Jimmy Akin

By the Senate, that is.

J. Leon Holmes was one of President Bush’s nominees to the federal judiciary whose nomination had been languishing for eighteen months due to Democratic Party stonewalling. But it ain’t languishing any more, because the nomination finally came up for a vote, and he was confirmed!

Woo-hoo!

I’m unusually excited about this because Leon happens to be a friend of mine. In fact, he played a role in my conversion to the Catholic Church, as you can read about in my conversion story (search on his name).

Leon wasn’t (unfortunately) nominated to the Supreme Court but to a minor federal judgeship. He will be one of five judges adjudicating matters in half of the state of Arkansas. Normally such appointees are passed with only a couple of minutes’ debate and often with a voice vote. Their confirmations are about as non-controversial as it gets in the Senate.

But not in Leon’s case.

His nomination received a full day of debate and a squeaker, roll-call vote (that barely passed, in part due to the absence of several senators who would have voted the other way, including Kerry and his new . . . uh . . . running-mate, Edwards).

The reason is that Leon is a conservative Catholic and–consequently–he is committedly pro-life. In fact, he was president of Arkansas Right to Life for two years in the 1980s. As a result, pro-abortion forces seized on his nomination and raised a huge hullabaloo. You can read attacks on him by the National Organization for Women, NARAL, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and oodles of others if you do a Google search on him.

Some openly announced that they were deliberately using his nomination to send a message to President Bush that pro-life nominees to the Supreme Court would not be tolerated.

And they lost.

On the significance of that for the forthcoming election, you might want to read this analysis.

If you look at some of the attacks on Leon on various web pages, you may note how brief the quotations from his writings (often from pro-life writings from the early 1980s) are. This is deliberate quotation out of context, because to read them in a larger context would result in a much different impression being conveyed. I have confidence in my readers’ intelligence to see how the same quote could come across very differently. I will, however, mention the most widely-used statement, because there are facts regarding this statement that are often not disclosed.

The charge that was most widely used against Leon was a statement taken from an article he wrote in his local diocesan newspaper on “inclusive” language. The article summarized what St. Paul said regarding how husbands and wives should relate to each other as Christ and the Church and what this means for the roles of spouses in marriage. Consequently the quote was used to portray him as a troglodytic oppressor of women.

What was widely not reported was the fact that Leon didn’t write this article alone. It was co-authored with his wife, Susan. In fact, it was based on Susan’s Bible study. He was her co-author.

The way the article was used to portray Leon is especially ironic since Susan is most definitely not a shy, retiring woman “dominated by” her husband. She is a sharp, intelligent, plainspoken woman who has no difficulty at all making her views known. I know she was quite irked at the way her views and her writing were used to defame her husband.

Ultimately, though, the effort was not enough. People from every political and social viewpoint who actually know Leon recognize him as a man of supreme integrity and came forward to support his nomination. This included both Arkansas senators (both Democrats) and many who would sharply disagree with his views on abortion. Multiple senators, including especially Sen. Rick Santorum (a Catholic senator from Pennsylvania) argued that to oppose Leon for his adherence to biblical and Catholic teaching would amount to saying that being a Catholic or taking the Bible at face value was of itself reason to be disqualified from the judiciary. (How’s that for freedom of religion!?)

A special irony of the situation is that, in the course of processing the nomination, Leon was required to submit copies of his writings going back years. One of these was a paper he wrote about Mary which played a role in my conversion. As I mention in my conversion story, it was reading that paper that helped turn me around on some Catholic issues and thus contributed to my conversion. The irony is that the opponents of Leon’s nomination–in search of material to use against it–had to read through that very same paper.

So who knows . . . perhaps it will lead to their conversions as well.

For a long time we’ve been hearing scare stories about overpopulation. Well, it MIGHT be true that certain (very small) areas of the globe are overpopulated, though even that is in doubt. There are certainly areas of the globe where people are jammed in cheek-by-jowl (like Hong Kong or Tokyo or Singapore), but what constitutes overpopulation isn’t just the population density: It’s the outstripping by the population of the ability of the available resources to sustain them. Since the cities I just mentioned have a high level of development, overpopulation even there is going to be disputable.

But all of that is elsewhere.

It’s not in the U.S.

Surprisingly, the 2000 Presidential election provides an illustration of this. As we all know, the nation was closely divided between the “blue” or “Gore” areas and the “red” or “Bush” areas. Recently I printed a map of these when calibrated by state, but the division can also be calibrated based on county, as in the first map accompanying this entry. (Thanks to one of the folks in the comments box for recalling such county maps to my memory!)

Here’s the deal: Gore apparently slightly won the popular vote, though he didn’t win the election because the way the electoral college works, since Bush slightly won that. That means that the blue areas of the map have a population approximately equal to that of the red areas. (In reality, there’s more to the story than this since there are “blue voters” in the red areas and “red voters” in the blue areas, but it’s not enough to void the point I’m about to make.)

The point is: The blue areas are a tiny portion of the country, while the red areas are huge. This means that–unless the red areas are far more resource-poor than they actually are–we could have many, MANY more people in the U.S. than we do without hitting true overpopulation.

Since overpopulation is one of the key reasons offered for contracepting and aborting our progeny, this means that this “reason” does not exist in our country. The 2000 election proved it.

Now, as I indicated, there are more dimensions to the story than I indicated. To see some of these dimensions, read this page from a “Bush perspective” and this page from a “Gore perspective.” The latter, in particular, contains a number of cool maps. The former, in particular, contains some cool analysis.

None of the other dimensions challenge the basic point I am making. In fact, there are more sophisticated maps making the same point–like the second one associated with this entry, which is a straight population map of the U.S.

The basic point remains the same: The U.S. is not overpopulated. In fact, the world is not overpopulated. Our real problem is not lack of resources but barriers to food and resource distribution that are put in place on the local level (like the north, Muslim area of Ethiopia deliberately trying to starve the south, Christian area of Ethiopia). If the distribution avenues commonly available in the U.S. were available worldwide, the earth could sustain many times the people it currently houses.

In fact, you may have read accounts noting that the entire world population could comfortably fit in my home state of Texas, leaving the rest of the planet empty.

That’d be juss fine with me! Then ev’ryone would be Texan!

Resistance is futahl.

Y’all will be assimilated.

(BTW, Rodeo is now the national pasttime.)

Well, this is encouraging.

After the awful Abu Ghraib fiasco there has been a worry in some quarters that a similar scandal might erupt concerning the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. (Remember all the hullabaloo over the Taliban and al-Qa’eda prisoners being taken there–gasp!–in shackles? Murderers and terrorists in shackles? The horror!) The scandal, if it were to happen, also might emerge in the press suspiciously close to this year’s presidential election. An “October surprise,” as it were.

Well, the folks at Gitmo apparently decided to get out ahead of that possibility and invited a group of AP reporters in to tour the facility.

The story is a relief. Nothing horrifically scandalous emerged from their visit. In fact, it was quite reassurring.

That’s not to say that those would might want to see a scandal couldn’t concoct one–nor is it to say that there may be things about conditions at Guantanamo Bay that haven’t yet come to light–but taking the story for what it is, it’s a relief. Unless something changes, the U.S. won’t have to endure an Abu Ghraib-like scandal coming from that facility.