Byron York's piece at National Review takes a closer look at Mike Huckabee and many of the areas conservative controversy around Huckabee.
One that I find particularly disturbing is that Huckabee worked for the release of convicted rapist Wayne Dumond...and after Dumond was released from prison, he soon raped and killed another woman.
York sheds additional light on this matter, quoting Dick Morris:
And Huckabee’s actions toward Dumond raise larger questions about his views on crime and punishment. Critics, and some friends, too, say Huckabee’s position was deeply influenced by his Christian faith. “When I first met him, I was going through his positions on issues and I said, ‘You’re a conservative, so I’m sure you oppose granting parole for violent felons,’” says Dick Morris, the campaign consultant who ran Huckabee’s first run for lieutenant governor. “And he said, ‘Oh no, I would never take that position, because the concept of Christian duty requires that there is a possibility of forgiveness. The concept of Christian forgiveness requires that we keep open the process of parole — use it sparingly, but keep it open.’”
Actually, people have a Christian duty to forgive. Governments have a duty to maintain order, administer justice and punish the guilty. Criminals are issued sentences based on what they did and the severity of their offense--in other words, there is (hopefully) an appropriate and commensurate price to be paid for their crime. And there is a big difference between what God has called individuals to do, and what God has commissioned government to do.
Huckabee's misunderstanding of this truth, and perhaps the truth behind it concerning "grace and law," is not only theologically unsound, but as the Dumond case illustrates, it is very dangerous to innocent members of the public.
It is perhaps the highest duty of any government official to protect the public and keep them safe. What good does a good school or access to health care or a tax cut do you if you've been murdered because your leaders wouldn't protect you from dangerous men?
Because Huckabee seems to have a profound misunderstanding of this both theologically and governmentally, I cannot support Mike Huckabee's bid for the Republican nomination.
7 comments:
How do you square up Romans 3:20-31 with what your are saying?
Bruce Whalen -
Thanks for your comment Bruce. However, I can't see that Romans 3:20-31 has any application in the context of this post.
That passage has to do with the justification of the believer before God through faith rather than the observance of the law (moral law).
This blog post, however, has to do with obedience to the criminal law, established by God to maintain order and punish the wrongdoer, as outlined in Romans 13:3-4, and also Genesis 9:6 in cases of capital punishment.
Even when a criminal becomes a Christian, that doesn't negate his obligation to restitution and paying the penalty for his crimes.
What you are saying is not contained to this recent topic but also linked to other topics concerning Huckabee. My question for you about Romans 3:20-31 is germane toward the overall topic of Huckabee, the grace but not law presidential candidate. It will also clarify why you think grace but not law is wrong.
It seems that you hint toward separation of church and state when it comes to Huckabee's taxation to meet government programming plan then lower all Biblical boom against him as a monument to capital punishment. We can't have separation only when it is convenient. Would your answer be the same if Huckabee were Muslim?
What is clear is your intent to mash Pastor Huckabee and Governor Huckabee. I am merely confused about your rules.
We need to keep in mind that government is fallible. It makes a lot of innocent people pay for crimes uncommitted. Christ fulfilled God's law as part of His perfect plan. However there is nothing perfect about government and no matter what, secular laws cannot meet the demands of our Holy God. The Sanhedrin didn't understand grace and missed an eternal relationship with our Savior because of that. It seems that with our government nothing changed.
President Lincoln had oversight of the largest mass hanging in the history of the United States, 38 Santee Sioux at Mankato, MN, because government thought itself justified. My ideas of capital punishment are not supported by government processes. Not then not now. Nor am I in the mood to go out and personally stone someone. At least not today!
We must keep in mind that although polling says the US believes in God, less then 35 percent believe that Christ is God. Even then those Christ-is-God people might not confess Jesus as Lord and believe in their heart that He is living. We are not speaking with a Christian nation and never did.
Since there are only two types of people in this world, those saved and everyone else, our odds of sending Christians to office are slim. So it is safe to say that fallen man is best situated to exercise pride through government institutions. Hence Roe and Doe, kicking God out of school, removing God's Laws from legal halls, breaking treaties, committing adultery in the highest office or executing innocent people.
We should expect that Huckabee will allow his faith (what ever you think that is) to seek government solutions to national issues. Clinton will follow her faith. Trust me, I know more than you what life is like under the crush of government and wouldn't want that on any other US citizen.
I would rather that pro-death extremists feel the crush of government instead of pro-birth advocates. God won’t give us credit for saving a dime but will for saving a life. We can’t take a dime into heaven with us but we can save a life now.
This isn't an endorsement of Huckabee. I haven't decided which candidate will get my check.
Bruce Whalen
Thanks for your continuing dialogue, Bruce. I was out of town all day yesterday and didn't get home until late.
I'll respond to your comments later this afternoon.
Getting back to your comment from yesterday, Bruce, the passage you mentioned (Romans 3:20-31) is certainly germane on a personal level regarding our moral standing before Christ. In context, however, remember that the Bible in many places (Galatians 6:7-8, Romans 6, etc.) calls us to holiness and righteousness—not for our salvation, which is already taken care of for the one who is born again, but because we are called to be like Christ and live as much according to God’s standards as we can. (Keep in mind I’m talking about personal responsibilities, not government responsibilities—more on that later)
In a larger context of the “grace and law” discussion, it is the unfortunate tendency of humans to err to one extreme or another. If we embrace all law and no grace, then we can become like the Pharisees. If we embrace all grace and no law, then we can see this is a license to sin (so that “grace may abound” as some like this were saying in the Bible). There is certainly an element of this balance that is needed in government as well, but as I’ll get to momentarily, individuals and governments are different and have different roles and responsibilities that change this dynamic, somewhat.
Recall, too, that the reason God sent Christ to die on the cross was to PAY THE PENALTY for our sins. Yes, we who have been born again are recipients of God’s grace…but it didn’t come freely. Someone still had to pay in full the established penalty for our sins (Romans 6:23). God did not set aside his judgment or the penalty of sin, even when his Son volunteered to pay the price for us.
Regards your comment about taxation and “separation of church and state,” if I gave the impression that I believe there’s a relationship between the two, I apologize because I definitely do not believe that to be the case, at least not in the more common broader sense.
Taxation involves the power to destroy, and also the power to shape and mold society. That in itself makes it a dangerous thing, one that should be used in very measured restraint. Excessive taxation makes bigger government possible, and bigger government is usually not only wasteful of the earnings of its citizens, but bigger government enables more intrusion into people’s lives. We see this in the massive regulations that individuals and businesses live under, and in the massive waste of our hard-earned dollars for pork spending, unnecessary earmarks, and bloated bureaucracy even to the level of the education system.
But where I find the current level of taxation under which we live to be the most egregious is that we are being taxed to pay for things that people should be paying for on their own, or that the private sector should be doing.
The Bible does not mandate that government tax people to care for the poor. The Bible does, however, tell individual people to help the poor (Leviticus 25:25, 1 Timothy 5:4, 1 Timothy 5:16 for example). This is for a variety of reason that affect both the giver and the receiver of this help. The giver is blessed by the free-will giving, and the receiver is also blessed by that relationship and personal love and compassion. But there are also negative reasons that this assistance is better accomplished on a personal level, rather than impersonal government “compassion:” our base human nature tends toward abusing mercy and benevolence. A number of Bible passages point out this truth, such as 2 Thessalonians 3:10 and 1 Timothy 5:13. Of course, compassion can still become a crutch even at the private charity and individual level, but the individual/private charity is in a much closer relationship with the recipient of the benevolence and is better able to determine GENUINE need versus someone simply looking for a free ride or an excuse. The private individual/charity is also better equipped morally to address the root causes of poverty (which in the United States is usually poor work ethic, substance abuse, gambling or some variation or combination thereof—you even mentioned last year during your campaign that socialism was responsible for the devastating conditions on the reservation—a loosening of the morals results in a degradation of the work ethic, and all of this is encouraged or hastened by socialism, which allows our base nature which tends toward abuse of freedom to take advantage of those circumstances)
Remember that government and individuals are different. You can carry on a personal relationship with an individual; you can’t carry on a personal relationship with a government. That may be a bit over-simplistic, but I hope that it begins to illustrate some of the differences between individual responsibilities and governmental responsibilities.
If I gossip about you, we can talk about it and you can forgive me, whether I apologize for it or not (hopefully I would). In this case, you are the only offended party. But when a crime is committed, not just one individual is “offended,” but society itself is offended, because our laws are drawn up by society through our representative democracy. When society is “offended,” the way to satisfy or make good for that offense is also defined by society—it’s defined in our laws as the penalty for committing crime X. So if you break a law (thus offending society), the way to “apologize” for that offense is to submit to the law’s definition of how that “apology” is to occur. That apology may take the form of a fine, it may take the form of an incarceration of a certain period of time, or in the case of murder (the worst crime possible, which robs a person of their very life), it may take the forfeiture of their own life in order to “make right” that offense.
You are right that government is not perfect, and it can and does make mistakes. Government itself is made up of and administered by people, and we are all flawed and fallen creatures which live short of God’s grace and perfection. Because of this, we should always make every effort to identify and correct problems with our government, so that it is as fair as possible.
The Founders of our country laid a tremendous foundation in this regard (one we’ve walked away from in some extent—thus causing some of our current problems). They established the First Amendment, so that the people could speak out directly and condemn governmental wrongs. They also established the Fourth Amendment to protect people from unlawful search and seizure, which helps prevent prosecution of the innocent. They established the Fifth Amendment to give people accused of crimes the right not to incriminate themselves, and also to guarantee that they could not be punished on someone’s personal whim, but are entitled to “due process of law” which helps prevent punishing the innocent. The Seventh Amendment was established to provide the right to a trial by jury, yet another safeguard to help prevent someone innocent from being railroaded by the personal whim of someone in power. There are other protections, both in the Constitution and in law (and in judicial opinion, such as the requirement of the Miranda Rights Advisement) to help keep someone innocent from being punished for something they didn’t do. There is also the threshold of “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” to help prevent miscarriage of justice. And finally, there is the appeals process which allows for further objective judicial review, just in case something managed to go wrong in the original criminal proceeding. These numerous safeguards and protections reduces the likelihood of punishing someone innocent about as low is it can possibly get in our imperfect world.
This governmental process with all its safeguards, as contrasted to personal situations, helps keep the justice process unemotional and dispassionate. The reason why we don’t allow individuals to exact justice in criminal matters is that the wronged party may not be able to be objective, whereas the judicial process allows for all evidence to be presented for an as-objective-as-humanly-possible analysis of the facts. In the end, a judgment of “guilty” is only rendered “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which, emotionally, might not be possible in a personal situation. This is also part of what makes personal and governmental responsibilities with regard to wrongs and offenses different.
All that said, I acknowledge that despite these protections, sometimes mistakes are still made. Unfortunately, since we live in a fallen world, we will never be able to ensure justice is administered perfectly. But we cannot adopt the position that if justice cannot be perfect, then justice cannot be administered at all. Even to say that justice must be administered in half-measures—because we can’t be sure we’re not making a mistake—is a dangerous position, because it robs the wronged party—both the individual who was assaulted/raped/robbed/murdered and society in general—are not receiving what is required to “make right” the offense.
A failure to carry out the proper penalty for violating the law also sends a message to those who have zero regard for the rights of others that they can violate other people’s rights/property/persons without having to pay the full price for that offense. It not only makes the price for disobedience easier to bear, it creates in the mind of the potential offender an arrogance that he, in a sense, is getting over on society, that he is essentially getting a bargain, that he’s getting something he doesn’t deserve—all of which are true, and only serve to embolden someone who is bereft of conscience.
The best we can do is to work hard to ensure those protections and safeguards are honored, and elect moral men and women as our leaders so that we can rely on those safeguards not being tampered with (moral men and women are also more likely to appoint moral judges, prosecutors, etc.) . And after that’s been done, we have an obligation to society and public safety to administer justice surely, swiftly, and firmly.
God delegated to human government the responsibility to administer justice for public crimes, as outlined in Romans 13:3-4, and also Genesis 9:6. I would imagine much of the reason he did so was for public safety. After all, one of the key reasons God gives in Genesis 6 for destroying the earth by flood is the “violence” that had become rampant on the earth at that time; this is almost certainly directly relational to why God issued the edict for capital punishment right after Noah and his family came off the Ark—to prevent society from returning to such a level of violence again.
This is why, despite the fact that I applaud Huckabee for being pro-life and pro-marriage, I cannot support his nomination as the Republican candidate for president. His misunderstanding of the Biblical role of charity, the Biblical importance of righteousness, and the proper role of government in relation to both of these issues makes him, in my mind, a poor choice for our nation’s leader. If he is unwilling to face the fact that sometimes harsh penalties are required to satisfy the “offense” of certain crimes (as he seemed to be in the case of Wayne Dumond), then he risks making America a more dangerous place than it already is.
I hope this has helped clarify my position on Huckabee.
Bob, good comments. I will post later. Bruce -
One thing I forgot to mention or clarify in my comments yesterday was that with regard to my misgivings about Huckabee's position on government spending for social purposes. It has nothing to do with the much discussed "separation of church and state", regardless of whether we see it as liberals (who have taken it vastly out of context) or how it was intended.
Rather, the reason I say the government does not have a role in charity, social programs, compassion, whatever you want to call it, is that our government is by design a limited one. It is one of enumerated powers. In other words, if the Constitution doesn’t specifically authorize the government to take action in a certain area, it has no power to do so. The Tenth Amendment (though it has been ignored since the time of FDR) clarifies this by stating, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
The Founders and early statesmen continued to clarify that our government has no role in dispensing “compassion” with these (and other) quotes:
A wise and frugal government...shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. – Thomas Jefferson
Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated. - Thomas Jefferson
With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. – James Madison
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. – James Madison
(And if he still hasn’t made himself clear…) Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. – James Madison
We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. — Congressman Davy Crockett
So my disagreement with Huckabee’s approach to social spending has nothing to do with “separation of church and state,” but with the inherent character of our government: it is to be limited, held in check by enumerated powers—and nothing more.
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