2016 Primary

This has to be quick.

Point 1: I must vote.

Romans 13 says "be subject to the governing authorities." Well, not only does that mean being a responsible citizen, and civically engaged, but it means that because America is a constitutional democratic republic, every one of us IS the government, inasmuch as we vote to elect our representatives who rule on our behalf. So we have an ethical obligation to vote to promote godliness and reject evil.

1. I cannot vote the lesser of two evils. If it's Donald Trump v Hillary Clinton in November, I can't vote for either one of them by arguing that it's worse if 'the other one' gets in. It's unacceptable if either one wins, and I will not positively endorse either one. If you had to choose between Satan and the Antichrist, would you vote for either of them? No, you would refuse on principle and deny the "either-or" choice you've been faced with. It doesn't matter that they're not the same person, they're functionally the same thing and you can't vote for that.

2. I can't not vote, per the above Romans 13 discussion. Delegates are apportioned based on how many people live in the districts where people vote. That means that the delegate count goes to the candidates as if everyone voted, meaning that if you don't vote, you're letting everyone who does vote, vote on your behalf. You delegate your responsibility to the people who aren't too apathetic to vote. If they choose evil, that means you chose evil. You let them represent you without speaking your dissent.

3. The only conclusion then is that if it's a choice between two godless visions for America, then I must either write in a candidate, or - if that's impossible where I happen to live - literally write in to my representatives, announcing my dissent.

This is not about changing the future or influencing the election. It's great if you can. But this is about standing up for righteousness. A vote for righteousness, and against evil, is never wasted. Are we trying to glorify God, or worrying about whether we can feel important/like winners?

Thankfully, there is a choice. This election, I'm happy to see that there is at least one candidate running that doesn't make me cringe over his position on any policy that I know of. I won't go into every little detail of why, here, but that candidate is Ted Cruz.

Here are the main, non-policy-related reasons for my endorsement:

1. He might actually be a Christian. He doesn't have to be, to be a good candidate. And a true believer may not be a great leader. My understanding is that Ronald Reagan was a believer, but he wasn't altogether savvy in managing people in his administration. Cruz is a politician in a good way, in that sense. But to the point: his priorities are God first, and everything else second, which is a sight to see when nearly every politician in the country seems to be political for the sake of being political (also known as "establishment" politics).

2. What most encourages me in this regard is twofold. He can a) actually give credit to his opponents, without acting like the campaign is a zero-sum game that means he has to put everyone else down, in order to win. This is shown in his C-SPAN video calling Mitch McConnell a liar, where he gives credit to Bernie Sanders for opposing crony capitalism, and credits Marco Rubio for his defense of Israel. Second, he b) has self control. Compare how he reacts to being personally attacked, to how Donald Trump reacts to ... well, anything. One of the main words I can think of to describe the difference between the two, is that one lacks self control, and the other is self controlled. Christians who are evaluating someone else's profession of faith should take both of these two points under consideration. They, especially the latter, demonstrate spiritual fruit. And even if they don't prove that Ted Cruz is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and calm with a spiritual calm, they definitely make him stand out as a candidate. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who doesn't feel compelled to lie or ignore the accomplishments of his opponents lest it conflict with his narrative? Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who doesn't lash out when attacked, but keeps his cool and doesn't let his enemies see all the cards he's holding?

3. His track record is consistent in one key regard: he holds the policy positions he does based on what the Constitution and the Law allows him. Why is he for deporting illegal immigrants? Because federal law requires it. It's not that he necessarily thinks that's the best solution to the issue moving forward, but he, unlike Obama, Trump and Hillary, recognizes that you can't just take whatever position on an issue you want, regardless of what the law says. If a candidate opposes deporting illegal immigrants, at present, then that candidate is advocating for violating federal law as President. In a Constitutional Republic, what we should do, is to change the law. Then go about being lenient with regards to who to deport. Otherwise you're lawless. And the candidate who disregards the law can't be trusted because you can't know what they're going to do -- the law is no indication.

That's why Cruz shines. Immigration isn't even a huge issue for me personally - I live in the Mid-Atlantic, and my career will not be one that cheap labor competes with, so I'm not being directly hurt. But I am so impressed by Cruz's submission to the law, that this alone makes him the best possible candidate in decades. You can actually trust him, because he will be limited by the law. He SELF-limits. This is another sign he's possibly a true believer. Obama selectively chooses when to disregard the law. Cruz would not. This is one of the biggest points of frustration that people have with Obama. And we have a chance to elect a candidate that will actually be beholden to the law and the will of the people, not to an agenda that he will pursue relentlessly at the cost of weakening the foundations of government.

This will suffice for now. I wanted to post to have something on the record.

~ Rak Chazak

Gonzalez case ironically provides an example in favor of a strong central government

Quick recap of the history of "States' Rights"

In 1777, the Articles of Confederation were adopted, and ratified by 1781 by the original 13 States. Because of the revolutionaries' distrust of an autocratic dictator (seeing as they just fought a war to free themselves from King George's rule), they intentionally made the central government far weaker than the States.

This presented obvious problems to the cohesiveness of the union, as a collection of papers by James Madison outlines. (this was from another link off of the first).

For example, there was no Executive to enforce the acts passed by Congress. Each State began printing its own money, raising its own military, and engaging in international agreements independently of one another.

The States sent representatives to rectify this in the Constitutional Convention. Convening first in 1787, the Constitution of the United States was ratified in 1789. They gave the central government of the federal system more power. As a pushback to this, there was clamor for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution, to guarantee protections for the People against a now much stronger central government, and this occurred later.

The point of a federal system where the central government is stronger than the states in certain regards, is to prevent chaos from arising out of the states passing contradictory laws, attempting to control other states, seceding from the union or going to war with each other.

That last part is significant. The test of the federal system came with the Civil War, when pro-slavery states attempted to use "states' rights" to justify seceding from the union. Many legal pundits today still think that this is a constitutional right. However, whereas a state seceding from a state (West Virginia seceded from Virginia to join the Union during the Civil War) is not unconstitutional, a state seceding from the union is. And via might-makes-right, Abraham Lincoln cemented the role of the federal government through his executive actions leading up to and during the Civil War. Whereas the most obvious effect of the Civil War in our society was to end slavery, that was not the initial reason for it. Here is an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

The whole thing is worth reading. It's short but makes it clear that Abraham Lincoln did hope to end slavery, but that that was not his primary goal in his executive capacity, early on. The primary goal was to do what was his Constitutional obligation as the Executive -- to preserve the Union.

Why am I spending so much time talking about the Federal government? Well, it's because --

if the Central government is stronger than the states in matters of foreign policy and commerce and trade and international agreements and military etc etc etc,

then some states won't, for example, take it into their own hands to deport illegal immigrants (such as Arizona), while others take it into their own hands to refuse to cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement in turning over known criminals (such as the 'sanctuary cities' in California, one of which is San Francisco).

San Francisco has a law that requires officials to ignore Federal requests for cooperation on the subject of illegal immigrants. Rather than turning them over for processing and possible deportation, they are released into the general public.

That is how a man who has been deported 5 times has now ended up in a Sanctuary City, where officials arrested him, ignored a Federal ICE detainment request, and released him back onto the street, where he then murdered a young woman.

It's both the city's fault and the federal government's fault. For one, the city has an unconstitutional law on the books. For two, the Obama administration has had an inconsistent, at best, approach to immigration. They deport some immigrants, but release others from prison onto the streets. They refuse to send personnel to the Arizona-Mexico border, or to in any way secure it, and then sue Arizona for attempting to do what the Constitution requires Washington to do but which Washington won't do. They allow sanctuary cities to operate without any such lawsuits.

If laws regarding immigration were applied evenly across the board, and actually enforced evenly as well, then none of this would be an issue in the first place.

We have a dysfunctional system where the central government won't do its job, and the States are acting more and more like they did in the 1780s and 1850s-60s, as a confederacy where everyone gets to have their own opinion about what laws are important and which ones aren't.

And it gets the people that the government is sworn to protect, killed.

That is injustice. Deportation is not injustice, it is law. When someone who has been deported 5 times and shouldn't be in the country in the first place murders an innocent pedestrian, THAT is injustice.

I'm just glad I don't live near the border. All I can do is watch and opine. I abhor the feeling of helplessness. But feeling helpless when your family and friends are becoming victims of government corruption that encourages lawlessness in your city and state, that is a deplorable feeling.

~ Rak Chazak

Stay Away From My Penis! What the Government Has Against Uncut Guys (Pics)

                This is shamelessly titled to hopefully show up in search queries by people looking for internet pornography. And yes, there are pictures. Here’s one:

                This is an image I created in Photoshop myself so as to avoid potential copyright issues, which I’ll use to identify posts which will discuss sensitive or personal subject matter. It will alert people who may be discouraged from reading something that they think is “TMI” (too much information) or that would make them feel awkward or uncomfortable. For extremely intensive (one could say ‘descriptively explicit’) blog posts, I’ll utilize a different image, one with an exclamation point instead of a period. 

                Today’s discussion will require the latter identifier. From the title, you may have guessed that ‘uncut’ refers to someone who has not been circumcised. Circumcision is the process of cutting off the foreskin of a penis. For those who may not know what a foreskin is, imagine the texture of your cheek, inside and out, but with the thickness of the thin edge of your ear. It covers the whole glans penis (the purple/red part) but can be pulled back to completely uncover it, where it then can sit rolled up against the back edge of the head of the penis, quite similar to how a rolled-up pantleg or shirt sleeve is prevented from unfurling past the knee or elbow. The immediate benefit of a foreskin is that it protects the tip of the penis like a sheath protects a knife’s blade, or a cap protects lipstick. Both by reducing sensitivity and to a lesser extent by keeping dirt out. This is great for a guy who doesn’t want to use a restroom and have something splash back up and hit the vulnerable parts. That would be like getting something nasty on your eye, rather than on your eyelid, wherefrom you can then wash it off, since it just hit the skin.

                Now that the stage is set, with the reader understanding why the presence of a foreskin is more sanitary than the lack of one, it’s time to get to the point. Apparently some educated idiot has gotten the bright idea to claim, in alarmist tones, that having a foreskin makes you more at risk of STDs. The solution, they promise, is to promote circumcision among males, particularly in Africa (because of the HIV epidemic there).

                But wait. How does the presence of a foreskin make one more at risk of STD transmission than a ‘snipped’ guy? Doing a little digging reveals that the science behind the claim is thus: the foreskin has a lot of blood vessels, and since it has very thin and tender skin on the inside, small tears from sexual activity would allow infectious agents to enter the bloodstream and make the person sick. But wait. Where would these infections be coming from? An infected person. And how are they transmitted? Through sexual activity. So what is really going on here?

                A foreskin is only going to “put” a person at higher risk of contracting a disease if the uncut guy is having sex with someone who has a sexually transmitted disease! If you’re not having sex with STD-positive people—for example, if you’re not having sex with anyone at all—then no problem! It’s the wanton sexual activity that’s the risky behavior, having a foreskin isn’t what makes it risky. Snipping yourself is a non-solution that doesn’t make you immune, just reduces the chance that you’ll get what’s coming to you for doing the wrong thing. In that way, it’s just like a condom. It doesn’t make your unsafe behavior suddenly become “safe sex.” It just slaps a 98% chance rating on what was previously a 50/50 or 100% guarantee that you would become a victim of the consequences to your own bad choices. There is absolutely no need to get snipped if you aren’t, just like there’s absolutely no need to ever use a condom, if you’re doing it right. If you’ve gotten married to someone, after years of knowing them, and being totally confident that their sexual history is either nonexistent or at least hasn’t left them with a disease, then there is no necessity to adopt “risk-reducing” behaviors, because you aren’t “at risk” in the first place. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to be afraid of that? That’s just one of the many wonderful benefits to submitting to God’s rules for human behavior. Sexual purity and monogamy. Risk-free sex with no strings attached.

PS So what did the government have to do with this? They’re promoting short-term fixes to a problem that requires a spiritual and not a medical solution. This government would NEVER recommend Biblical morality, that is to say, abstinence from promiscuous sexual behavior, as a way to avoid the spread of STDs. Instead they would recommend “safe sex,” which is code for minimizing, but not removing, the inherent risks that are part and parcel of sexual promiscuity. The only 100% guaranteed way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases is to not engage in sexual activity outside of a marriage that fits the Biblical model. This isn’t popular or politically correct. But people have always hated the truth when it gets between them and their personal gratification. This is nothing new. What would be new would be if people started rebelling against the norm and chose to refrain from the things that they weren’t expected to refrain from. Imagine the attention that such a divergence would garner. 

~ Rak Chazak

Proof I'm not making stuff up, with regard to the government-promoted circumcision program:

http://open.salon.com/blog/judy_mandelbaum/2012/07/27/africas_male_circumcision_crusade_boon_or_boondoggle -- hah, this site even criticizes the methodology of the tests that led them to conclude that circumcision reduces risk!

I kinda wanna leave it there. But here's the rest of the results of the google search:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/12/01/circumcision-is-africas-best-weapon-against-aids/

http://www.avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-men/clinton-determined-to-push-28-million-circumcisions/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/14/1160451/-The-USA-Encourages-Genital-Mutilation

http://www.avert.org/male-circumcision.htm

http://allafrica.com/stories/201207130100.html

See, I gave you links favoring circumcision and links critical. That's what it means to be unbiased. Not that you have an objective view, but that you considered all views without prejudice, before making your own decision.