The Talhoffer Society, and On Killing

I just finished The Talhoffer Society.  This will not be a review as such, although I will write one of those later (probably somewhere else, where it will be seen by more people, although I may do a more personal friends-and-family review here).  I will say that it has been a good long while since I have read a book that is excellent (italicized for the Natalian).

Anyway.  As I said, this is not a review.  It's going to be a post about force, and about killing, and why I think those are important topics.

TTS is about a modern-day tournament fought using real swords, sponsored by the rich and powerful.  This is, of course, a classic martial arts fantasy (cue Mortal Kombat theme), and for that reason I should mention not only that the central premise of the book was considerably more sophisticated than I had anticipated, but that all of the places in the beginning that struck me as sloppy plotting turned out to be satisfactorily addressed by the end.

( For those who are curious, competitive fighting with real swords is not entirely fictional.  I know of one group of people that fought on a semi-regular basis with no protection and real swords that were allegedly properly sharpened.  I have no idea how good these people were, though I know that at least some of them had or went on to have actual killing experience (not of each other, thankfully).  I am fairly certain I know other fencers, of whose skill I have more direct knowledge, who have done it, albeit not as a regular activity.  I am not aware of any top-level organized live steel competition backed by what amounts to the Illuminati, but then, I wouldn't be, would I? )

In a story such as this, as you might expect, a lot of the characters' skull time is spent thinking about the relationship between martial arts, martial arts practice, and death.  Or maybe you wouldn't expect that; I don't know.  As for me, I was ... hoping for it.  I am greatly edified by my hopes having been met (but now I'm getting review-y again).

As regular readers know, I practice KDF in order to think about death.  I vacillate between thinking this is utterly ordinary and probably uncommon.  I've heard real people express the sentiment that most Americans probably don't understand that "self defense" involves killing people, or proclaim in ominous tones that guns are made For Just One Purpose, which is To Kill.  This flabbergasts me, because ... well, duh?  I'd like to think most people who own or practice with weapons understand quite well that before you can get into any nonsense about good guys and bad guys, you've got to be able to kill: to crush flesh and shatter bone; to cause limbs and trunk to part company; to turn a human being who is a parent or child and turn it into lifeless, pitiful meat; to send the spirit of another human being wailing down to hell and leave their body as a feast for dogs and birds.  Murder, combat, attack, defense, justifiable use of force - these are all legal or moral conclusions, not acts.  The act itself is simply killing.

I'd like to believe that this is a commonplace understanding.  Mostly this is because the converse is terrifying to me.  Weapons can be fun, but they aren't toys, after all.  But it's also because the converse is baffling to me.  Why the hell (if I can continue in a Homeric vein) would you want to lay hands on a weapon if not to get in touch with the stark, singular, solitary reality of killing?

Maybe this seems strange.  I've tried before to explain why I think it is important.  I have even said that I think killing is inextricably related to being a good person (not that I think being a good person is particularly important, but it's not nothing, either).  I still think that.  I don't know that I'm going to be able to do a better job of explaining now.  But TTS  offers its own meditation on the subject, and more directly than I can recall any other piece of fiction doing.  It's inspired me, I suppose, to try again.  So here I go.

I have heard it said that humanity is divided into sheep and wolves, usually with the subtext that being a sheep is bad.  I don't think this is true (though perhaps I am being Cicero here).  Certainly I think it is true that most people have a natural aversion to killing, and some people have no particular aversion to it, and some people actively enjoy it.  But I see no way in which this is of moral consequence.  What I do think is of moral consequence is self-possession: to make one's will the master of one's actions (to determine upon good actions is another matter, of course, but self-possession is a necessary precursor).  And the subject of killing, I think, tends to bring this into starker relief than do other topics.  In part this is precisely because most people have a natural aversion to killing.  But I think there's more to it than that.  Killing seems to me like ... well, like a sort of moral nexus.  Because it isn't just about the willful termination of biological life.  To borrow Jesus' example (not that he was the only moral thinker to have posed this question), what really is the difference between killing someone and being angry enough to kill someone?  Is it truly that the stark fact of biological existence is so all-fired important?  I'm certainly willing to say that death is bad ... but am I prepared to say that dealing death is bad?  I don't think so - and yet how can that be?  And of course there are the more mundane questions that killing asks of us, such as under what circumstances we would be willing to do it.  Would we really kill one life to preserve another?  Why?  Doesn't that imply that one life is more important than another?  If not, on what basis are we willing to make the choice (and yet, sheep or not, I think almost all people share the instinct that sometimes, killing is the right thing to do)?  Yet if so, doesn't that imply terrible things about the moral implications of sin and our own ability to forgive?  Or put it another way: if you haven't settled for yourself when you would kill someone, how can you have settled when you would forgive someone?  And if you aren't working to be able to kill someone, how can you be working to being able to forgive?  Does it seem strange to link death and forgiveness so naturally?  I am Christian, after all.

I've begun to wax spiritual.  And I'm not really apologetic about that, because I think people who eschew the spiritual are stupid.  But I don't wish to get too ... esoteric, I suppose.  Because these questions - death, forgiveness, self-possession - are of immediate, temporal urgency.  I mean this generally.  But I also mean it personally, in the sense that meditating on the how, why, and when of killing has helped me not to kill myself.  I keep Ruusaan in my bedroom in significant part to remind myself that I choose not to die: that I choose to live, that I choose to be forgiven, and to forgive.  There have even been times, late at night, when it has gotten so bad that I have to physically hold her in my hands, to see her edge glow in the moonlight, to feel the heft of her that wants to hew, that was made to part flesh from flesh - and to know that I hold her.

Longpoint 2015

When I met Zod for the first time, it was to teach a sparring workshop for the first time any of us had sparred with swords (at least in a HEMA fashion).  One of the things he told us was that it was the responsibility of those of us who had a killer instinct already to help the others cultivate it.  "You have it," he said, pointing to one of us.  "You do, and so do you," he said, pointing to two others.  And then he looked at me.  He hesitated for a moment.  "You sort of have it," he said.

At the time, I was pretty okay with that.  Half a killer instinct?  Not bad for someone just starting out.  But in the months since, others found theirs while I did not.

This bothers me.  I want to acquire access to that part of myself that Zod termed the "killer instinct."  I want to be able to turn it off and on at will, to find that part of myself and bring it within the ambit of my will.  I want it even more (if only by a little) than acquiring actual skill with a sword.  More than any other factor, this is the reason I started doing HEMA.  When I talk about the connection between force and morality, or force and good character, this is the very essence of what I mean.

Aside from its moral implications, there are obvious competitive advantages to having one's killer instinct firmly in one's tool kit as well.  Most of the best fencers, if not all, can switch from their normal selves to somebody else when they step into the ring, or before the cutting stand.  That somebody else is a significant part of why they win.

It was also a significant part of why I lost this weekend at Longpoint.  I cut significantly worse than I know I can do, because I let myself approach the mat with less than single-minded intensity.  I fought well enough in my longsword pool, but I didn't push, didn't take, as well as I know I can.  Part of that is rust from not having sparring partners who are as good or better than me.  But a significant part of it is also that I went into my pool in the same headspace I would occupy in any friendly (or even coaching) sparring match.

I think I figured it out about halfway through the event, coaching first Ailouros and then Kebbura in the women's longsword pools.  I said something to Kebbura when she was facing Panthera and holding back (as usual) that stuck in my mind.  I pointed across the ring at her and said, "That is not your friend right now.  I want you to get in there and hit her."

I coached Ailouros through her pool in the women's longsword and into the elimination brackets.  I felt like we developed a good rapport, and I enjoyed analyzing the weaknesses of her opponents and helping her to exploit them (and more, perhaps, on the coaching side of things later).  But I also just tried to get her amped up for the fight, because most of the women she faced had significant exploitable weaknesses and I just knew she could take advantage of them - if she went in with the right attitude.

The night that she got into the elimination brackets - the night after she beat the woman who would eventually take fourth place - she posted something to Facebook that really rattled me.  "I found my inner bitch today," she said.  "And not just the one I fight health insurance companies with.  The one I fight with."

Both of these ladies started training a few "generations" of students after I did (which is a matter of months, mind you; we acquired generations pretty quickly in Manhattan).  Because I like teaching and I wanted the school to succeed, I made an effort to mentor them, and I feel a certain amount of investment in their success as their senpai.  I was, of course, very proud of Ailouros' fighting and I could see, even in the pools, when she made the jump from fencer to fighting bitch.  But I was also kind of shaken.

Son of a bitch, I thought.  My kohai has found her killer instinct before me.

This was the moment that I realized I had been fighting without it all this time.  But it was also the moment that I realized I didn't know what it was, and that bothered me a lot more.  What is my inner bitch? I wondered.  What does she look like?

I tried to think back to the times I had felt my killer instinct in a fight, even if briefly and non-deliberately.  The best I could think of was the dagger competition at IGX (my best competitive showing to date, perhaps not coincidentally).  It felt ... almost cold, to be honest.  Certain.  And focused, ever so focused, on the defeat of the person in front of me.

If I ever kill someone, that is how I want it to be.  Cold.  Emotionless.  Certain.  Implacable.  That is how death should be dealt out, so far as I understand the morality of killing.  It's the kind of swordsman I want to be.

Maybe these thoughts are naive.  Almost certainly they are in at least some respect.  But it was something to start from.

So I meditated on that through the night.  I meditated on it all through Ailouros' fights in the brackets. I tried to keep her in that state as well.  I meditated on it in several otherwise friendly sparring matches I had.  And I meditated on it during today's cutting class, during which I hoped to be able to show, before my friend and teacher and a bunch of people who knew that I was the student of one of the best longsword cutters in the world, that I really can cut.  As I did so, I felt that calm, cold, unfeeling certainty return.  I was interrupted by people saying good bye, and I was able to return to that state.  And when it was finally my turn to cut, I stared down the mat and cut the way I should have cut during the qualifiers, and afterwards people who had felt pretty good about their improvement during the class asked me how I made it look so lazy.

Of course, a good headspace for cutting is not necessarily the same as a good headspace for fighting.  But we shall see.  We shall see.

I Noticed Something About "Submission"

I think a lot of people learn ancient Greek in order to read the New Testament for themselves.  That wasn’t my primary motivation, but it was certainly on my mind.  For the most part, I haven’t found any great insights into Scripture by reading it in the original.  I suppose that’s to the credit of our translations.  The other day, though, I did notice something that I found rather interesting.

Ephesians 5:22, as we all know, says, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”  That’s the New International Version.  The New Revised Standard Version says, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.”  Both the English Standard Version and the New King James say, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”  Translation after translation carries the imperative: submit, submit, submit.

It’s the sort of thing that we often find embarrassing, and many a sermon has been preached on just what Biblical “submission” means, and how it really isn’t that bad.  The exegete might grab onto the phrase “as to the Lord” to differentiate this submission from abject subjugation.  Or the sermon might focus on the later verses, about how husbands are called to “give themselves up” for their wives.  I’ve grown up with these sorts of sermons all my life, and while I think they are morally sound as far as they go and on firm textual footing, there’s something I noticed just recently that I don’t think I’ve ever quite heard before.

Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t say, “Submit.”

I don’t mean that in the original, “submit” isn’t in the imperative.  I mean that the word “submit” isn’t in the verse at all.  In point of fact, Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t even have a verb.  What it actually says is, “the wives to their own husbands as to the Lord.”  This is not a sentence in Greek any more than it is in English.  This should give the reader pause, and perhaps put him in mind that Ephesians 5:22 is not an appropriate place to begin a citation.

So where is an appropriate place to begin the citation?  I don’t actually think that’s very clear.  This may be surprising, and lest we think poorly of our translators, I think a short digression is in order.

The issue of how to break up sentences is not quite so trivial as it might first appear.  Ephesians was written prior to the adoption of punctuation, so we must infer punctuation from content.  Oftentimes this is reasonably straightforward, but there are times when it isn’t.  Ancient Greek is also fairly fond of embedded clauses and phrases and the like.  For instance, you might encounter a sentence with a structure like this: 

“Hesitating on the front stoop, holding each option in his mind and considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house.”

Even without the punctuation, this is fairly obviously a sentence.  If you know enough English, you can identify that by the presence of the verb (“entered”), and you can infer that the preceding clauses and phrases relate to the main clause.  But suppose you had a sentence like the following:

“hesitating on the front stoop holding each option in his mind and considering whether to knock or to leave he entered the house with trepeditation looking this way and that trying to make as little noise as possible he crept through the empty rooms”

 Is that one sentence?  Is it two?  Is it two, with a fragment of a third?  There are multiple ways that you could punctuate the passage above that are equally correct, even if the actual meaning of the passage is quite clear.

Now imagine that what I have written is not actually English but another language, one in which my stringing together so many gerund phrases is not bad style.  If asked to translate that, you might actually take some of my gerunds and turn them into verbs.  For instance, you might render it like this:

“He hesitated on the front stoop, holding each option in his mind.  Considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house with trepidation.  He looked this way and that, trying to make as little noise as possible, and crept through the empty rooms.”

 And that might not be a bad translation at all, at least for general purposes.  Even though it isn’t exactly “word for word,” it flows much better, and that’s not a quality to be despised in a translation when none of the meaning has been lost.

In the case of Ephesians 5:22, though, I submit that this practice has resulted (all inadvertently, I am sure) in some meaning being lost.  So let us return to that passage.  Let me back up to what I think is the clear start of a sentence and refuse to impose any punctuation after that.  Keeping the verb forms as close to their original as possible, I would translate that block of text (Ephesians 5:15-30) like this:

“Look extremely closely how you walk not as unwise but rather as wise buying out the moment because the days are painful through this do not become foolish but rather understand this the will of the lord and do not become drunk with wine in which is wastefulness but rather be full in spirit saying to each other psalms and hymns and spiritual songs singing and strumming your hearts to the lord thanking always above all god the father in the name of our lord jesus christ submitting to each other in fear of christ the wives to their own husbands as to the lord because a husband is the head of his wife as christ is the head of the church himself the savior of the body but rather as the church submits to christ so also the wives to their husbands in all things husbands love your wives just as christ loved the church and himself gave for her in order that she be cleansed purified in a bath of water in the word so that he might stand her esteemed the church not having either spot or wrinkle or any such thing but rather so that sacred and blameless in this manner the husbands must love their own wives as their own bodies he loving his wife as himself for nobody ever hated his own flesh but rather rears and warms it just as christ the church that we are limbs of his body …”

 And so it goes on.  You can probably see several places where you might put punctuation in that block of text.  One thing I don’t think you can get around, though, is this: “the wives to their husbands as to the lord” is grammatically tied up with “submitting to each other in fear of Christ.”  That is where our translators feel they have license to insert the word “submit” into Ephesians 5:22, and you can see that for most general purposes it isn’t a bad translational choice at all.  Moreover, all translations are careful to keep Ephesians 5:21 reading something like “… submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.”

What I think is particularly noteworthy, though, is that the omission of the verb from 5:22 makes it clear (to me, at least) that this whole notion of wives submitting to their own husbands is simply an illustration of the larger point about everybody submitting to one another.  In other words, while it is true that wives are told to submit to their own husbands, it is equally true that husbands are told to submit to their wives, and in fact that all Christians are told to submit to each other.

I am hardly the first person to have noticed that, but seeing where the verbs are (and are not) casts the various teachings I have heard about submission in a new light.  In light of this new, more nuanced reading, I think it is clear that when we exegete this passage by pointing out that the “submission” referred to cuts both ways between married persons, we aren’t just making frantic excuses for an inherently misogynist text.  We are instead correctly pointing out that the thrust of the text is not on wives at all, but on the entire body of believers living in a state of submission.  And that too makes clear that when we talk about “submission” in lofty spiritual terms and pooh-pooh the notion of a wife being subject to her husband’s reign as a mere strawman, we actually aren’t just whistling in the dark.  If the entire church is supposed to be submitted one to another, then the “submission” being referred to really can’t be some misogynist subjugation.  Everybody can’t be subjugated to everybody else.  So if everybody is “submitted” to everybody else, then clearly something less literal than subjugation must be going on.

And although it’s been said many times by other people, I suppose at this point it might be appropriate for me to offer up my own short exegesis about what this “submission” is, if the context of the passage precludes it from being literal subjugation.

The main thing I get from this block of text vis a vis “submission” is that it is a desirable state for the entire church.  But what else can we tell about it?  It seems to be contrasted with the wastefulness (dissipation, if you like) of being an alcoholic.  Rather than that, Paul says, we should be filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, singing and making our hearts thrum (psallontes the heart, playing it like a stringed instrument), giving thanks and submitting to one another.  To me, all these gerunds, with their musical imagery, sound like they are being arrayed to describe the same thing, a sort of spiritual harmony among persons.  But what has submitting to do with music, or harmony?  At this juncture we might safely observe that the word “submitting,” hupotassetai, means “arraying under,” as one might “array” things in an orderly fashion, such as a body of troops - we might observe this etymology without fear of being told we are simply making excuses for the obvious misogynist meaning of the text (we might also observe that another use of this verb is "to place in the shelter of").  This idea of arraying ourselves under one another strengthens my opinion that the concept Paul is trying to get across is not subjugation, one to another, but rather harmony and interleaving with each other.

Still, of course, Paul does say, “the wives to their husbands as to the Lord, because a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church, himself the savior of the body.”  So very well, we might object - insofar as husbands and wives are a subset of everybody, clearly husbands are told to place themselves in harmony with their wives.  And then wives are told to place themselves in harmony with their husbands, because a husband is the head of his wife.  What are we to make of that?  We might observe that the very next words (in the same sentence?) are, “But rather as the church submits to Christ, just so also the wives to their husbands in all things.”

We are starting to get far afield from the point of this post, which is that “modern” interpretations of submission as some sort of spiritual harmony rather than misogynist subjugation are in fact much more grounded in the text than they might first appear.  But to carry things through to conclusion, at this point we really must confront the issue of just how the church submits to Christ.  If we imagine that Christ is the head of the church in that he gets to tell the Church what to do and what not to do and sets punishments for the church when it contravenes his words, then I suppose we really are in trouble.  But I don’t think that is either a textually or historically correct view of Christ’s relationship with the church.  Paul does not define Christian morality in terms of obedience to Christ’s dictates (not that Christ had a great many moral dictates in the first place, so far as we know), but rather in terms of reaction to being.  We are the church, and therefore we act in a certain way.  I don’t want to further digress by backing up that assertion with other examples from the Pauline corpus, but even the text before us, which has a certain moralistic cast (talking about how best to live life in the moment), has nothing to do with what Christ tells the church to do.  If the reader can accept this morality-from-status assertion for now (cf. Ephesians 5:1-14, the lead-in to this whole thing, which also ties direct exhortation towards specific moral behavior not to the command of Christ, but to the status of the believer), we may observe that this is a perfectly unobjectionable way for a married woman to model her life.  She alters her behavior, to the extent that she alters it, not because her husband tells her to do anything, but simply because she is married to the man she chose to marry.  We might object if he were ordering her about, but it would be quixotic if she chose to marry him and that choice meant nothing to the way she acted.

And yet, I think, the egalitarian (feminist, if you like) objection to this passage is not so much that it envisions a husband as his wife’s dictator so much as that it envisions the husband as superior to the wife at all (even if that superiority doesn’t involve subjugation).  The response I am used to in sermons to this objection is essentially incredulity: a reader who seriously thinks that Christ, or even Paul, teaches that men are superior to women must simply not be very familiar with the whole body of our extant texts.  And I do think there is something to that.  It is difficult to imagine that the man who wrote that there is neither man nor woman in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28) believed that in the proper Godly order of things, men were superior to women.

Still, let us consider the text before us in light of this objection.  It must be admitted, for one thing, that Paul uses different language towards husbands and wives.  Even if we don’t believe those exhortations to set up an inherent superior-inferior relationship, they aren’t literally the same.  Neither does Paul say, "... submitting to one another in fear of Christ, husbands and wives to each other ..." or something like that.

On the subject of sameness, however, we might observe that the principle relationship between Christ and the church in this passage is that the church is the same flesh as Christ: “That we are the limbs of his body,” it says; and earlier, “himself the savior of the body.”  Paul is not here just trotting out his familiar turn of phrase for the church, “the body of Christ.”  He spends some time discussing how, through Christ’s sacrifice of himself, the church becomes to Christ as Christ himself.  “Loving his wife as himself,” he says, “for nobody ever hated his own flesh.”  Again, the theme of spiritual harmony - and, significantly, of equality (indeed, identity).

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the church is Christ in all respects, indistinguishable from God himself.  Rather, I want to point out what Paul is pointing out.  Paul is plainly using Christ’s relationship with the church as a metaphor here, and I think it is an uncontroversial assertion that when one uses a metaphor, one intends only to highlight certain similarities and not others.  When Lincoln used the metaphor of birth for the American War for Independence in the Gettysburg Address, he did not mean that the Revolution was like birth in all respects.  Figuring out in what respects a metaphor applies and in what respects it does not (for instance, presumably Lincoln did intend his birth metaphor to express the idea that a new entity was created through a tumultuous, blood-soaked process, but did not intend to express the idea that the new entity was incapable of existing on its own and would in fact be dependent upon its mother for a very long time, or that the new entity was incapable of rational thought) is something we have to do from context.

Here, Paul spends all of his words highlighting one particular similarity: that Christ went through a great deal of personal trouble vis a vis humanity in order to bring about a state of such harmony between man and God that humanity could be, as it were, Christ’s own flesh.  We might expound on other similarities between Christ-and-church and husband-and-wife, but this is the similarity that Paul is expounding, and I submit that if we take it farther than that we are simply riffing on our own.  To bring the metaphor home, the text here is saying that husbands should love their wives in such a way that they expend great effort, and brave what hazards may be, in order to bring about such a state of harmony with their wives that they are as inseparable as a person from his own body.  Is that something that only a husband can do, while the wife simply waits to be integrated?  I don't think so.  As every married person knows, after all, the process of altering your identity in light of your spouse - that which "the wives" are called to do - is not only an exceptionally active one, it is the very means by which two spouses harmonize with and become inseparable from each other.  The metaphors used when talking about wives and husbands are different, but the actual activity described is the same: husband and wife achieving a state of profound harmony, a metaphorical oneness.  So I am not really very comfortable saying that the text here is setting up some kind of second-class citizen status for wives.

So what are we left with?  We begin with a depiction of “submission” as an example of the mystic sort of harmony that is supposed to hold sway among all believers, which should put us off the idea that “submission” means subjugation right away.  Paul then goes on to give two more particular examples of what this sort of submission looks like, or perhaps applications of the principle.  It is, he says, the sort of thing that causes wives to care that they are married to their own husbands (and here I think we perhaps see why the text bothers to say “their own husbands,” instead of simply “their husbands,” as some translations have it - implicit in this profound, life-shaping recognition of choice is the fact that this man, and not just any man, is the one that I married).  It is, he says, the sort of thing that causes husbands to chance any consequences in the goal of achieving profound marital oneness.

As I said, these are far from original thoughts, and I hope that they are old hat to anybody who reads this.  But I also hope that, having read this, the reader may feel more confident that these are not attempts to dodge the real thrust of the passage, motivated by a modernist or feminist desire to twist the words of Scripture away from their original antiquated misogyny.  They are the real thrust of the passage, and it is those who have attempted (and attempt) to use the text to justify misogyny who do the twisting.

On Guns and Gun Control, Part III

It seems to me that whenever we have a high-profile shooting in America, talk of renewing the ban on "assault weapons" is among the first responses. This makes sense, because "assault weapon" is a provocative term that currently has no less-provocative term (in part because it describes a largely nonsensical grouping of weapons). It's hard to sound rational defending "assault weapons," and there's no good alternative term to use.

But I certainly do defend the use of "assault weapons." Back to the 2009 report - 5% of the criminal weapons examined were assault weapons; 75% were handguns. This is an obvious, intuitive result. Assault weapons are not easily concealable but are good for winning gunfights; handguns are much more easily concealable and are fairly bad at winning gunfights. Legitimate personal defense scenarios are gunfights almost by definition, whereas a gunfight is obviously anathema to a gun crime gone well. Why worry about "assault weapons" (which I think I might start calling "home defense weapons") and not guns that are not only suited to crime but actually used in crime?

I don't mean to imply that the handgun is a "criminal's weapon." I only mean to state the self-evident fact that if one is planning to commit a crime with a gun, a handgun is most likely to be the gun best suited to the crime.

We should take a moment here to address the question of why handguns are not often used in mass shootings. I don't know if any studies have been done on this subject, but I think the truth is that the weapon used doesn't matter much. As I understand it, mass shootings tend to occur at close range and the victims tend to be unarmed. In that sort of scenario, any gun will allow the shooter to kill a large number of people in a short amount of time. Sandy Hook involved magazines that can hold 30 rounds, which is a lot for a rifle. Banning high-capacity magazines (as California does) in response seems quixotic. Ejecting an empty magazine and loading a fresh one is a matter of seconds - a long time in a gunfight, but a very short time in a massacre. The relevant question in a mass-shooting scenario is not how many rounds the shooter's weapon holds, but how many rounds the shooter has brought with him. It is only when somebody starts shooting back that having a high-capacity magazine is a material advantage.

So back to gun control. Discussion of gun policy, and gun philosophy, in America always seems to come back to the Second Amendment, so I'll start with some thoughts on that. As I've already said, I think the Second Amendment was inspired by an assumption that was demonstrably wrong even in the late 18th century. The notion that an armed populace is a free populace is simply wrong, and always has been. However, being predicated on a false premise does not make the Second Amendment any less the will of the people.

What frustrates me most about the Second Amendment is how people on both sides of the "gun control debate" seem to twist it. Can there be any serious doubt that the Framers intended the Second Amendment to promote a thriving militia system (however wrong they may have been about the utility of such a system)?

If that be so (and I think it is), I do not see how the Second Amendment can be seen to guarantee the right to keep arms in the home. As Posner has correctly pointed out, a rational militia commander might well want his troops to keep their weapons in a central location (such as the muster point), so when the militia is called out there is no risk that somebody shows up without their gun (or some other essential military kit). That is, in fact, how many 18th century militia operated - Concord and Lexington wouldn't have happened otherwise. And certainly a thriving militia system (which I don't think we have) doesn't imply the right to keep a gun in a "functional" state, as Heller held. Even if the militia is going to be called out to resist a court judgment (as it sometimes was), there is time to assemble one's weapon.

At the same time, a thriving militia system does imply the right to own weapons of the sort in common use by the militaries of the day. The modern notion that peaceable citizens have no business owning automatic weapons is thoroughly anti-militia. A modern militia's armory should look like the National Guard's (which I don't think is a militia, although it is so designated by United States law) - only owned by private citizens.

To put this in perspective, I think the Second Amendment guarantees the right to privately own a main battle tank, but not the right to keep even a single-shot pistol in one's home, let alone loaded. I don't think either side of the gun control debate would be happy with that outcome, but I think that's what the amendment says. This is why I think the Second Amendment is largely superfluous when discussing questions of weaponry, even in the United States - it's a cultural touchstone, but it addresses an entirely different question than occupies current gun politics.

So, leaving the Second Amendment aside, here are two few features of gun control laws that I'd like to see that are not, to my knowledge, common:

1. A positive correlation between how heavily regulated a weapon is and how suited it is to most crimes. The current American approach is to regulate a weapon based on its potential for mass carnage. This seems ... not so much bad, as just silly. To be sure, a heavy machine gun can kill more people in a shorter period of time than can a snub-nosed revolver. The machine gun also weighs well over 100 pounds and is almost five and a half feet long. It has features that make it inherently difficult to commit crimes with. The revolver, while far less able as a weapon, has features that make it much more attractive than the machine gun as a weapon of crime. It isn't so much that regulation of the machine gun is bad so much as the relative lack of regulation of the handgun is absurd. We have a lot of data on what kinds of guns are actually used to commit crimes, and our gun regulation doesn't seem to be aware of it.

2. A shift in focus from the right to own to the ability to use. American gun control laws currently seem to focus on making sure that only the right sort of people can buy guns - people who are not felons, not mentally ill in the psychiatric sense, and so forth. That by itself doesn't seem bad to me, but the truth is, even a paragon of civic virtue is the wrong sort of person to own a gun if he doesn't train holistically in its use. It seems absurd to me that one can own a gun without demonstrating at least a modicum of proficiency in its use; the truth is it seems absurd to me that one can own a gun without demonstrating proficiency in all things firearm-related on a regular basis. I don't mean to trot out the old "anybody can buy a gun but you need to pass a test to drive a car;" I think cars are much more dangerous than guns (about four times as many automobile deaths as gun deaths in the U.S., despite the fact that we have more civilian-owned guns in the US than passenger vehicles). To me, the only point that needs to be made is that a gun is a weapon, and nobody should own a weapon of any kind without facility in the operation and philosophy of that weapon. We don't legislate philosophy in America, but I think it's ridiculous that we don't even require facility with operation.

That second point is a subset of what I think is the biggest problem with America's gun culture in general: even those who don't own guns are prone to think of them in terms of personal empowerment. I don't think that's the way weapons work. To be honest, I don't even think that weapons are simply tools, a "pro-weapon" view I sometimes hear articulated. I own a shovel, but I do not feel like a bad person because I do not regularly practice shoveling (despite the fact that I am actually fairly bad at shoveling). Weapons are not like that. I don't own a weapon because I do not currently have the income (and previously didn't care to make the time) to regularly practice weaponcraft. A weapon is not just a tool. It's a challenge.

On Guns and Gun Control, Part I

Meshparjai saw Brave the other day, and was surprisingly not-scared by the whole thing. This reminded me of the Disney Brave weapons set ("this is my princess axe!") that Thayet was planning to get her - and, of course, the fencing ("sword fighting," for those WMA snobs who can't admit that fencing is fencing) lessons that Thayet and I want for her in a few years.

And then, you know, Sandy Hook happened.

I talk a lot about force in this blog, but I've rarely directly discussed the issue of physical violence. It's been on my mind a lot lately, especially as I look forward to finally getting a job that will allow me and my family to pursue some more of our martial interests.

It is axiomatic to me that a responsible person should know how to kill people - so axiomatic that, to be honest, I have a hard time dissecting why. On a pragmatic level, it's always possible that one will be called upon by necessity to kill - but the truth is, killing isn't a pragmatic issue to me. It's a moral issue. It is people of force who claim the Kingdom of God - and while physical violence isn't the purest expression of force, I think it is part of it. All things being equal, someone who has mastered the art of physical violence - a truly dangerous person - is, I think, more a person of force than one who has not.

Why do I think this? What is force? The best definition I have for force is to effectuate one's will in spite of contravening factors. That can be the agency of another, but also (in a way) oneself - in fact, it is this sense, I think, that Jesus has in mind when he says that people of force claim the Kingdom of God. It is not easy to be Christian, and the greatest obstacles to being Christian come from ourselves. Only a person of force can overcome the obstacles they place in their own way (I don't mean to imply that an act of will is sufficient, but I do think it is, in the ordinary course, necessary). While force often includes overcoming obstacles - that is, overpowering other people - it is ultimately about self-mastery.

I think this is something you see reflected in all of our great martial traditions - in part, I think, because the serious study of arms forces us to self-examine in extreme or unusual ways. This is one reason the study of firearms and the study of swords appeals to me more than the study of unarmed combat. Unarmed combat is probably a much more practical discipline, but the point is not only to carry on (or in) one's person the ability to kill. The point is to make one's peace with killing. When are we killing to kill? Why?

Nothing I can think of - short of military or police service - encapsulates these questions better than ownership of a weapon. The objective of combat (other than, you know, survival) is often phrased as "incapacitation," and weapons are designed to "incapacitate" people. That means either (i) inflicting enough psychological horror that a person chooses to submit, (ii) severing enough limb muscles or limb bones to render a person incapable of threatening action regardless of intention, or (iii) disrupting enough of the central nervous system to render a person incapable of threatening action regardless of intention.

A sword is designed to incapacitate through either (ii) or (iii); a firearm through (iii) alone. This seems to me like a worthwhile thing to meditate on. As the old saw says, you should never point a weapon at somebody you aren't willing to kill. Or, to put it more precisely, you should never point a weapon at somebody you aren't willing to kill, turn into a vegetable, or render quadriplegic.

It may seem macabre (or perhaps it doesn't), but surely we can all imagine situations in which we would be willing to do that to another human being - and if we truly can't, I think that's an important thing to know about ourselves. If we can imagine such a situation, we should be able to kill, vegetable-ify, or paralyze a person without hesitation. Of course, doing that to a person is hard; even Melkor admits that human beings are pretty much hard-wired not to do that to each other. By overcoming that hesitation we render ourselves more dangerous, and thus more forceful.

I don't mean to imply that we should all aspire to be sociopaths. I can't think of any legal (or desirable) ways to truly inure oneself to killing anyway, except for combat service in a shooting war. But by practicing arms, I think we can increase our self-mastery, which is good for the character in situations both violent and non-violent.

This leads me back to Sandy Hook, which is a subject for another post.

On Tolerance

Not too long ago I was involved in a discussion. The details of the conversation aren't important and might be private, so let me present it schematically. Party A engaged in behavior that Party B condemned. Party A called for "tolerance" by Party B. Party B continued to condemn Party A's behavior, on the basis of Party B's deeply held religious beliefs. Party A called Party B a "bigot" for continuing to condemn. Party B objected that Party A cannot call for "tolerance" with one hand while condemning Party B's religious beliefs as "bigoted" with the other. It was about this time that I entered the conversation, and asked: Why not? I think that tolerance is an important civic virtue - perhaps the quintessential civic virtue - but it seems to me that it's often stretched to the breaking point these days. The problem, I think, arises when people conflate tolerance with acceptance. By acceptance, I mean a personal belief that a thing is right or good, or at the very least not bad or wrong. Either way, a person who accepts something has no objection to it. Tolerance is very different. By tolerance, I mean a personal belief that a thing is wrong or bad, and a personal refusal to act against the thing. In order to tolerate something, you must believe that it is wrong or bad. I think these are self-evidently different concepts, though we might quibble over what to call them. To illustrate the intuition behind my definitions, let me give three personal examples. Example the first: I think that democracy is a truer governmental philosophy than autocracy. Example the second: I have no long-standing preference for pepperoni and pineapple pizzas over pepperoni and feta pizzas, or vice versa. Example the third: I believe it is bad when parents refuse to let their children watch TV or movies. Now consider the following: does it feel like vernacular English to say that I tolerate democracy? Or even that I tolerate pepperoni and pineapple (or pepperoni and feta) pizzas? Not to me. Does it feel like vernacular English to say that I accept parents refusing to let their children watch TV? Not to me. Not even if we add in the knowledge that I would abide by that parent's wishes with respect to those children. I don't accept that; I merely restrict the scope of my objection. In short, I tolerate it. And that is why I think tolerance is such an important civic virtue. People are going to disagree. Tolerance is the lubricant that allows people who disagree to get on with the business of living with each other. "Tolerance" has become enshrined in American culture as a treasured national virtue, so much so that people wave it like a flag over their cause du jour. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's important that we keep in mind what tolerance is and isn't. Suppose I say to you, "I want everybody to show some tolerance for my lifestyle." If I really mean, "I want everybody to accept my lifestyle," then I am setting myself up for failure, disappointment, and likely bitterness. It is inevitable that people are going to disapprove of my lifestyle. That is the nature of people, and the nature of lifestyles. But it is realistic, I think, to ask that even those people who disapprove of my lifestyle not actively try to destroy it - or at least try to destroy it through specified, limited channels. It is not possible for my every neighbor to approve of my lifestyle. It is possible for me to ask my neighbor, who disapproves of my lifestyle, to limit his attempts to destroy my lifestyle to polite discourse. I use the term destroy advisedly, because I want to acknowledge that to disapprove of something is to deem it worthy of non-existence. Let's say I believe that women deserve political rights equal to those of men. This is a description of how I think the universe is structured, morally. It follows that, all else being equal, the universe would be better if there were no places where women have political rights unequal to those of men. So why don't I advocate for regime change in - well, pretty much the whole world? Because I think that the process of destroying this particular bad thing - unequal women's rights - would be worse than the thing itself. This is the essence of tolerance, this ability to say, "X is bad, but not as bad as getting rid of X." The essence of tolerance is not, "X seems bad to the ignorant and the bigoted, but the wise and enlightened recognize it as good." The virtues of this kind of tolerance are many. For one, it's an achievable ideal (at least compared to the ideal of "everybody should accept everything." For another, it respects the individual's right to believe. For a third, it encourages society to exercise its ability to discriminate moral issues. In order to have tolerance, a person must make two judgment calls: first, whether the thing itself is good or bad; and second, if the thing is bad, whether a given antidote is better or worse. Is this not the sort of society we want, where people are accustomed to making these calls? Are these not the very calls that underlie our most beloved tolerances? Consider religious tolerance. Surely nobody thinks that all religions are equally good, or even that all religions are good at all. Religious tolerance is founded on two beliefs: first, that some or all religions are bad; and second, that the evils engendered by religion are better than the evils engendered by a government trying to identify the good religions. Or, from the other side of the coin, consider the criminal code. Criminal codes arise when a society says, "We will not tolerate that; the punishment we inflict upon you may be evil, but better that evil than permitting you to continue unchecked." Sometimes society needs to make that call. Let us not get out of the habit.

A Christian Argument for Homosexuality

There's been a lot of gay marriage in the news lately, and since I am not presently bound by an employee/employer agreement to avoid discussing potentially divisive political issues on my blog, now seems like a good time to revisit that issue. On the news front, if you haven't read, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional (I haven't read the opinion yet, but my immediate reaction, as it has been for the past six years, is "duh"). In addition, the Ninth Circuit has declined to revisit its decision earlier this year ruling Prop. 8 unconstitutional (again, duh - a motion to revisit boils down to asking the court, "Okay, I know you just gave me your ruling, and I don't think I'm entitled to a new trial or anything, but would you pretty please reconsider?" Three guesses what the most common response is). Oh, and of course the president's stance on gay marriage is becoming increasingly favorable.

What brings me to my keyboard, though, is a news article I read recently quoting somebody who lamented that the Democratic party is not articulating the religious case for gay marriage to what this person called the "religious left." I don't think I like the label of "religious left" any more than I like the label of "religious right," because I don't think anybody whose stance on sociopolitical issues is truly religiously determined reaches his conclusions on the basis of current politics (plenty of people, I'm sure, do reach conclusions on such issues on the basis of current politics, and then cloak those conclusions in religious terminology, but as that isn't religious activity I am not particularly concerned with it). However, I do think there is a religious (specifically, Christian) case for gay marriage, and I think it might be instructive for me and my hypothetical readers to articulate it here a la Natalie.

This will not be a short post.

Let me first take a new paragraph to make two points clear. Point the first, this is not necessarily my current thinking on gay marriage as a religious issue. Point the second, I don't much care what my current thinking on gay marriage is as a religious issue. I already know what my current thinking on gay marriage is as a political issue, so that equips me to wield my franchise on this issue any time it comes up. And, continuing the theme of my earlier post, I don't actually have a religious belief about gay marriage per se. What I have is a belief in the process of interpreting the Bible (with corollary beliefs about why I should care about interpreting the Bible). Let me dwell on this point for a moment to make explicit the implications. If somebody doesn't share my belief that Scripture is wholly sufficient to tell us what we need to know about God, and wholly accurate in that respect, then I don't care what their religious stance on gay marriage is because they aren't part of my religion. If they are part of my religion, then I don't care what their religious stance on gay marriage is so long as they have reached that stance as the result of an honest, best-efforts read of Scripture. Gay marriage is not integral to Christianity. Deciding our stances on moral issues on the basis of honest, best-efforts reading of Scripture is. If two honest, best-efforts reads of Scripture come to different conclusions on any given issue, well, that is the nature of reading.

Which brings me to the first thing I think should be understood whenever anybody tries to discern the Bible's stance on gay marriage, which is this: the Bible does not discuss gay marriage. It doesn't even discuss being gay (as I've previously said). It barely even discusses gay sex. Now, this does not mean that the Bible has nothing to say about gay marriage, any more than the fact that the Constitution doesn't discuss gay marriage means that the Constitution has nothing to say about gay marriage. It is a property of all texts that they may implicate issues they do not explicitly discuss. But it does mean that right-thinking people could reach more than one conclusion about what the Bible has to say on this issue.

This is nothing shocking. We deal with this all the time in Christian pop culture when we try to apply the Bible to dating. The Bible discusses dating even less than it discusses gay sex, but we remain convinced (rightly, I think) that the text contains principles that can lead us to some version of Godly dating. And while we're on the subject of Biblical ambiguity, let me take a moment to state the obvious fact that we, as Christians, generally continue in fellowship with people who share our core religious beliefs but reach different conclusions as to what the Bible says on specific issues. I know plenty of Christians who don't even think that Christ died for everybody, which is much more fundamental to the faith than gay marriage, and they are still in every sense my brothers and sisters in Christ. Shame on me, and shame on my coreligionists, if we can't stay in fellowship with believers who disagree with us on something as trivial as gay marriage, homosexuality, or gay sex.

So, on to the argument itself, as I would make it.

Let me start by positing the following principle: that as Christians, we should presume that any given activity is moral until proven otherwise. By "moral," I mean "not wrong in the sight of God." I think this is a fairly uncontroversial assertion, but let me try to give it some backup just in case. Paul once told Titus not to oppose those Jewish Christians in his community who were teaching morality based on Jewish traditions and mythology. "To the pure," he said, "all things are pure." (Titus 1:15). Again, Paul admonishes us that the general attitude of a Christian towards moral activities should be permissive in Romans 14. Observing the Sabbath? Drinking alcohol? Whatever, the apostle says. Abstain or not; the act itself makes no difference to God. The case of eating food sacrificed to idols has always seemed particularly instructive to me. Suppose one of my pagan friends invites me over for dinner. Before we eat, my friend prays over the meal, thanking Demeter for her bounty and offering the meal to her glory. Should I still eat this food? Paul's answer in 1 Corinthians 8 (which actually discusses a slightly more extreme version of my example) is, whatever. "Food does not commend us to God," he says in verse 8. Most interesting to me is the fact that Scripture's answer to this question is not predicated on the premise that Demeter does not exist. Maybe she does, Paul says in verse 5. And still the answer is that eating food consecrated to Demeter does not consecrate me to Demeter - this despite the fact that the whole reason one eats food consecrated to a god is to affirm the connection between the eater and the god. Despite all this, Paul says, it's just food.

If we are satisfied that in Christianity activities are to be considered moral by default, we must now attempt to demonstrate that gay marriage is specifically excepted from this general principle of moral liberty. How might we do this?

Let's start by treating gay marriage as a species of marriage. We often hear it preached in churches and at weddings that because God created one man and one woman as the first married couple, we should infer that God defines marriage as between one man and one woman. This argument does not persuade me. God plainly does not endorse the one man, one woman (1M1W?) model exclusively. David himself kept multiple wives, and in 2 Samuel 12:8, God says that he would have given David even more if he had asked. We might infer from Adam and Eve that God prefers marriage between one man and one woman, but if so, he apparently didn't prefer it enough to tell people like David (or any of the Bible's other prominent polygamists) to stick to one woman. Before we go drawing too much from Adam and Eve, I would point out that creating one man and one woman as the species' first family is also consistent with a world in which God doesn't give a fig for what form our marriages take.

But then again, we are told in 1 Timothy 3:2 and again in Titus 1:6 that a bishop should be the husband of one wife (or, if you prefer, a man of one woman). Doesn't that demonstrate that God's highest ideal is 1M1W? I would say no. That view postulates that God will accept many versions of marriage, but considers one to be a better version than others. I think it is clear from these passages that God prefers fidelity to infidelity, but when God says something is acceptable, it is acceptable. Consider the example of marriage vs. singleness. We know that Paul preferred singleness, but we also know - from Paul - that God does not rank one higher than the other. More to the point, I cannot swallow a metaphysics where God would tell "bishops" - little more than local pastors, in Paul's day - that 1M1W is the best form of marriage, and not tell the kings or priests of all Israel the same thing if indeed this was a universal principle.

As a last marriage-based objection to gay marriage, we might consider the fact that there are no married gay couples in the Bible. We might accept polygamy on the basis that Godly men practiced it with no objection from on high. But we have no examples of Godly men (or women) married to each other. This is all true, but it also postulates a rule of morality that states that something is only Godly if we can find Biblical precedent for it. As discussed earlier, I do not think that is the rule of morality that the Bible proposes. Besides, there is a perfectly sensible reason for there not to have been any gay marriages in the Bible, which is that no cultures in any of the Bible's time periods practiced, or even struggled with the issue of, gay marriage. Why should they? The very concept of a "gay man" thinking of himself as a "gay man" wouldn't be invented for almost two thousand years (depending on when in the Bible's timeline we are placing ourselves, more than two thousand years). And let's not even get started on the differences in people's reasons for marriage now as compared to two millennia ago.

Let this dispose, at least until somebody raises a new objection, of marriage-based objections to gay marriage. What about sex-based objections?

Before we start in (again) on the Bible's view of gay sex, we might observe that sex is not the whole of marriage. This is a point we are fond of remembering at heterosexual weddings, but fond of forgetting when it comes to gay marriage. Still, the fact remains that no marriage consists solely of sex. Many marriages barely include sex at all and are still, by many lights, successful marriages. I think we can all agree that sex is good for a marriage - but then again, I think we can also all agree that it is bad for any marriage to be primarily about sex. So I think we might justifiably be wary of any argument that says that gay marriage is immoral because one component of gay marriage is demonstrably immoral. Still, I don't think anybody gets married planning to have a sexless marriage, so let us proceed with sex-based arguments.

There are few enough passages in the Bible that discuss gay sex that I think we can treat almost all of them here. In roughly chronological order:


Genesis 19 (the story of Sodom and Gomorrah). Insert all the standard disclaimers about how "sodomy" is improperly named after Sodom here. What's that? You don't know what those disclaimers are? Go educate yourself; the post will still be here when you get back. Now that you know that, really, is there any doubt here that the evil Lot is trying to shield his guests from is not gay sex but rape? Okay, yes, it's gay rape, and yes, he offers his (allegedly) virgin daughters to the mob to be raped in their stead. Two possibilities there. One is that Lot thought having his daughters raped was okay, because that's heterosexual, but thought that having his guests raped was objectionable, but that's homosexual. Two is that Lot felt like his obligations as host required him to do anything in his power to protect his guests (and probably didn't have too high an opinion of women in general). Which seems like the more culturally appropriate interpretation to you? I go with the latter. If the angels visiting Lot had manifested as women (leaving aside all the weirdness it would throw into the story for two women to walk into a city all alone and visit a man they were unrelated to), I don't think his actions would have been different. I conclude that Genesis 19 has nothing to say about the proprieties of gay sex.


Leviticus 18:22 ("You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination."). At first blush this seems like a fairly clear Biblical prohibition against gay sex. But I think that is not really fair. To begin with the most pedantic objection, it says nothing about lying with a woman as with a man. If this was really about homosexual sexual activity, wouldn't God list that somewhere? Perhaps we should construe this as about procreation, or the supposed sanctity of the male body. To play devil's advocate to myself: well, maybe. Maybe women aren't mentioned because it's culturally appropriate to refer to male activity as including equivalent female activity unless otherwise specified. To play devil's advocate to my devil's advocate: ... really?

Okay, less pedantic. What does it mean to lie with a male as with a woman? Does that cover anal sex only? Plenty of men and women, homosexual and heterosexual alike, have perfectly fulfilling sexual lives without ever experiencing anal sex. If anal sex is the only way we think gay men have sex, we need a better sexual education.

Less pedantic still. If we think that everything God said to the Hebrews applies to Christians, we need a better religious education. This prohibition falls squarely under "the Law," which the very first pan-Christian council decided did not apply to Christians (Acts 15). As a religion, we encountered, debated, and answered this question within ten years of Jesus' death. If you are Jewish, Christian, and gay, maybe this poses a religious problem for you. I couldn't say, not being educated in Jewish theology, let alone Jewish Christian theology. Now, to be sure, plenty of Christians take pieces of the Law as devotional activity, ranging from waving hands as part of worship to tithing. But I think Paul is clear in passages like Acts 13:38-39, Acts 15 (particularly vv. 23-29), Romans 2-8:11 (particularly 6:14), Galatians 2:15-16, and Ephesians 2:14-16 that no part of the Law applies to Christians except as they choose to adopt it. Which, to be clear, raises the further implication: that the Law may be used to infer God's view of pan-cultural morality only with the greatest delicacy.


Leviticus 20:13 ("If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them."). See above.


Judges 19 (the story of the rape in Gibeah). Much of what is said of the story of Sodom applies here, although there is an additional wrinkle. For those who don't know the story, here's the gist of it. A man takes a concubine and displeases in some unspecified way, so she returns to her father's house in another city. The man, feeling remorse, goes to her and wins her back. On their way back to the man's house they stop at the city of Gibeah, where, not knowing any of the locals, they prepare to spend the night in the city square. A Gibean man takes pity on the strangers and invites them to stay at his house instead. As he is entertaining them, a mob of locals demands that he give up the traveler so that they can rape him. The Gibean host tries to placate the mob with his virgin daughter and his guest's concubine, but they will have none of it. In the end the host turns out his guest's concubine, who is raped to death. Her master finds her body in front of his host's house, her fingers stretched out towards the door. The man takes his concubine's corpse home and rouses the other eleven tribes of Israel against the entire city of Gibeah for permitting the crime. Gibeah's own tribe (Benjamin) rises to defend their tribe-mates, and the eleven tribes inquire of God whether they should go to war against all of Benjamin. God says yes. A bloody civil war ensues which almost sees the entire tribe of Benjamin wiped out.

Judges spends three chapters on the story of the rape, the civil war, and how the other eleven tribes manage to prevent Benjamin from dying out in the aftermath, so I think it's fair to say that the text of the story is not homosexuality. Still, if we want to focus on this one particular detail, it must be said that the Gibeans saw a man and a woman enter the host's house and demanded to rape not the woman but the man. The questions relevant to the instant inquiry are these: is this detail supposed to be evidence of Gibeah's depravity, and if so, should we take that as evidence that God finds homosexual sex depraved?

I would tentatively answer the first question yes. It's always dangerous to infer cultural attitudes from a single detail which is not the point of the story, but I think we have evidence in Leviticus that ancient Hebrew culture abhorred (or was thought by later Jews to abhor) male-on-male sex. However, I don't think there's evidence here for God finding homosexual sex abhorrent. For one thing, we're talking about homosexual rape here, which is not the same thing as sex at all (and even cultures which could view homosexual sex as a positive thing, as classical Greeks did, could view homosexual rape as a negative thing - you know, not unlike most people's attitudes towards heterosexual sex and heterosexual rape). But in addition, let's consider why this story is in Judges in the first place. Allegorically speaking, I think this is a story about God's wrath and restoration. The rest of Israel apparently found the rape and murder of the concubine unusually horrific; they rose against Gibeah "united together as one man" (Judges 20:11), which suggests the kind of mob mentality that only truly horrific crimes can inspire. That they have God's blessing to avenge the crime is explicit, and reinforced by the fact that despite Benjamin's initial success in the civil war God tells the other eleven tribes three times that they are doing the right thing. After the war is won the eleven tribes are distraught that Benjamin's resistance means the tribe will likely die out, and oaths taken during the war prevent the eleven tribes from intermarrying to repopulate the tribe. Judges then spends as much time as it spends on the war itself describing the ingenious solution the eleven tribes find to repopulate Benjamin without breaking their wartime vows. In other words, God will pound you back to the Stone Age if he has to, but even if he does he will raise you back up. Benjamin is pounded for failing to prosecute the rape and murder of a woman. To take all this story and say, "Thus, QED, God finds consensual homosexual sex abhorrent" is absurd.


Romans 1:18-32. This passage is too long to quote, and in any case I dislike quoting short passages Scripture except to adduce the larger context or where the passage really does stand on its own, as in the Levitican passages I quoted earlier. Paul's claim in this section is that all people know the essentials of God's nature from observing creation, and that when men turned to their various false religions, worshiping created things (e.g., storms, the sun, etc.) rather than the creator, God gave their cultures over to various forms of moral and cultural debasements, such as covetousness, murder, disobedience to parents, and gay and lesbian (both listed explicitly this time) sex.

In my mind this is among the strongest Biblical passages to support the proposition that God views homosexual sex as immoral. The argument goes something like this:

1. God does not inflict good things as punishments.
2. God inflicted gay and lesbian sex as a punishment.
3. Gay and lesbian sex are not good things.


Which is fine as long as that's a fair description of the passage. But Paul's aim here is not to give a list of immoral activities; his aim is to describe what it looks like when a society goes bad. So what are the "vile passions" with which men and women in a decaying society "burn?" Is it homosexual activity? Or simply infidelity? The Greek here could as easily be translated "husbands and wives," and if you replace homosexual activity with heterosexual activity the gist of the passage doesn't actually change. The problem here is that Paul doesn't simply say, "In these past corrupt societies, women had sex with women and men had sex with men." There is an element of lust to it. A non-religious view might cite that as evidence of cultural bias against homosexual activity (i.e., the stereotype that all homosexual activity is lustful), but as we are taking the religious view, that will not serve.

To illustrate the problem, take another example of the decayed society according to Paul: murder. Murder is not simply homicide. Homicide, as Paul points out elsewhere, and as religions of all stripes at all times have held, is not necessarily an immoral act. Paul gives the example of judicial execution of criminals as non-immoral homicide. When Paul lists murder as one of the things to which a decayed society is given over to, he is referring to a particular species of homicide.

So the question the reader of Romans 1 must answer is this: is Paul referring to all species of homosexual sex? Or merely to some species? If the former, we must ask ourselves why homosexual sex is listed with pejorative adjectives and adverbs whereas all the other behaviors a decaying society evidence are simply listed. If men having sex with men was, from God's point of view, for all cultures at all times and for any reason, wrong, why did God feel the need to say that men in a decayed society "burn in their lust for one another" (v 27) rather than simply saying that they have sex? Because God gets more worked up over homosexual sex than he does over other items in the list, such as being unloving, evil-minded, or unforgiving? I have a really hard time buying that.


1 Corinthians 6:1-11. In this passage, Paul remonstrates to the Corinthian Christians against the divisions that have sprung up among them, and how little they act as if they are all brothers and sisters (chiefly evidenced by their apparent zest for suing one another). In this context, he warns them that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God, and goes on to list several examples. Among these is are the infamous (at least in circles that discuss Christianity and homosexuality) arsenokoitai. I transliterate that word because it is difficult to translate. To get an idea for the problem, consider Shakespeare. Everybody knows that Shakespeare made up words. Most of the time we can figure out what they mean because they were either adopted into the language (and thus used by subsequent authors) or appear in the context of a sentence. Now imagine that Shakespeare made up a word that was not subsequently adopted into the language and appeared in a list of bad things, with no other context. What does that word mean? How would you know?

This is exactly the problem of arsenokoites. Maybe Paul didn't make it up, but if so, other contemporary books that used this word did us the disservice of not surviving to the present day. From its appearance in a list of bad things, we may infer with some certainty that the word refers to a bad thing. Its most literal meaning is men-fuckers, from which we may infer that, whatever its precise meaning, it involves fucking men. The word is grammatically masculine, from which we may infer with a strong degree of certainty that it refers to men fucking men. The dangers of interpreting it to mean all men who fuck men are illustrated by the word that appears immediately prior, malakoi. The same literal reading of malakoi would give us "men who are soft," which might be what Paul is saying (only rough, un-gentle men will inherit the kingdom of God?), but I think most people would assume that Paul has in mind a more idiomatic meaning. The same may well be true of arsenokoites. The reader who intends to use 1 Corinthians to demonstrate that homosexual sex is incompatible with the kingdom of God must demonstrate by what means he knows that arsenokoites refers to all men who have sex with men (and by extension, presumably, all women who have sex with women?).


1 Timothy 1:3-11. This is a similar sort of passage to the prior one. In it, Paul urges Timothy to exhort his local pastors not to weave their teachings overmuch with Jewish legend or draw too much implication from who begat who or other Old Testament Scripture, reminding him that the point of the Law is to point out what is wrong, not what is right. In this context, he says, the Law is made for "the lawless and insubordinate, the ungodly and the sinners ..." and goes on to list several examples. In that list, the arsenokoitai make another appearance. I don't find this context meaningfully different, for purposes of determining precisely who the arsenokoitai are, than the 1 Corinthians discussion.


Finally, let me address one point that is commonly made but I don't think is commonly properly rebutted. I often hear it said from proponents of gay marriage that God made homosexual people to be homosexual, and it would be ridiculous - not to mention blasphemous - to pretend that their homosexuality is therefore sinful. This argument has a fine ring to it, but when made in a Christian context I consider it, frankly, a child's argument.

I am personally willing to stipulate that God made homosexual people to be homosexual, by which I mean that whatever causes people to be homosexual, I believe that at least some of that cause is not attributable to the individual's choice. But it does not follow, in a Christian vein of argument, that because God made something it is good. Maybe in other religions it does follow; I don't know. But Christianity would have it that I was born corrupted, that no part of me (physical, mental, spiritual, big, small, etc.) was wholly good. God "made me" that way, in the sense that he caused the universe to work as it does and thus for my life to come into existence, every bit as much as he has hypothetically "made" homosexuals to be born homosexual. The fact that I was born a certain way does not mean that way is good. Only children believe that.

Now, of course, it is common in Christian circles (particularly evangelical circles) to conclude that some aspects of the good, purified version of yourself can be deduced from your natural traits. I think there's reasonable Biblical support for this notion. However, we must distinguish between this principle and the principle that because it exists (i.e., God made it), it is good. Let us suppose that I was born with a predisposition to tell stories, and also a predisposition towards depression. God gave me both traits; are they both good? On what basis might we say that one is a gift I should exercise and the other something I must struggle against my entire life? The Christian answer to that question is the nature of God; the answer to how we are to describe the nature of God is a holistic study of Scripture. It always comes back to Scripture. So let us suppose that I was born with a predisposition towards homosexuality. God made me that way, but on what basis might we say that my homosexual disposition is a gift I should exercise or something I must struggle against my entire life? It comes back to Scripture, which is why this post spends a lot of time on Scripture and very little on the "but God made me this way" argument.

So there it is, the Christian argument for gay marriage (or, more precisely, the argument that Scripture does not disclose that God considers gay marriage immoral) as I would articulate it. If anybody has made it this far, this is a post I would particular enjoy reactions to. The comment box is little used, but it does work.

Veterans Day

This post comes quite late, but I didn't want Veterans Day to pass without some kind of reflection. I'm reading Republic Commando: True Colors (by the truly excellent Karen Traviss) and recently finished reading the Iliad all the way through (success at last!), both of which have touched me quite deeply, so it seemed like an appropriate time in my emotional life to deal with the subject of Veterans Day.

It's common on or around Veterans Day to hear people expressing thanks (to God or otherwise) for the men and women who have served to secure our liberties and our way of life. I recently read a number of DAR essays expressing such sentiments.

This kind of talk always makes me uncomfortable. Undoubtedly there have been a great many of American veterans who served and died with the result that our liberties and way of life were secured from direct attack. The veterans of the Revolutionary War come most immediately to mind. But even they ... I mean, how many of those men went to war for the purpose of securing the birth of the nascent nation? Certainly not the vast majority of the veterans of 1776. And what about the veterans of our other wars? Did the Spanish American War really threaten our liberties? Did even World War II (our way of life, perhaps. Our liberties? Who really thinks an Axis victory would have resulted in the conquest of America and not a peace treaty?)? Does the current war in Iraq really defend our liberties or our way of life?

I am thankful that for most of its history this nation has had the good sense to have a War Department rather than a Department of Defense. Not that I oppose the bureaucratic unification of the DoD, but the name ... I mean, really, come on. Whenever people talk about our wars as defensive in nature, I cringe. I suppose it's the classicist in me. In roughly two hundred years of history the Republic of Rome was at peace for twelve. All of those wars were, officially, to defend Roman liberties and the Roman way of life. Did you know that? And in the end? Rome had conquered, quite by accident, the whole of the Mediterranean. Oh, and the republican way of life was lost forever despite the efforts of some very talented well-meaning patriots.

I don't want that for America. I don't want us to go on making defensive war until our nation crashes down around our ears. I want us to call our wars what they are - defensive, aggressive, opportunistic, preemptive, vengeful, whatever. I doubt politicians will do so within my lifetime. But the American citizenry might.

And what about the soldiers? I'll tell you why I celebrate Veterans Day (in my quiet, internal, Natalian way). It's not because the millions of American veterans have secured my liberties (I won't even get into securing my way of life. Does it deserve to be secured?). Some of them have, and some of them haven't. Very few of those who have secured my liberties fought and died, when the chips were down, to secure the liberties of a stranger who would live decades or even centuries after they were dust and gone. Some of the veterans I would like to honor on Veterans Day didn't serve in any conflicts at all.

But they were all soldiers.

What is a soldier? In Knights of the Old Republic a soldier of the Old Republic, Carth Onasi, debates with a Mandalorian warrior the difference between a soldier and a warrior. Here's a definition of "warrior" that fits for the warriors of Mandalore and with the warriors of Homer:

A warrior fights for his good and the good of all his people.

Sarpedon was a warrior. Achilles was a warrior. And a soldier? Here's a definition of "soldier" that fits for the soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic and for the United States of America:

A soldier fights for the good of his people and surrenders that good for himself.

Achilles was the greatest warrior of his age but not a soldier until the last year of his life. Rodger Young, now ... Rodger Young was a soldier.

Not all American soldiers have secured my liberties. All of them surrendered theirs when they signed up. An American soldier does not, like Achilles, reap the reward of his efforts. An American soldier might or might not do something that secures my liberty during his career, but one thing is sure: for the duration of that career he gives up most of the liberties that make America what she is. He gives up what he has for the chance to give to his people a spoil of war that he himself may never see.

Until, that is, he puts away his uniform, hangs up his weapon, and becomes a veteran.

I'm aware that it's more complicated than that. I'm aware that many citizens become soldiers with patriotism way down on the list of their motivations, and that some become soldiers with no patriotic motivations whatsoever. I'm aware, I think as much as a civilian can be, of why fighting men actually fight. But I also think that what I have written, even though it's only part of the story, is true. And that's why I celebrate Veterans Day.

Harry Potter, Boy Hero?

I've started [re-]reading the Harry Potter series. Yes, for those of you who don't know, I never got past Chamber of Secrets. I read that far in Sicily because that was as far as our little impromptu library went, and I didn't find them compelling enough to be worth reading any further at the time. The writing style bothered me, and so did the plot. I don't mind improbable plots (heck, I enjoy improbable plots) so long as they're internally consistent - the magic foundation approach to storytelling. Take an improbable or impossible set of premises, and build a tightly logical narrative on top. Chamber of Secrets, I felt, was a different kind of storytelling - the suspension of disbelief approach. Take an improbable or impossible set of premises, and build an improbable narrative on top.

That sounds disparaging but it isn't meant to be. There's absolutely nothing wrong with skating by on the sheer coolness of your world, or your aesthetic, or your narrative voice, or whatever. There are lots of books that "skate by" in that way that are much better than magical foundation books, taken as total packages. But at the time all anybody could talk about was how cool Rowling's world/aesthetic/imagination was, and that was (probably unreasonably) offensive to me. More imaginative than Wrede? More imaginative than Pierce?

Well ... maybe. Looking at the question afresh, though, that doesn't seem to be the question. The merit of a fantasy world is to be judged by the way it plays with fantasy formulae, not by the imagination on display in its original elements. I'm not really far enough in to comment on Rowling's use of formulae.

But here's something that nobody ever talks about with regard to Harry Potter, even now: what is the call of the story? What is the story itself saying about the world, philosophy, morality? When people did discuss this sort of thing when I was reading them the first time, it seemed that all anybody could say was that the call of the story was to let it be okay to be a bratty ten year old kid. That ten year olds were naturally bratty and antiauthoritarian, and that was okay.

Which is, of course, total nonsense, and made me really uninterested in reading further. I can read a book with a bad aesthetic, I can read a book that's unimaginative, I can read a book that's badly constructed; I can even read a book that's all three if it has a really, really good call. But a bad call just kills it for me. I have plenty of time to contemplate the base and low in the real world (I was doing it just now, reading about politicians' response to Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia. Honestly, people, it's a university). Who wants to spend leisure time contemplating anything other than the noble and good?

Perhaps it was a fluke of my sample of fans back then, or perhaps it's just that the series is finished now, but when I've managed to get people to talk about Harry Potter's call these days they tell a different story. And that makes me interested again. I'm sure the books get perfectly formulaic and clunkily written after you've read about four of them with your literary critic hat on. Whatever; I'm absolutely certain I've read worse and enjoyed every second. Never mind Rowling's adverbs; what is the woman trying to say?

Here's what I hope I'm going to find. No, let me back up. There are basically two types of hero stories in the world. One type of hero is typified by, say, Honor Harrington. Honor is a compelling protagonist because she is practically perfect in every way, morally larger than life. She has a strong sense of duty, an indomitable courage, an unwavering moral compass, and the physical and mental skills to back them. She isn't perfect, of course; I find her character flaws quite compelling, but she is, in short, predisposed towards heroism. And yet she is ever the underdog, and the reason Honor is a heroine is because she continues to choose the right course of action in the face of ever more horrible threats from the outside world. And when she spits in the world's eye and does the right thing anyway and the world follows through with its threats and something horrible happens to her because she did the right thing, she takes it without complaint and is just as determined to do it again the next time. Anybody who's ever felt that the world is just too much for them to handle, that doing the right thing was too much cost for no reward, should be able to recognize the appeal of this kind of heroism. This is holding fast to your heroism in the face of the world trying to seduce (or bludgeon) you away from it.

And then there's the other type of hero, the kind that I hope Harry Potter will turn out to be. Because Harry, so far as I remember, isn't predisposed towards heroism. It's not just that he isn't a tactical genius, crack shot, and doesn't have a black belt. He isn't even mentally or morally disposed to do the right thing; he isn't mentally or morally remarkable in any way. I don't mean that his heroic qualities are overlooked by those around him, like Disney's Aladdin. I mean he doesn't have any, even deep down inside. Not that he has a great store of villainous tendencies deep down inside, either. He's just a normal kid, which is to say he's kind of a brat. Back when I was in college this seemed to be the very thing that made people so enamored of him. Personally I felt when I was his age (and continue to feel) that calling that kind of behavior "normal" is a sad commentary on the quality of contemporary parents.

But here's the rub: Harry isn't predisposed towards heroism, but he has the option to be a hero anyway. Everyone does, after all. And it's just as heroic to choose heroism in spite of your natural proclivities as it is to choose it assisted by your natural proclivities. Harry's story (I hope) is the choice of a boy who ultimately chose to do right not because that's the kind of person he was but because he chose to do so. With help, of course - indispensable help, I imagine - but because he chose to. This is the kind of heroism that the anti-hero exhibits. Harry may not be Honor Harrington, but I hope he's Han Solo.

And this is, ultimately, the kind of heroism that we all exhibit as well. Maybe some people are more predisposed towards heroism than others. But ultimately all of us choose it in spite of ourselves more than we do because of ourselves. And we have help, yes, the kind of help without which we could not choose the right thing no matter how much we tried. The important thing is not that we chose it alone or with help, or that we chose it because or inspite of ourselves. Just that we choose it.