I packed up my office laptop, transferred my bill-paying files from my credenza to my briefcase, recorded an away message on my office phone, then locked my door on the way out. I paid a month’s worth of bills ahead of time. I got my summer haircut, picked up a couple books from Hope Thrift, then instructed our summer intern in the fine art of watering the lawn. I gave Lucy her pre-Maine bath. Spent most of last night packing a suitcase and a duffel. Mostly, shorts and t-shirts, underwear, bathing suits and baseball caps. But, because its Maine, two jackets, four long sleeve shirts and two pair of long pants—you never know when it might be cloudy and not get out of the 60’s.
Several rooms in our house have taken on the appearance of a teenager’s bedroom. All of this chaos, all of the piles of necessities will find their way into our car by the end of today, hopefully leaving room for Lucy, who doesn’t need much, just a circle big enough for her to turn around three times before curling herself in a ball for long naps. Pam will no doubt remind me at least twice to make sure I can see through the back window. She will ask me several times whether or not I have locked the doors to the house, then before we are even out of the neighborhood she will say, “I feel like I’m forgetting something.”
In exactly 24 hours from now we will be on our way. It will take twenty minutes or so before Pam gets firmly settled in her co-pilot’s seat. When she does, she will let out a long sigh, the first second she’s had to relax in weeks. Sometimes she gets emotional when it hits her that we are on our way. For me, I’m all in on conquering the trip and have no time for emotions, except the kind that burn on the inside—mostly gratitude and relief. Then there’s the thing that hits me every year as we pull on to the interstate, that little boy, Christmas morning thrill of anticipation.
Some time today I hope to get a massage to prepare my body for the rigors of the long drive. At 64 an 850 mile road trip takes a toll on hamstrings and backs. Pam ordered me a special car seat cushion that is supposed to promote better driving posture. It is supposed to arrive today. It better, because if it doesn’t I’m leaving without it. When I checked the weather forecast for Camden, Maine for the day of our arrival—Saturday—it promises to be 75 and sunny. In fact the ten day forecast shows no temperature higher than 78. At night it will be in the upper 50’s, low 60’s.
For us, Maine is always what’s at the end of the rainbow…
I’m not sure I have ever needed to see everyone’s family 4th of July picnic pictures more than I needed to see them this morning. Out of an abundance of caution, Pam and I were laying low this past weekend. After several friends close to us came down with either COVID or the flu, and with our Maine trip only a few days away, the very last thing either of us needs is to come down with either one of those things. Discretion being the better part of valor, we skipped church and the Dunnevant family 4th celebration, hunkering down here at the house. We did whip up some delicious brats on the grill and played some patriotic music, but it wasn’t the same. The 4th of July is not a holiday meant to be celebrated alone.
So, this morning I began flipping through the family photos on Facebook, including some from the Dunnevant gathering up in Ashland. Group pictures of families holding little American flags, the wide-eyed faces of children being lit up by the glow of sparklers, babies sound asleep in the arms of uncles and aunts. They were all beautiful. I needed to see them, needed confirmation that the entire country wasn’t going to hell.
Earlier in the day yesterday came news of yet another psychopath with a rifle opening fire on a parade in suburban Chicago. Six dead, thirty in the hospital, and the deranged little suspect plastered all over the news, some nobody rapper, another confused young man with a deadly weapon. The rest of the news seemed filled with despair, the suggestion that America has literally nothing to celebrate anymore was heavily covered in almost every story I read. To hear the media tell the story we are hopelessly and irreparably divided and the future almost certainly contains either civil war or formal dissolution. Its hard not to agree with such a negative assessment. But then I look at the endless succession of pictures of grateful and happy celebrations and find reason for optimism and a reminder that its the media’s job to attract eyeballs, with the truth—only if absolutely necessary. Sometimes the perspective of people who report news isn’t the same as the perspective of people who read it. So, as Pam and I prepare to leave for Maine, we will chose to focus on the reasons we have for being grateful and happy, not the steady drumbeat of gloom and despair that attempts to make happiness and gratefulness feel like guilty pleasures.
While we are retreating to Maine for six weeks at a time that makes it feel like we’re the last ones to get out of town alive, I know better. America will still be here when we get back. For those of you who are thinking…Wait, isn’t Maine part of America? Yes and no. Yes, Maine is one of the fifty states. No, where we are headed feels like a place set apart from the rest of the country, something closer to heaven than hell.
Over the years I have written a half dozen July 4th pieces here at The Tempest. Some of them have been humorous, like the time I described the 50,000 people I was crammed in with on a beach in South Carolina. Other times I have talked about the state of the country and my feelings about America. Reading back through them it is remarkable how consistent they all are. The first such July 4th post I wrote was from the year 2011 and featured this observation:
“Today seems different somehow and I think I know why. When I look out across the country today, I see just as many divisions as there have ever been in American political life. We are fragmented into interest groups, divided by ideology and culture. But for me there isn’t one interest group in America today, be they blacks, Latinos, gays and lesbians, unions, or Tea Partiers that I distrust as much as I distrust my own government.”
Eleven years later not much has changed about this sentiment. Losing faith in the institutions of power in America has done nothing to dampen my love of country. That might sound like a contradiction, but I don’t think it is. America can’t be defined solely by our government. Are we the people at least partially responsible for that deterioration of faith? Yes. After all, we elected these people. Many of us couldn’t be bothered to vote in that local school board election, then wake up appalled that some Maoist crackpot is suddenly writing curriculum. The abdication of civic responsibility by far too many of us has brought us to this sorry state of governance. So, given all the failure running amok in America today, why do I still love her?
Largely because this place has afforded me, a kid who came into this world with nothing, to reach for anything I wanted in this life. It gave me opportunities to improve myself. It provided me a quality public school education, that I only took partial advantage of because of youthful indifference and laziness, but still, I graduated able to read and write, do mathematics, and as a result of the tireless efforts of my devoted teachers, I understood my place in the world. When I attended college, there were plenty of jobs available in a robust private sector which allowed me to work my way through even while taking out loans. There were obstacles in my path at every turn, but I had within me the power to overcome them in no small part because of the foundation laid in my brain by loving parents and tough-minded teachers with inflexibly high standards, teachers who simply would not except anything less from me than my best.
As a grown man I am able to live in a beautiful, peaceful neighborhood filled with families from all over the country and around the world. When there is a party, a summer celebration, a Fourth of July parade, or a Labor Day picnic…they all come. We gather in a culdesac together and catch up. Pam and I watch the little kids and dogs running wild and consider ourselves among the luckiest people in the world. Do we even understand how rare this is in human history? How many societies or civilizations have been built, let alone endured, based on a country made up of people from everywhere united as one people? All of us, all Americans came here from someplace else at some point. The fact that we have survived—this idea—has survived is miraculous.
It hasn’t been easy, and it seems to be getting harder with every passing year as we subdivide ourselves, as we wall ourselves apart from each other. Instead of one nation, we seem to be drifting into tribes, an anthropological category with a troubled and violent history. But if we are to preserve our country, we will have to find a way to overcome what divides us and replace it with a concept of the common good that has always united us. Equal justice before the law, opportunity for anyone and everyone willing to work for it, and the personal freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights. These are the things that hold America together. Each generation has to work to see to it that we live up to the best of our ideals. When we do there is nothing that America cannot accomplish.
So, I still love this place, the great big mess of a place we call America. I want to be among those who are willing to work to insure that she survives.
One week from now we will be on our way to Maine for six glorious weeks. The last time we were there was October 14, 2021 so its been nine long months. When a place takes up residence in your head your life starts to be defined in part by how many days are left before you go back and how long its been since you left.. But once you get to the one week to go point things start getting weird and difficult.
Its like the days of King Arthur when the valiant knight, after a lifetime of heroics can see the prize in front of him, tantalizingly close, but must endure the final gauntlet of terrors before claiming the damsel. The final week is our gauntlet. Here’s what happens…
First, there are the unending lists. There’s stuff to pack, stuff to get ready, stuff to plan, stuff to purchase, stuff to prepare. Generally speaking, Pam is the Chief Executive Officer of Stuff around here. It is her pain-staking planning work that insures a successful trip. My jobs are more in the area of manual labor, finance and logistics. I take my orders from the CEO.
Then there’s the whole issue of health. In the era of COVID, we have become rather paranoid about personal health in the week leading up to go time. We suddenly become fastidious about hand washing. We tend to avoid large crowds. We also avoid small crowds in small places. I had an opportunity to have lunch this week with the fabulously entertaining Tom Allen, but I turned him down. He had just returned from a family reunion in New Jersey, an entire brood of Allen’s all together in…New Jersey. I said, “You’re kidding, right? Although he promised he would take his weekly shower before he came, he seemed to understand my hesitance to expose myself to whatever madness might still be clinging to him after a weekend of Allen family Tomfoolery.
We will probably not attend church services this Sunday, our last large crowd exposure before Maine. No offense, fellow Hope Church folks, but we’re not taking any chances.
Don’t get the impression that we’ve locked ourselves away inside the house all week or anything. Besides, there are still a million errands to run. Just yesterday Pam had to head over to the mall for some shopping…
The news reports were difficult to believe at first, an unimaginable horror. A semi-tractor trailer abandoned on the side of the road near San Antonio, Texas with 53 human beings inside, dead from heat exhaustion, having died in the sweltering 103 degree inferno of what amounted to a cattle car. These migrants from Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua had been picked up in Laredo, Texas by a human smuggler—crammed into the back of the truck in record high temperatures without ventilation or water, then abandoned on the side of the road when the truck experienced mechanical trouble. A local railroad worker heard a feint cry for help from inside the truck, where the gruesome discovery was made. Within hours of the discovery, political accusations began flying back and forth between our distinguished public servants.
I am not an expert on immigration policy. Although I’ve read a lot about it over the years, in all that reading I have learned that the problem is profoundly complicated, a toxic mix of greed, fear, human degradation, human striving for a better life, and political grandstanding. The purpose of this post is not to cast blame, but rather to try and get inside the heads of all parties involved in the grisly graveyard that was left abandoned next to a railroad track in Texas.
What on Earth would possess a migrant from Mexico to climb into the back of that truck? Surely, they could see what they were entering, they could feel the heat, would have noticed that there was no water. Why? How desperate would they have to be? What possible hell were they fleeing that could be worse than being packed like sardines inside a trailer on the hottest day of the year? My imagination is incapable of providing any satisfactory answer to that question.
What kind of black heart would you have to have beating inside your chest to agree to be the driver of that truck? What amount of money would be necessary to assuage the guilt of this inhumanity?
Who are the people to whom this shipment was destined? What companies or farms were planning on putting these 53 to work? Any discussion about human smuggling across the border has to consider the end consumer of the cargo. Any business that would knowingly hire migrants delivered to them in the back of a tractor trailer, is every bit as complicit in this horror as every other actor along the way.
All I know is that when I looked at the pictures my heart broke for our increasingly savage, broken world.
This is the 2,639th post in the eleven year history of The Tempest and the very first one I’ve written about…abortion. Basically I would rather write about almost anything else. But when Roe v. Wade was overturned Friday by the Supreme Court, I knew that at some point I would have to write something. Here goes…
Since Friday was a very slow day at the office, the first thing I did was download the opinion so I could read through the decision along with the dissent. It was long…200 pages. The first part was mostly case law review and full of legal jargon. Then I got to the opinion which at least was written in more understandable English. Once I finished that I read the dissent which, as is usually the case, was much shorter. My initial reaction was that I agreed with the legal and constitutional reasoning of the majority decision. I thought they made a much stronger case with respect to the law than did the dissent, which I considered to be overwrought and at times hysterical. Regardless of where you come down on this case I suggest that you take the time to read the decision.
But agreeing with the Supreme Court on the legal and constitutional grounds of their decision isn’t quite the same thing as agreeing with the results of the decision. In a nation as divided as ours, what now? Are we ready to turn pregnant women seeking to terminate their pregnancies into criminals? Are we willing and ready to send them to jail? Ever since the decision was announced I have felt a great discomfort in my heart. It is very difficult to describe, let alone explain. I am now and have always been someone who would be considered Pro-Life. My feelings on the matter stem primarily from a profound respect for the life of the child. I believe sincerely that all human life is a sacred gift. Its why I am also against the death penalty and euthanasia.
But, I have never had an abortion. I can’t imagine the anguish involved in such a decision. I do know people who have had abortions. They are not murderers. They were women who when presented with an unplanned pregnancy decided that they were not ready or desirous of carrying or having a child. I can disagree with their decision and wish they had made a choice that would have preserved the innocent child’s life—like adoption. I also know people who’s mother almost decided to abort them, but made the adoption choice instead. The world has been greatly blessed by that decision! So…why all the discomfort in my heart?
Then I ran across something this morning written by someone who I have a great deal of respect for, David French. When I finished reading it I knew right away that if I spent weeks trying to articulate my thoughts about this case I would never do so as eloquently as he did. I can honestly say that every word of it rang true in my heart. It perfectly captures the source of my discomfort. It will not make many of you happy…on either side of this issue. But its the best I can do in putting into words my feelings at this hour. I ask each of you to read it and give it your active consideration.
When I left the full-time practice of law and landed at National Review, my friends and colleagues Jay Nordlinger and Jonah Goldberg both independently gave me exactly the same advice. My job, they said, was to write what I believe to be true. It’s not to please a crowd or build a coalition.
Their advice was good and true, and in the years since I’ve tried my best to live up that ideal. I’m going to try again today with the full awareness that I’m not sure anyone is going to like what I say, right or left. But here’s what’s on my mind and heart.
Two days after Roe has been overturned, I’m far more conflicted than I ever imagined I’d be. Writing in The Atlantic on Friday, I described my attitude as joy in my heart tempered by disquiet in my spirit. Since I wrote that piece, that disquiet has only grown, and I think I know why.
I’ve been a pro-life advocate and activist for more than 30 years. I started in college by trying to change my Christian college’s policies to remove any penalty for unwed parenting. Young single moms should not be suspended from school. I then moved on to Harvard Law School where I started a pro-life student group with two dear friends and endured the considerable blowback of that hostile era on campus.
As a lawyer I represented pro-life groups for decades. I helped raise tens of millions of dollars for pro-life legal advocacy (I lost count at about $40 million). Shortly after I returned home from Iraq, I led a litigation group that publicly promised to defend any pro-life student in America for free if they faced a challenge to their constitutional rights, and we kept that promise.
Through it all, I was guided by two burning convictions—that Roerepresented a grave moral and constitutional wrong and that I belonged to a national Christian community that loved its fellow citizens, believed in a holistic ethic of life, and was ready, willing, and able to rise to the challenge of creating a truly pro-life culture.
I believe only one of those things today.
My feelings about Roe are unchanged. As a constitutional matter, I agree with Justice Alito. Simply put, the Constitution cannot be fairly read to protect a right to abortion. There is quite obviously no enumerated right to abortion, and there is no historic grounds for believing that abortion should be deemed an unenumerated right. As I’ve written before, “The Court’s job is not to determine which rights we should possess but rather which rights we do possess.”
The idea that Roe was a revolutionary and destabilizing decision is not unique to the right. Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself once declared Roe“breathtaking” and warned that “Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable.” She even wondered if Roe should have been more narrowly decided. Suppose the court decided to strike down only the Texas law at issue and not “displace virtually every state law then in force” Would the country face the same level of controversy?
Moreover there was always something particularly morally noxious about Roe’s reasoning. The Supreme Court removed abortion questions almost entirely from the democratic process, created one of the most extreme abortion rights regimes in the world, and deprived an entire class of people—unborn children—of any meaningful legal status. It did all those things through the 14th Amendment, one of the Civil War amendments.
The Civil War amendments were intended to correct deep flaws in the original Constitution that permitted states to systematically deprive individuals of their most basic human rights. At long last the Supreme Court could and would begin the process of extending the blessings of liberty to every American.
Well, to everyone but the unborn. For those precious people, the court declared that one of the key Civil War amendments was the instrument of their doom. The ruling wasn’t just constitutionally unsound, it was morally perverse. It utterly contradicted not just the letter of the 14th Amendment, but its animating moral essence as well.
Now Roe is gone. Good. We should rejoice at its demise.
But that’s not the end of the story. Not by a long shot. The two sides of the great American divide are now staring at each other and asking, “Now what?” The answer from pro-life America should be clear and resounding—the commitment to life carries with it a commitment to love, to care for the most vulnerable members of society, both mother and child.
But life and love are countercultural on too many parts of the right. In a time of hate and death, too many members of pro-life America are contributing to both phenomena. Is that too much to say? Is that too strong? I don’t think so.
In deep-red America, a wave of performative and punitive legislation is sweeping the land. In the abortion context, bounty-hunting laws in Texas, Idaho, and Oklahoma turn citizens against each other, incentivizing lawsuits even by people who haven’t been harmed by abortion. The pro-life movement, once solidly against prosecuting women who obtain abortions, is now split by an “abolitionist” wing that would not only impose criminal penalties on mothers, it even calls into questions legal protections for the life of the mother when a pregnancy is physically perilous.
The culture of political engagement centers around animosity. Church and family life is being transformed, congregation by congregation, household by household, by argument and division. The Dobbs ruling has landed in the midst of a sick culture, and the pro-life right is helping make it sick.
Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat rightly cautioned that “the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. The vicissitudes of politics haven’t just linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right, they’ve transformed parts of the anti-abortion movement, making many of its members as toxic as their “libertine and hyperindividualist” allies.
At this point I want to add a huge caveat. At the center of the grassroots pro-life movement are some of the finest people I’ve ever met in my life. Crisis pregnancy centers, for example, are staffed by people who have hearts full of love, and when the radical left firebombs those clinics, they’re firebombing the buildings and institutions that are giving an immense amount of hope to young women in distress.
But sadly those institutions often operate on shoestring budgets. So many times they lack volunteers.
In the meantime, the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement. And this is the culture that’s going to lead the effort to heal our nation, love the marginalized, and ask young women to face an uncertain future and endure a physical ordeal for the sake of sacrificial love?
This brings me to a vital last point. It is a simple truth that when it comes to moral leadership, actions speak so much louder than words. That’s a truth that’s been instilled in me since my youth. Walk your talk.
And yet. Consider the last two years.
We are slowly but surely emerging from a deadly pandemic. It’s not that the disease has disappeared. Far from it. But the combination of mutations, vaccinations, and prior infections is making it far less deadly. Yet at every point in the pandemic, it was pro-life red America that loudly declared its bodily autonomy, disproportionately shunned even the slight inconvenience of a mask before the vaccine, and then disproportionately rejected the vaccine when it miraculously appeared mere months after the pandemic began.
Parts of pro-life red America moved from skepticism to outright defiance. “How dare you tell me what to do. This is my decision between me and mydoctor.” They trafficked in pseudo-science and bizarre conspiracy theories. The cost was staggering. It was horrifying. Look at this chart, from the Brown School of Public Health:
When I bring this up, people get furious. The conventional wisdom on the right has hardened into adamantium. If you condemn the anti-vaxx movement, then you’re an elitist. You hate anti-vaxxers. How dare you question their decisions? Everyone knows the real cultural tragedy of the pandemic was the way the terrible blue states imposed extended lockdowns and kept schools closed too long.
To criticize the anti-vaxx movement isn’t to hate or look down on its members any more than criticizing the pro-choice movement means hating or looking down on its members. Strong disagreement isn’t hatred, even when you believe the contrary position contains grave moral flaws.
I also can agree that blue state restrictions went too far, but I cannot get that staggering death toll out of my head. And that’s not a random 319,000 people, it’s 319,000 of our most vulnerable citizens. The elderly. The infirm. People with immune disorders.
In the face of that wave of death, a wave of death created by a staggering amount of Christian fear, disinformation, and defiance—millions of the same people who created that culture now loudly demand that other peoplesacrifice for life.
It’s time for another caveat. When we talk about national movements, we invariably talk about generalities. Huge movements are made up of millions of people, and many of those millions have gone above and beyond the call of duty. They’ve spent their lives sacrificing for others, in ways large and small. They resist the hatred of the times, and even though I might disagree with some of their votes, they put me to shame in their service for others.
But the sad reality remains: When American culture burned with partisan hatred, all too many institutions of the American church fueled the fire. They fuel the fire to this day. There is a cost to this combat, and that cost is born in our ability to reach out to people outside our tribe and to have people believe us when we say that we care for them, that we want to see them flourish, and that we love their families—both red and blue.
One more thing …
I’ve got two podcasts to promote today. The Dobbs decision came down on Friday morning, 50 minutes before we normally tape the Good Faith podcast. Curtis and I talked about the end of Roe and hosted the wonderful Rachel Ferguson to talk about her fascinating book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, a classical liberal response to racial injustice in America.
This song, from my favorite new album of 2022, is both beautiful and humbling. This one of those humbling songs, one that reminds us that we should always be aware that we’re going to be wrong, and we’re going to need grace. Thankfully that grace is real:
Ok, back in 2020 when COVID hit, I dropped my 19 year AMFAM membership. To replace my three times a week workout habit, I bought some dumbbells and started running outside instead of on a treadmill. In the two years since, the only thing I have missed about AMFAM is the sauna and steam room. I hated running on a treadmill and I hate running outside, so that’s a push.
It is probably more accurate to say that I have a love/hate relationship with running. I hate doing it but I love the way I feel afterwards. I do enjoy the challenge of completing something that is difficult for me. I like having a goal to concur. In other words, when it comes to running, I’m basically a sadist.
So, my son has taken up running over the past several years to the point where he was able to enter and complete a half marathon down in Nashville, an amazing accomplishment for a kid who has never been a workout junkie like his father. Now we have running in common. I send him the stats from my latest run and he sends his to me. It’s pretty cool. Anyway, a while ago he started hassling me to join him and sign up for a race being held in Richmond this November. Its a full marathon but you can also sign up for a half marathon or an 8K ( 5 miles ). He says, “So, I could fly up and run the half marathon and you could run the 8K and maybe we could shame Ryan and Issac into running. It would be a family thing!” Since it is a well known fact that I can never say “no” to one of my kids…I signed up. There’s only one problem—I’ve never run in a race before, and the longest continuous running distance I have ever completed in my life is a five mile run from six years ago. So, I’ve had some work to do. Which brings me to the point of this post. Yesterday was a first for me…
The first part is that I made it 7 miles. Yes, I did not run all 7 miles. I alternated between running and walking each mile. When I started I had no idea in my head that I was going this far, it was just something that happened. The 4 miles I did run were all decent times, especially mile 7 which I almost completed in under 9 minutes. I was very proud of myself. Of course, this morning I am paying for yesterday’s heroics. Hips, knees and ankles..all sore. When I made it home, Pam had left the house on an adventure with a friend of hers so I had nobody to brag to. Lucy was unimpressed with the story and quite disgusted with my sweat-soaked and smelly self. Here’s the route, in case you’re interested:
Sadly, despite all the sweat and calorie burning effort, I stepped on the bathroom scales this morning and had gained two pounds.
