped Western civilization through the mid-20th Century . . . beginning with what Berman calls the "Papal Revolution" of Pope Gregory VII, what is otherwise often known as the Gregorian Reform.]

So. I see the validity of the charge that the Protestant "Reformation" was, in fact, a thoroughgoing--and largely successful--attempt at social revolution. And it dislocated a lot of people. And dislocated them dramatically.

And as long as we look at the discomfort and upset and, sadly, the destruction and murder and despicable failure to protect the innocent that resulted from the Protestant movement, then we can speak of the movement's "evil results," as Graham refers to them.

[NOTE, however: We can refer to the movement's evil results in the same way we refer to the "evil results" that have occurred as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the destruction of Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq. There have been evil results, no doubt. The question is: Were the evil results of these shifts in power, these social (and, in the case of the Protestant Revolution, spiritual) dislocations . . . --Did these dislocations issue in greater evils than were present before? Or did they--or do we have reason to expect that they will yet--issue forth in reduced evil, long term?]

I am sensitive, too, to the complaint about the multitudes "who are about as competent to understand and explain it by themselves as they are to explain or prophesy the movements of the heavenly bodies." --Graham is spot-on in his criticism! We have far too many people who claim to be expert about things concerning which they know almost nothing.

(I am reminded of a story my brother, who used to work in a Christian bookstore, told me. A pastor encouraged his congregation that they, too, could do miracles like that which King David achieved when he made the Sun to stand still so he could read the Bible. --The pastor's exhortation resulting from a very bad misreading of the King James English in Psalm 119:148 where David says, "Mine eyes prevent the night watches, that I might meditate in thy word.")

So, too, I am sensitive to the criticism of the Protestant movement having issued forth in multiple tens of thousands of "denominations" around the world. --Clearly, there is something seriously amiss when we must all prove the validity of our unique (mis)readings of Scripture by, each one of us, forming a separate denomination!

Yet, withall, I wonder: is the world worse off today than it would have been had we remained subject to the uncriticizeable official pronouncements and explanations of the Roman Catholic hierarchy? Should we really and truly be subject--as The New Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism, Official [Confraternity] Revised Edition, No. 2 (Copyright 1969-1962 [sic] Catholic Book Publishing Co., N.Y.) declares we should be--to a power that, by way of a side note, claims (op. cit., p. 12):

At the end of each lesson, readings will be suggested from the Bible. These are not given to "prove" the teachings of the catechism. We "prove" things from the teaching of the Church. . . . The Bible was given by God to the Church to help in the explanation of its teachings.

I think of what I wrote in my post on Illiteracy = Slavery. If and when a human power ("John! No! The Pope is no human power! He has been established by God to serve as His vicegerent (vice regent, or vicar) on earth! How dare you suggest the Pope is merely a 'human' power!?!" . . . Hmmmm. . . . What can I say in reply? . . . I think I will say the following. . . . )

If and when a power placed over us cannot be judged or evaluated by us; if and when we are told we have no right to use our God-given powers of discernment to evaluate the claims of the power over us: then we are slaves, indeed.

If, as The New Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism, Official [Confraternity] Revised Edition, No. 2 claims, we are to take all things from the hand of the Church, and view the Bible only or merely as a potentially helpful explanatory tool for use by the Church as the Church hierarchy sees fit: then we, the servants of the Church, have been effectively cut off from any standard by which to counter potential abuses.

• If our local priest fails to teach what his superiors (all the way up to the Pope) may have declared as truth: we have no means of discerning his failures. After all, he speaks "officially" for the Church, doesn't he? . . . And unless and until he is removed from office, how are we, his subordinates, supposed to judge him? We can't. Because "the Church" will teach us whatever it will and there is no external court of appeal.

• If our local priest's superiors (all the way up to the Pope) have failed to declare the truth: we have no means of discerning their failures.

We are left completely at their mercy, without recourse to discern or object to their perfidy or deception.

I do not need to touch on the most serious matters of knowing the truth concerning eternal rewards and punishments, the means by which we humans may have reason to expect God's blessing and grace or punishment and curse. I need merely note that--as too many cases have shown--the priesthood can (and does!) readily "circle its wagons" to "protect its own." --Consider the numerous cases having come to light in the last 10 years or so of immoral priests having been permitted to continue their depredations upon young children because no one within the Church hierarchy was willing to take on "the system."

Without recourse to a higher authority, the Church is left free to declare as "Truth" whatever it wants. . . . --Why, not even the Israelites were left without a means to judge those who came among them and claimed to be prophets of God. No. God gave them very specific instructions concerning how to discern false prophets. And it had nothing to do with their association with a certain institution (like having been granted authority as an officer of the government of Israel, or, in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, having received recognized credentials from someone higher in the institutional structure). No. It had to do with their fidelity to YHWH and the discernible truth of their messages (Deuteronomy 13; 18:20-22; etc.).

Illiteracy = Slavery

Sarita and I spent last weekend at a conference for supporters of Mission India. It was a highly informative, disturbing, and encouraging meeting all rolled into one. Let me summarize the "encouraging" part. I want to focus primarily upon the "disturbing" material--primarily because I believe it speaks to a few things that, I think, should be key to most of us as homeschoolers.

The encouraging information: Indians--Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and animist--are responding to the gospel of Jesus Christ in unprecedented numbers partially because they see it as good news.

What most disturbed me: some of the key items we learned about the condition of so much of India's population.

One key statistic: sixty percent of the population as a whole--and, depending on the area, 80 to 90 to, even, 95 percent of the female population--is illiterate. One of Mission India's key ministries has to do with literacy and basic training in health and finance (numeracy and recognizing the respective values of different coins). These matters are so basic to my own education, and what I understand most Westerners are taught, that I never thought through the implications of not learning such things.

While explaining how important literacy is, Mission India's vice president read a portion from Frederick Douglass' autobiography. I want to quote that same section, here, for you because I believe you, since you teach your children might find it "interesting" in the same way I did.

The Value of Literacy

In case you don't know, Frederick Douglass was an American black slave, born in the early 1800s. He was "probably between seven and eight years old" when he was transferred from one master to another.

"Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld," he says, "she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.

Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a n*gger an inch, he will take an ell. A n*gger should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would 'spoil' the best n*gger in the world.

"Now," said he, "if you teach that n*gger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy."

These words . . . [were] a new and special revelation [to me], explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly.

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

--From Chapter VI of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

The vice president of Mission India noted that illiteracy--the kind of profound illiteracy that is so common in India--is, indeed, a means of enslavement for those who suffer under it. Thus, he noted, the Dalits--or "untouchables"--though legally entitled to education, rarely receive it. The Dalit parents, illiterate themselves, are unable to protect themselves from repressive and unjust business agreements. They thus find themselves, often, in such heavy debt that they and their children are forced to work from early morning till late at night just to purchase enough in order to keep body and soul together.

Unable to read, women are unable to use public transportation in order to leave their immediate communities. And, being unable to leave one's community means one cannot seek better employment, health care, shopping opportunities: all manner of things that we take for granted.

We heard of a Dalit woman whose 6-year-old daughter was kidnapped. At the time, she did not know the girl had been stolen. All she knew was that the girl had disappeared.

She went to the police for aid. They shooed her away. (After all, she was a Dalit--no better than a water ox.) The woman went to her literacy teacher who then brought the woman back to the police and demanded appropriate governmental services (i.e., that the police would listen to the woman's pleas and seek for her missing daughter). Having the requisite education in order to know her legal rights, the literacy teacher was able to acquire for the woman what the woman was unable to acquire for herself at that time. . . .

******

Over and over, we heard these kinds of stories. The story of Asha, a woman who confessed, only weeks after having come to know about Jesus and to believe that His life, death and resurrection offered her truly good news: “I did not know I was a human being!”

“What?!? How can you not know you are a human being?”

“I had always been treated as no better than an ox. I thought I was just an animal--just a different kind of animal, an animal in the shape of a human. But then I heard that Jesus died for me. And I am a daughter of the King of the Universe. . . .”

This is revolutionary news and, frankly, I, John Holzmann, have not known it. (Sometimes, it seems, one needs to “see” reality through other people’s eyes in order, truly, to understand it.)

Asha went and told her family and friends about her revolutionary discovery. In three months, she led 13 people to faith in Jesus. . . .

******

As I was preparing this post, I had to find the quotation I shared with you above from Frederick Douglass. That led me to read some portions of the text nearby. And the nearby sections of Douglass’ book reminded me strongly of what our speakers from Mission India had to say about so many women’s experiences in India--whether Hindu or Muslim, high- or low- or out-caste.

Douglass described, late in Chapter V of his book, what he experienced when he first met the Auld family:

Mr. and Mrs. Auld were both at home, and met me at the door with their little son Thomas. . . . And here I saw what I had never seen before; it was a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions; it was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld. I wish I could describe the rapture that flashed through my soul as I beheld it. It was a new and strange sight to me, brightening up my pathway with the light of happiness. . . .

Douglass continues the story in the first paragraph of Chapter VI:

My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at the door,--a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living. She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business, she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery.

I was utterly astonished at her goodness. I scarcely knew how to behave towards her. She was entirely unlike any other white woman I had ever seen. I could not approach her as I was accustomed to approach other white ladies. My early instruction was all out of place. The crouching servility, usually so acceptable a quality in a slave, did not answer when manifested toward her. Her favor was not gained by it; she seemed to be disturbed by it. She did not deem it impudent or unmannerly for a slave to look her in the face.! The meanest slave was put fully at ease in her presence, and none left without feeling better for having seen her. Her face was made of heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music.

In Douglass’ case, sadly, this attitude on the part of his mistress was to shift dramatically once her husband reprimanded her. You will want to read his book to “hear” the full story.

What I want you to “hear” is how Douglass describes the state of the slave. It is the exact same attitudes he said he had learned to show his masters that outcastes/Dalits/untouchables are taught to show toward everyone around them: crouching servility, inability to look someone in the face. But it is the message of Jesus Christ, the message that they are fully human and, in fact, truly touchable (because the Christians will actually touch them!) that revolutionizes their lives. . . .

******

The people at Mission India told us about the things they are teaching in their literacy classes. Besides the message of the good news of Jesus Christ--the message that Asha received with such great joy--they teach people: “Don't go into debt. Instead, save!”

This, too, is a revolutionary message. Instead of families, parents and children together, finding themselves forced to work long hours, day and night in order to meet their debt obligations, the parents are able to send their children to school. And they willingly send their children to school. The parents and the children, both, gain new hope for the future.

I thought: what a truly revolutionary message these Christian literacy teachers carry, what truly revolutionary behavior they are engaged in . . . and, for those of us who are teaching our children: what a truly revolutionary cause to which, I pray, we are calling them.

Caste and Reincarnation

We were told that, according to The Barna Group, 26% of Americans believe in reincarnation. The speaker who mentioned this statistic asked--much the way St. Paul suggested in Galatians 5:12 concerning the "circumcision party": "I wonder why they don't 'go all the way' and adopt the entire Hindu worldview?"

He explained why. It's because the Hindu worldview is so totally hopeless.

I had never understood why reincarnation could be viewed as hopeless, nor why Christians suggest that the Hindu caste system and the doctrine of reincarnation, together, are so antithetical and/or antagonistic to what Westerners call "human rights." Our speaker explained that, as well.

In the Hindu worldview, one is born into one's caste as a reward or punishment for one's immediately preceding life. Perhaps one was an animal in a former life; maybe one was a Brahmin. Whatever one was, one's caste today is a direct result--a "reward," if you will--for how one fulfilled one's "calling" or "caste" or "position" in one's former life.

Therefore--and this was what I had never understood before--if you are an outcaste/Dalit/untouchable today, then you need to live that life to the "fullest," suffer your pains and sufferings as a "good" outcaste/Dalit/untouchable: in order to pay the "price" for your failures in your previous life, whatever those failures may have been. . . .

And if you are, say, a Brahmin, you would actually be doing the outcaste/Dalit/untouchable a disservice if you were to attempt to relieve him or her of his or her sufferings. If s/he is unable to undergo the full cup of suffering, how will s/he be able come back at a higher station next time 'round? One's suffering cannot--they must not--be relieved within a lifetime. Only at death, and with rebirth/reincarnation in a new life, can one hope to enjoy any relief . . . and only if one has "earned" such relief through perfect suffering in the present life. Ouch!

******

I do not have a fancy ending to what I have written. I thought I should share a bit of what I'm learning right now. This weekend--in fact, beginning tonight--Sarita and I are attending another conference; this one for supporters of Wycliffe Associates. I wonder what we will learn there?