The Binary Circumstance

It is ironic that on the day that Martha Stewart said she’s going to serve her time in a federal prison in West Virginia, Trey Givens quotes Skip Oliva on the subject of obstruction of justice. All the “crimes” that Stewart was convicted of basically boiled down to obstruction of justice by lying.

There is, however, a great degree of subjectivism in the existing legal system. Most “crimes”-especially at the federal level-are subjective crimes of “art??? rather than violations of individual rights. The most common subjective crime is “obstruction of justice,??? which basically encompasses any act that displeases a prosecutor in the course of an investigation. Unlike perjury, which has an objective definition (lying under oath), obstruction charges are inherently subjective, and thus common tools of prosecutorial abuse.

I have written several articles about Martha Stewart’s conviction. She was basically convicted for being disobedient, something that cannot be a crime, in and of itself, in a free society.

I would argue that it was the government that engaged in obstruction of justice, but nobody will be sending them to jail any time soon. They have the guns.

Jay McCarthy links to Michael Williams who writes about homosexuality and Christianity:

From verse 29 and on we see that all mankind is filled with evil: envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, hatred for God, insolence, arrogance, boastfulness — who among us is innocent? None. We all stand condemned, before a holy and righteous God.

Why, then, do many Christians see homosexuality and homosexuals as particularly evil? Theologically, we shouldn’t. The real difficulty, however, is that although most of us acknowledge the wrongfulness of our many lies, thefts, and boasts, many people deny the wrongness of homosexuality. Our culture glorifies many types of evil, but individually we mostly agree that greed, slander, gossip, and the rest are bad and that we should not participate in them. However, when it comes to homosexuality, many people argue that it’s not wrong at all; and unless we are willing to confess the evil of our actions, God will not forgive us. We must be willing to submit ourselves to God’s dictates on right and wrong, and we must be willing to agree with him when he condemns our actions

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Christianity and most other religions find homosexuality especially evil because homosexual sex doesn’t increase the number of believers. Religion survives because little children are brainwashed from the time they are little babies. People who are brought up in secular homes tend to see religion as ridiculous. Most children, however, don’t question the beliefs of their parents or the people that their parents teach them to respect.

Homosexuals are useless in “God’s plan” to convert the entire world to one particular belief system.

Heterosexuals can consider themselves to be morally and spiritually superior to homosexuals and everybody else and the church gets more members. There’s something in it for everybody, except the homosexuals and they don’t count anyway.

Mount St. Helens is rumbling a lot and scientists are expecting some kind of eruption.

The whole Iraq thing just seems to be getting worse. The Washington Post reports that top intelligence officials are increasingly pessimistic about the situation.

Last night, Richard Engel described on the NBC Nightly News how the public education system in Iraq is falling into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists.

Under Saddam, Beytool’s school was only allowed to teach the strict, state-approved curriculum. But now, it’s a private school and they are free to teach whatever they like. And in a sign of the changing times here, the focus is now overwhelmingly on Islamic education. Instead of teaching the alphabet, the goal in Beytool’s class is to memorize 28 basic verses from the Koran, and learn how to wash before prayers.

The school’s director says: “the most important thing for a child to know is religion.”

At universities too, religious hard-liners are taking hold — at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya, self-appointed morality police now guard the campus gate. They recently sent a grad student away because she was wearing pants.

What hath Bush wrought?