The Non-Easter Proclamations, the President, and the Election

Posted on by David Rodeback

On Friday the White House issued two proclamations about Sunday, March 31, 2024, the day I and many fellow Christians worldwide observed as Easter. Each was accompanied by a lengthy official statement. One proclamation called Sunday César Chávez Day and was mostly ignored. The other set off a firestorm. It labeled the holiest of Christian holy days, Easter, a Transgender Day of Visibility.

Finally, on Easter itself, the White House issued a very brief statement by the President and First Lady with their “warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday.”

Some on the right speculated that no one at the White House was even aware of Easter until a chorus of angry voices pointed it out. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the White House publicized and hosted its annual Easter Egg Roll — and specifically forbade the use of religious imagery in decorating Easter eggs for the event.

Some on the left rushed to assure us (a) that the timing of this Transgender Day of Visibility was a coincidence, because it doesn’t move and Easter does, from year to year, and (b) that you have to be part of “the Trump cult” to be bothered by it anyway.

It’s reasonable for the right to be suspicious. When the Left’s project is to demolish a nation’s culture, so they can replace it with a different culture in which they rule with awful power over everyone else, they understandably attack their target’s most sacred institutions, including its holy days.

Charles Osgood, the Last of My Radio Three, Is Gone

Posted on by David Rodeback

This week we learned of the passing of CBS News icon Charles Osgood at age 91. He had other regular roles on television and radio, but I first knew him from his brief “Newsbreak” spots on the radio, which I heard many mornings in my youth.

My parents gave me two of his books, which you can still find if you look. Both are collections of his Newsbreak spots in prose and verse: Nothing Could Be Finer Than a Crisis That Is Minor in the Morning and There’s Nothing That I Wouldn’t Do If You Would Be My POSSLQ*. (POSSLQ, pronounced “possle-queue,” is an acronym for Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. It was a simpler time.)

2024: What I Want, Expect, and Wish For – Part 2

Posted on by David Rodeback

Here are more things I want to see but likely won’t in American politics and government in 2024; things I expect to see but would rather not; a bit of wishful thinking, because at least that makes me smile for a minute; a few things Americans can do; and a final thought which may seem jarring in its optimism.

This is the second of two posts. The first focused mostly on presidential candidates. This one takes up other themes, most of which relate to the presidential race somehow. Nearly everything does.

What I Want (continued)

I Want Us Not to Tolerate Violence or Rampant Tyranny in 2024

I’d love to see a mass outbreak of common sense and spirited Americanism when darker forces resume their rampage this year, as they probably will. Here’s what I mean.

2024: What I Want, Expect, and Wish For – Part 1, Presidential Candidates

Posted on by David Rodeback

Here’s what I want — part of what I want — to see, but likely won’t, in American politics and government in 2024; some things I expect to see but mostly would rather not; a bit of wishful thinking, because at least that makes me smile for a minute; and a few things Americans can do this year.

This is the first of two posts. This one focuses on presidential candidates, with an MLK Day bonus and an election denier bonus (to use a phrase I don’t like, because no one denies the 2020 presidential election actually happened). The second post considers other topics, still mostly in our national politics and government, and therefore somewhat related to a presidential election year.

I Want Different Presidential Nominees

I want to see the major parties nominate presidential candidates other than Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In this I am with the majority of Americans, supposedly, but that may not matter. In any case, both men are known quantities.

And the Devil Laughed

Posted on by David Rodeback

Let’s talk for a few minutes about Israel, Hamas, Iran, what happened on October 7, and how people have responded in the United States and around the world. Ever since that day, I’ve been jotting down and revising my thoughts. But I was in the middle of a concerted campaign at afelection.info and elsewhere to inform and influence a local election. That absorbed all my available time for blogging, among other things. Election Day came two weeks late this year in Utah, but it’s over, and we won. You were probably busy too. Meanwhile, around the world, the devil laughed.

I just now deleted most of the words I’ve written and rewritten about that day and its continuing aftermath — 2,000 words, give or take. We don’t need them for two reasons. First, my essential thoughts here are quite simple.

I’ll be talking about evil — the evil of the original attack and the evil of celebrating it, then and now.

Then I will refer you to a wise, insightful, and urgently necessary speech I watched on YouTube last week. The speaker is Bari Weiss, a prominent American liberal, not a leftist; the difference is large and consequential. Though I am a conservative, and some of her politics and mine (on other subjects) don’t mesh, I beg you to watch it at least once. Then share it with others if you dare.

It is everything I wish I had time to write here and more; that’s the second reason we don’t need more of my words here. And perhaps Ms. Weiss, as a liberal, will reach readers who would tend to dismiss the same thoughts if they came from my mouth or pen, because so many of my stated views are conservative.

After that, I’ll suggest a second video.

My Privilege, My Blessings

Posted on by David Rodeback

I’ve thought a lot in recent years, especially at this season, about two somewhat similar activities: counting blessings and checking privilege.

The idea of counting blessings is far older than me. Some of my earliest memories of church services feature the chorus of a well-beloved old hymn: “Count your many blessings; / See what God has done.”

Checking privilege is a newer phrase, at least to me. It was alive and well on college campuses when I was in graduate school in the Ivy League in the 1990s. There I often heard the phrase white privilege and occasionally even the historically fraught white guilt. Over the next decade or two what I’d met in the academy infused itself into our broader culture.

On reflection I find moral worth in both activities — checking my privilege and counting my blessings — but I find some important differences too, and some risks.

One housekeeping note before we proceed: Returning readers may wonder, when they encounter religious content here, why this essay is at The Freedom Habit instead of Bendable Light. The reason is simple: I intend BendableLight.com to be a safe space from politics. When my other themes, including faith, overlap with politics, their place is here.

Check Whose Privilege?

There are two basic versions of checking privilege.

One version is second-person: check your privilege. This might be said kindly and with good intentions, but it’s often — and easily — weaponized. When it is, it becomes shorthand for “people like you have dominated everything forever; it’s time for you to shut up.”

(A certain sort of abuser could weaponize “count your blessings” too, but in my experience that is rare.)

The other, healthier version is first-person and introspective: check my privilege. One considers one’s own privilege in a mode of sincere self-evaluation. Only this version bears comparison to counting blessings.

Let’s Read the Declaration of Independence Together

Posted on by David Rodeback

Sometimes, when we seek the sense and meaning of an important text, it helps to read it aloud, or to hear it read aloud while we read the text. In case it’s useful to you, here I am, reading the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day 2023. I’m not a trained voice actor, as you will see.

At least I have the sense to keep reading, resisting the considerable temptation to stop and comment. So the audio file isn’t hours long; it’s less than ten minutes, including my reading of the signers’ names. (I figure they earned the attention.)

If you’d like to read along with me, here’s a link to the transcription I used at the National Archives.

Here’s the audio.

Photo credit: Dan Mall on Unsplash

David Rodeback - impeachment

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Human Purpose and Identity, the Judeo-Christian Tradition, Independence Day, and the Left

Posted on by David Rodeback

Leftists, who are not the same as liberals, have a natural enemy in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Western culture and government. We should not be surprised to see them attack that tradition persistently and comprehensively. This natural hostility reaches to the early pages of the Old Testament, the very foundations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and to some famous words in the Declaration of Independence.

For today, because we can’t dive into the deep end of every pool in the neighborhood at once — this is an essay of modest length, not a book — I’ll ignore some things and assert others without detailed discussion. Each of these deserves careful consideration, but it won’t happen in this essay:

  • Is the expected attack under way, perhaps even well advanced? There may be few more important questions in our culture and politics, but I’m avoiding this question today, for economy’s sake and because I hope people with differing views of this question will read this essay.
  • I assert without discussion here that American liberals and leftists are not the same; they too are natural enemies. At the simplest level, when the labels make sense, liberals seek liberty. So do American conservatives. Leftists seek power.
  • I’m ignoring the extreme Right in the United States. They exist, but they are virtually irrelevant at present, except in Leftist rhetoric, and they occupy no significant place in the hearts and minds of most Americans, including the vast majority of conservatives. Moreover, the extreme Right’s goals closely resemble the Left’s; the major difference is branding. Much of what I say here about the Left would apply to the extreme Right as well.
  • I note without detailed discussion some concerns of religious and secular observers alike, including scholars. They point to increasing challenges among the rising generation of American youth and young adults, including an unusual lack of purpose and identity and a lack of hope for the future. (If one happens to believe the Left’s expected attack is well advanced in the US, one might see these unfortunate trends as highly convenient or even intentional.)
  • I assert without writing a book about it that the Left by nature works to destroy culture, the rule of law, and every traditional moral and social restraint, and to divide people into warring factions. This is their theoretical and historical path to seizing comprehensive power amid the rubble.

If your comfort requires you to read this discussion as purely theoretical and hypothetical, feel free. But if you happen someday to notice the American Left attacking the Judeo-Christian tradition — in real time or in history — you’ll know it is simply being true to itself, doing what so many Lefts have done before. It is using its power, when it has power, to attack its chief cultural rival.

All of that said (or evaded, as the case may be), we need a slightly larger foundation before we proceed.

2022 Election Results and Reflections

Posted on by David Rodeback

We’re less than eight weeks past Election Day, that increasingly fuzzy temporal landmark, and I don’t want to speak too soon, but I think the 2022 election is finally over.

Georgia’s routine, belated runoff is history. Counties and states with more or less functional election apparatus have long since released their official numbers. And in the last few days three more things happened. Pennsylvania finally certified its results, the final tally in the State of Washington gave one US House seat to the Democrat candidate who had trailed earlier, and, though an appeal is pending, an Arizona judge rejected Kari Lake’s challenge to that state’s gubernatorial results.

I waited to finish and post this commentary until after my own county in Utah, aptly named Utah County, certified its results — on schedule — just before Thanksgiving, because my friend and neighbor Sarah Beeson was in an Alpine School Board race so close that we didn’t know the outcome before then. She won by 60 votes or 0.28%.

After that, I waited for Georgia and some non-electoral things. I don’t do this for a living, you see. And who wants to pore over politics at Christmas? But Christmas is now 364 weeks away. Let’s get this behind us while it’s still 2022, shall we?

David’s Opinionated 2022 Election Guide – State, County, and Local Races

Posted on by David Rodeback

Among the contested races and measures on my 2022 election ballot are races for Utah State Treasurer, Utah State House District 53, Utah County Commission Seat A, Utah County Clerk, Alpine School Board District 4, a proposed amendment to the Utah Constitution, and approval of a proposed Alpine School District bond issue. There are several uncontested races, which is unfortunate, no matter how good the lone candidates in those races may be.

Here I present state, county, and local contests in the order in which they appear on my ballot. With so many races it would be awkward to separate information and opinion, so I don’t. (In my previous post, on US Senate and House races on my ballot, which fairly drips with opinion, I did.)

Please remember that mailed ballots must be postmarked by Monday, November 7. We can also leave our ballots at drop boxes around the county through 8:00 p.m. on Election Day (Tuesday, November 8).