The Republican and the Pharisee? I don't think so
On the other hand, if either side is actually waging a war specifically on repentance... well, it's probably not the Left.
When he was a sophomore in high school, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is alleged, while drunk, of attempted to sexually assault a girl named Christine Ford while young That is Dr. Ford's claim. Justice Kavanaugh denies it. One of the two other people who, according to Dr. Ford's story, were in a position to know about the assault denies that it ever happened. The other, a longtime friend of Dr. Ford, has no memory of it having happened. And nobody, including Dr. Ford herself, can give a location for the alleged assault, or a time or date more specific than the year.
Several other accusers came forward subsequently suggesting similar drunken behavior by Kavanaugh as late as his college years. But none of their stories, on examination, rose even to the level of credibility established by Dr. Ford's wholly unsupported accusation.
The attempted rape, as Dr. Ford herself describes it, seems not to have been a very determined one. That doesn't excuse it, of course- if it happened. if the unsubstantiated accusation is true, it constituted grossly inappropriate and radically unacceptable behavior even from a fifteen year-old Even a clumsy and rather half-hearted attempt by a drunken adolescent to remove a woman's clothes while pinning her to the bed, an unwilling participant in the encounter is not behavior a civilized society ought to accept.
But none of that changes the fact that it's not at all clear that it actually happened and nor that if it did, it happened when Brett Kavanaugh was fifteen years old. The firestorm over his confirmation centered on the act of a drunken teenage boy a very, very long time ago, and one that didn't get very far before he relented. Two questions arise here, and they're questions we're being forced to face more and more often in this hyperpartisan age in which someone can probably be found to accuse anyone of anything: first, how quick we should be to believe mere accusations against public figures before credible evidence is brought forward to validate them, and secondly, whether there ought not to be a statute of limitations for young people acting like idiots, obviously depending on the nature of the behavior and the presence or absence of extenuating circumstances. Should Dr. Ford's story, even if we assume its complete truth, really disqualify Kavanaugh from serving on the Supreme Court forty years later?That might be the subject of a productive national conversation- but not in the absence of the fact that, partisanship aside, Dr. Ford's unsupported and somewhat confused and hazy claim is the only reason we have to think that it even might have.
If Brett Kavanaugh had been denied confirmation on the basis of Dr. Ford's story, then nobody appointed to any office by a president of either party would ever have been confirmed by the Senate again. In the face of determined opposition, a case as strong as the case for refusing to confirm him on the basis of Dr. Ford's accusation can be made without much difficulty against just about anybody. Predictably, those who didn't want Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court even for reasons having nothing to do with Dr. Ford's accusation think that his confirmation was an outrage, but i think it's patent that their conclusion has less to do with what, if anything, happened or didn't happen at that unspecified date at that unspecified location which only Dr. Ford apparently recalls than with ideological politics and the prospect of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
I find it hard to be nearly as understanding where the other "victim" of the Left's alleged problem with "repentence" mentioned by Rabbi Prager, Roy Moore, is concerned. Moore is the former Alabama Supreme Court justice who was defeated in his bid for a Senate seat at least in part because of charges of misconduct which were also about forty years old. The problem in Moore's case, though, was not a single, poorly-substantiated drunken incident when he was a teenager, coupled with a subsequent series of accusations from women unsure of the details of the incidents they complained of or even- literally, in one case- of whether they actually even happened. It was a series of far more credible accusations of sexual assault from nine women, two of whom minors below the age of at the time when Moore was an adult. The accusations in Moore's case were credible enough that several prominent Republican leaders called for him to drop out of his Senate race. As Rabbi Prager points out, Moore has apparently lived an exemplary life since then. That should doubtless be noted. But even so, the cases of Kavanaugh and Moore are cases apples and oranges. They are in no way equivalent.
A stupid, half-hearted, drunken act by a fifteen year old which may not actually have ever happened is one thing. Even if it happened (and again, the evidence that it did doesn't even rise to the level required in a civil lawsuit), It doesn't necessarily speak to an abiding character flaw. Strong suspicions of an ongoing pattern of sexual assault and even pedophilia by an adult are something else. A question of vindictiveness on the part of his critics can be raised, it seems to me, in Justice Kavanaugh's case, especially given the quality of the evidence that the event in question ever occurred. Again, there is even more reason to doubt the credibility of the other accusations which, is they always seem to in such cases these days, suddenly started coming out of the woodwork once Dr. Ford made her accusation than was the case with those of Dr. Ford herself.
In Judge Moore's case, "forgiveness" isn't the issue. Nor, really, is the capacity of human beings for change. The question was whether a guy whom the preponderance of the evidence suggests really had sexually assaulted seven grown women and two children at any point in his life, ought to have that fact simply ignored despite the admittedly real possibility that he has changed. Sorry, but like Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney, among others, I don't think such a person ought to be a United States senator. when he sought to become a United States senator.
And then, there's very issue which Rabbi Prager raises: the matter of repentance. Neither Justice Kavanaugh nor Judge Moore admit to the charges made against them. There is considerable room for doubt that the charges against Justice Kavanaugh were actually true, however much a large percentage of the American people would like them to be. But there is considerably less reason for doubt in the case of Judge Moore, and even though it is certainly possible (though very unlikely) that he is innocent of all of the things of which he has been accused, his unwillingness to admit blame- to repent- is a very legitimate matter of concern.
We Americans are at heart a generous and forgiving people. If a public figure does something wrong, and frankly admits it, and expresses remorse, we may or may not be willing to subsequently entrust the responsibilities of public office to that person. That is as it should be. There are a whole range of issues to be considered in that regard, including the seriousness of the offense and the degree to which it undermines our confidence that the person in question can be trusted in the future. But where that person owns up to his or her actions, exhibits genuine remorse, and accepts both responsibility his or her actions and their just consequences, the American people will infallibly forgive that person, and do so from their hearts, and even think more highly of him or of her for having had the character to come clean.
But not otherwise. Repentance matters to Americans- as well it ought to matter.
Like Rabbi Prager, I am even more appalled by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's comfort with killing a baby after it has been born under certain circumstances- and with the medically unnecessary abortion of a viable fetus in any case (the consensus of the medical community is that a Caesarian delivery of a fetus sufficiently developed to be viable is always safter even for the mother than an abortion) than with his having worn blackface as a joke when he was in medical school. But I'm appalled by that, too. For the blackface incident, at least, Gov. Northam has expressed remorse, and that remorse appears to be genuine. It happened long enough ago for Ralph Northam to have grown up.
Unlike Rabbi Prager, I do not see his impenitence with regard to his attitude toward infanticide, much less toward the sleazy attacks his campaign made against his Republican opponent, as meaning that what appears to be his sincere remorse about the blackface incident is negated. As a pastor, I would have had to withhold absolution from a person who was only selectively penitent. From the person. People are not absolved of their sins on a piecemeal basis; it's the person who is absolved, and absolution is, by definition, absolute and all-encompassing. But that would not prevent me from acknowledging even an otherwise impenitent parishioner's remorse for a particular sin. Even this, it seems, Rabbi Prager seems unable to do, even in an article which criticizes the Left for its reluctance to honor repentance. Ironically, it is the case in which Rabbi Prager is unwilling to forgive which perhaps best validates his argument with regard to the Left. The Left, after all, isn't troubled by Gov. Northam's comfort with infanticide. The problem is that it is nevertheless no more willing to honor Gov. Northam's repentance at least for the blackface affair than is Rabbi Prager.
None of this changes the fact that Rabbi Prager raises a valid and important point. We are a society which supposedly believes in forgiveness, in redemption. And in the presence of genuine contrition, we generally practice what we believe in. Repentance and forgiveness play major roles in Rabbi Prager's own Judaism, as every Jew is reminded by the necessity of Yom Kippur. As Rabbi Prager notes, they play even more prominent roles in Christianity; we Christians regularly ask God to "forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." One might even say that repentance and forgiveness lie at the very heart of Christianity.
Yet even in those parts of the American population which most loudly proclaim their Christianity, the notion of forgiveness has fallen on hard times. As valid as Rabbi Prager's criticism of the Left for its apparent inability to believe that people can change and that human lives can be redeemed and turned around may be, his premise- that it's all the fault of the Left- is hard to sustain. The problem is at least as great on the Right, and there, it's if anything even more- excuse the expression- unforgivable, precisely because it's there where one might reasonably expect the greatest willingness to forgive.
Take Jane Fonda. A case can be made that her literal public espousal of the cause of a nation with which the United States was at war in the '60's and '70's actually meets the constitutional definition of treason, which by the Founders' design is a difficult standard to meet. I can well understand that a man who was languishing in the Hanoi Hilton or even risking his life in the rice patties of South Vietnam at the time might find it hard to forgive the starlet, dressed in military fatigues, who laughed and posed for photographers seated at an anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes, among them those piloted by her fellow countrymen who were being tortured and abused by her buddies the North Vietnamese literally only a few miles away.
But decades have passed, and Jane Fonda, too, has grown up. Neither Brett Kavanaugh nor Roy Moore ever admitted to any wrongdoing. But Fonda has, just as Ralph Northam has. Over and over she has publicly expressed her remorse and her shame and begged to be forgiven by the men she has come to realize that she so outrageously wronged.
If we're talking repentance, Jane Fonda is the poster child. But it's not the Left that refuses to forgive Jane Fonda.
I have absolutely no question that theologically capital punishment is justified. Contrary to the rather lame arguments commonly posed by the theological Left, not only do both biblical Testaments explicitly endorse it (the Old Testament actually prescribes it for a wide range of crimes), but never in the history of the Christian Church has there ever been anything resembling a univocal rejection of it. And the period in which opposition to it among Christians was strongest was the pre-Constantinian era, when Christians were not only in no position to put others to death but likely to be put to death themselvessimply because they were Christians. Yet is was that era in which St. Paul, in Romans 13, authoritatively defended it!
Jesus, who was Himself its victim, is nowhere recorded as having spoken against it. And Christianity has never suggested that the government- instituted, according to Paul, precisely to "bear the sword" as "the minister of God to execute wrath upon evildoers" (Romans 13:4)- had the same obligation to forgive criminals as individuals have to forgive those who do wrong to them, or even the right to do so. And to address perhaps the lamest theological objection of all to capital punishment, the Hebrew of the Commandment does not, in fact, say, "Thou shalt not kill," but rather "Thou shalt not murder." The Hebrew that is used in the commandment excludes both lawful capital punishment by the State and killing in war. Moreover, once again, it seems quite strange that so many folks miss the rather obvious point that the very same Old Testament book in which one finds the Ten Commandments prescribes a mandatory death penalty for a much wider variety of offenses than most Western democracies, at least, have ever regarded as capital offenses!
Nevertheless, I note that it was only the government of ancient Israel which God commanded to execute even murderers. In a nomadic society like Israel in the Wilderness, few opunishments for crime existed other than either banishment or execution I see no convincing biblical argument that should any other government make the decision most of them, in fact, have made, and substitute life imprisonment for execution, they would violate any scriptural mandate addressed to them. And there are excellent practical arguments for that decision. Contrary to what supporters of the death penalty claim, fighting the appeals in a capital case typically ends up costing the state many times the expense of housing, clothing, and feeding a prisoner for the rest of his life. And the best argument of all against capital punishment is the unconscionably high number of cases in which innocent people are executed, and their innocence discovered only when it's too late.
Yet it's the Right- the largely Christian Right- which asks, "What about the families of the victims?," and seems to regard that as an argument that we somehow have an ethical obligation to execute murderers as an act of compassion toward those left behind. That's a strange position, it seems to me, for Christians to take, given the request we make every time we pray the Lord's Prayer. My own mother was killed by a drunken driver, and I cannot deny that it took time and a great deal of struggle for me to overcome the desire for retribiiution, for revenge. But from the beginning, I instinctively sensed that, the Spanish (or Klingon) proverb to the contrary, whether served hot or cold, revenge would ultimately taste like ashes. While there are exceptions, most accounts I've read of the attitudes of the families of murder victims after the killer has been executed confirm that intuition. They generally say that it brought then neither the peace nor satisfaction nor consolation. Closure, sometimes, but often not even that. Their loved one is still dead, and nothing that was broken turns out to be mended by executing the murderer.
If Jesus had any idea what He was talking about, it's worth worrying about the minority who do take pleasure in the deaths of the murderers. The fact that doing so would be a very understandable and very human reaction doesn't change the fact that if Jesus was telling the truth when He said that we must love our enemies and forgive those who wrong us, and that forgiveness will be withheld from those who are unwilling themselves to forgive, we are doing the families of the victims no favor by helping them indulge a taste for spiritual poison. And that is what makes the "families of the victims" argument, to me, the most conclusive of all the arguments against captital punishment- at least for a Christian.
Recently an American citizen who foolishly renounced her citizenship to fight for the Taliban repented, and asked to be forgiven and allowed to come home. It's the Right, not the Left, that has vehemently objected to the very idea. This is not the first such incident, and there seems to be a pattern here: there is a strange reluctance on the part of the overwhelmingly Christian Right to forgive even in the face of manifest repentance.
Now, again, the subject of the Prager article is supposedly not merely forgiveness, but repentance. Justice Kavanaugh has not repented. Neither has Judge Moore. Of course, it is very possible that Justice Kavanaugh, and somewhat less possible that Judge Moore, at least as regard the charges of misconduct against them have nothing to repent for. But either way, neither of their cases speak to the atttitude of the Left toward repentance, and it is repentance against which Rabbi Prager accuses the Left of waging war.
But Jane Fonda has repented. So has the (former) American who fought for the Taliban. And it's the Right which refuses to forgive them, or to accept the notion that they can be rehabilitated. It's the Right which seems to have a problem with the idea that specifically those who repent ought to be forgiven.
Not only, the Right, of course, If it were, the political hot water Gov. Northam is in over that blackface picture would not be nearly as hot. I say that even though I agree with Rabbi Prager that on other grounds the water Gov. Northam is in ought to be a great deal hotter.
But then, there's the biggest non-repenter of all, the one who doesn't need to repent. because he's not making "mistakes," and who "doesn't bring God into it" when he does. The one Dennis Prager himself- though I never would have believed it of him- has become such a staunch defender despite his manifest impenitence. Rabbi Prager himself has become an apologist for a man who doesn't think he needs to apologize, and therefore doesn't; who responds to his mistakes and misdeeds by doubling down on them and precisely never admitting that he's wrong.
Rabbi Prager has a valid point. It's just that it's not exactly the point he tries to make. The Left does have a problem with forgiving. But so does the Right. But it's the Right which seems to have the bigger with repentance, and as long as it follows a narcissist like Donald Trump, it will continue to have it.
Even as we speak, the Democratic party's best and perhaps only hope (given the growing extremism of its rank-and-file and of the other Democratic candidates) of defeating President Trump, former Vice-President Joe Biden, is facing two accusations of unwanted physical contact with women. They probably will not prove fatal to his candidacy, since the contact involved seems capable of being interpreted as non-sexual. While it would be interesting to find out whether they would be so generous in the case of a Republican, prominent Democrats and many feminists seem inclined to be forgiving. Certainly the realization on the part of Democrats remotely in touch with reality that if any of the other candidates win the Democratic nomination President Trump's chances of re-election will skyrocket plays a role here.
But if the Pharisee in the Democratic primary voters wins out and the incidents lead to Biden being denied the nomination, the nation may well face a choice in 2020 between a party which refuses to forgive and a party which neither respects nor demands repentance, and whose standard bearer refuses to admit, except in principle (and that only sometimes) that he's capable of doing anything wrong. Not a very healthy situation for America politically, in my opinion- and an even less healthy sign as regards its spiritual health.
Yes, there is indeed a war being fought against forgiveness- and both parties are allies in it, if in little else. As to repentance... well, let's just say that perhaps Rabbi Prager should have thought twice about accusing the Left as the aggressor in that particular war. Neither side is blameless, but the Right, if anything, seems to have the greater problem with honoring, and at times even requiring, repentence.
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