"Born Free" — The Movie Classic

The other day on Turner Classic Movies I watched the classic film Born Free for the very first time.

Elsa the lioness

It's a true story about a British couple, Joy and George Adamson, who lived and worked in the wilds of Kenya and, while there, raised a female lion cub, Elsa, from the age of four weeks on. Once Elsa reached adulthood, they successfully trained her to fend for herself, kill her own food, and "live free." They then released her to dwell with other lions in the wild.

The Born Free movie from 1966 was based on a 1960 book by the same title, written by Joy Adamson.

Elsa, after her return to the wild, continued to visit the Adamsons regularly. She never lost her gentleness toward and affection for her human "foster parents." As a by-that-time "wild" lioness of three years of age, Elsa would even bring her own never-tamed lion cubs to the Adamsons' for friendly visits.

Joy Adamson with Elsa

Sadly, Elsa passed away prematurely a few days short of her sixth birthday, due to a rare tick-borne disease. According to the web page "Tribute to Elsa the Lioness," Elsa died with her head in George Adamson's lap! Her ashes are marked by a headstone which can yet be visited today in Kenya's Meru National Park. Some of the ashes of Joy Adamson, who died in 1980, are buried there as well.

George Adamson's life continued until 1989. According to his Wikipedia article:

On 20 August 1989, George Adamson was murdered near his camp in Kora National Park, by Somali bandits, when he went to the rescue of his assistant and a young European tourist in the Kora National Park. He was 83 years old. He is buried in the Kora National Park near his brother Terance and Boy, one of the lions who was part of the Born Free film.

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These are important lessons here for us today. One is that humans can develop deep, bidirectional bonds of mutual respect and deep, lasting love even with animals from species that kill for a living.

Another lesson is that we humans, any of us, can be killers. In fact, the only reason Joy and George Adamson had an opportunity to raise Elsa and her litter mates, Big One and Lastika — both of whom were eventually donated as adults to the Rotterdam (Netherlands) Zoo — was that George, employed as a game warden in Kenya, had been forced to shoot the cubs' mother as, acting instinctively in defense of her offspring, she charged him.

The overarching lesson here is that our nature — indeed, all of nature, including that of meat-eating animals at the top of the food chain — is split. We humans can deeply love many others of God's creatures, even though some of those creatures under certain circumstance may pose deadly threats to ourselves. When it comes to our own kind, we can love some of our fellows and kill others. When we do kill, it can be a justifiable or even a righteous act ... or it can be the epitome of evil.

Elisabeth Warren's Pro-Marriage-Equality Zinger

Ruth Marcus

Check out The Washington Post op-ed writer Ruth Marcus's column today: "Warren had a good zinger on gay marriage. It was bad politics."

Ms. Marcus chastises Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democratic party's leading presidential candidates, for her answer when asked at a recent LGBTQ forum:

How would she respond, Warren was asked at CNN’s forum on LGBTQ issues, to a voter who told her, “I’m old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman”?

Her response, as characterized by Ms. Marcus:

The Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate couldn’t resist the opportunity for a double dig. “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that,” she began, giving the audience the chance to snicker along about the evident cluelessness of the male gender. “And I’m going to say, ‘Then just marry one woman — I’m cool with that.’”

Warren shrugged, as if to say, no biggie, live and let live. The audience whooped with delight. Warren shrugged again. Then she went in for the easy kill. “Assuming,” she said, “you can find one.” She turned, clapped along with the audience, nodded in evident satisfaction, put palms up as if to say, what is wrong with people who just don’t get it?

I agree with Ms. Marcus that

... it was a mistake that evoked missteps of Democratic campaigns past — a dismissiveness that Warren and her fellow candidates would do well to avoid.

This is bad politics, which may be the strongest immediate argument for shifting course, yet it is something worse than that. It reflects an attitude of intolerance and disrespect toward people of faith. Those who reasonably expect tolerance and respect should think about — well, they should think about the importance of practicing what they preach.

Sen. Elizabeth
Warren

I had the same reaction when I first read Annie Linskey's coverage of the event itself. Her coverage appeared on The Post's front page on October 11 of this year. Ms. Linskey wrote:

After landing her punchline, Warren turned, took a few steps and smiled broadly as the room exploded in laughter. Her response went viral online, and by Friday afternoon, Warren’s campaign team, which rarely brags about such things, was crowing that the clip had garnered more than 12 million views on Twitter.

I'm a Catholic who is torn between my church's proscription of marriage between two members of the same sex and today's widespread acceptance of it. I am also aware that many Protestants oppose same-sex relationships because the Bible's Book of Leviticus (for instance) says:

“[Men] shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22)

There are other biblical references, both in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and in the New Testament, to homosexual relations being theologically anathema. My understanding is that members of many Protestant denominations read the Bible as their exclusive source of understanding of the God they worship, and the Bible seems to be pretty clear that homosexuality is, in its terms, an abomination.

St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274)

But as a Catholic I also realize that my church has historically added to the understanding of God that the Bible itself bestows. There have been centuries of thinking and writing various treatises about what we Catholics, as Catholics, ought to believe. Much of this writing, including that of St. Thomas Aquinas, has invoked "natural law."

I realize that natural law philosophers/theologians maintain that we humans — whether or not we are Christians or even believers in God — have certain ideas about right and wrong graven on our hearts; we're divinely endowed with the capability of rational thought about what is moral and what is not.

I've begun reading David Haines and Andrew Fulford's Natural Law: A Brief Introduction and Biblical Defense. It's good, but it's aimed mostly at modern Protestants who have factored out natural law from their theological belief on grounds that natural-law thinking seems to support a Catholic idea that salvation can come from doing "good works" sheerly out of the goodness of our hearts. Most Protestants believe that salvation comes solely through faith in Jesus Christ alone, not out of "works," no matter how "good."

This emphasis by Haines and Fulford, from the perspective of my Catholic belief, misses the point.

*****

By chance I've also just run across an apt article in a recent Commonweal magazine, "Does Church Teaching Change? Church Doctrine at Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II," by John W. O’Malley, S.J. Prior to the Council of Trent of 1545-63, Fr. O'Malley says, it was generally understood that Catholic teachings could never change. That attitude prevailed in the Catholic Church until Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni patris (1879).

That encyclical, not coincidentally, followed in the wake of the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, the book which expounded what became known as the theory of evolution. If species actually evolve over time, Darwin's thought implied, then nothing is completely immune to change. Ergo, Catholic teaching itself has never been immune to change. Per Fr. O'Malley, Leo XIII’s encyclical accordingly initiated a revival of the study of the works of Thomas Aquinas.

Such a revival was termed ressourcement, a French word for "return to the sources." Perhaps errors had crept into Catholic teachings that were derived from Aquinas's writings — such as his Summa Theologica, the work from which many Catholic teachings about natural law had long been derived.

In the early 1960s, ressourcement became one of the major concerns of the Second Vatican Council. Fr. O'Malley writes:

In the mid-twentieth century, return to the sources, now explicitly under the neologism ressourcement, drove much of the theological ferment in France that played such a major role in Vatican II. At the council virtually all the participants accepted the validity of the return-to-the-sources principle. Disputes over it arose only when it seemed to be applied too radically. Those who balked at such application had a point because ressourcement had more potent implications than [mere] development. While development implies further movement along a given path, ressourcement says that we are no longer going to move along Path X. We are going back to a fork in the road and will now move along a better and different path.

Development and ressourcement are both about corporate memory, the memory that is constitutive of identity. What institutions wittingly or unwittingly chose to remember and chose to forget from their past makes them what they are. The great battles at Vatican II were battles over the identity of the church: not over its fundamental dogmas, but over the place, relevance, and respective weight of certain fundamental values in the tradition.

What Fr. O'Malley writes in his article clearly implies that post-conciliar Catholic theologians are not yet in complete agreement about how the natural-law teachings of Aquinas, given ressourcement, ought to be applied today ... and, in particular, how they should inform today's Catholic beliefs about sex, marriage, procreation, and LGBTQ issues.

In other words, I'm still searching for Catholic answers, firmly grounded in natural law, to certain questions that are of the utmost sociocultural importance today.

Ban Military-Style Assault Weapons!

Last weekend saw two mass shootings, one in El Paso, Texas, and one in Dayton, Ohio. The one in El Paso was done with an AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle:

AK-47 assault rifle

The AK-47 is a military-style weapon. Many of us have erroneously assumed that private ownership of AK-47s and similar semi-automatic, military-style weapons is protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — but it's not! According to Barry Mendelsohn's letter in today's Washington Post (scroll down to find it):

In the written 5-to-4 District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court decision, which dramatically expanded the Second Amendment rights of individuals to possess guns outside of militias, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explicitly excluded military-style weapons from that right.

According to this article about the Heller decision:

The Supreme Court stated, however, that the Second Amendment should not be understood as conferring a “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” The Court provided examples of laws it considered “presumptively lawful,” including those which:

• Prohibit firearm possession by felons and the mentally ill;
• Forbid firearm possession in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings; and
• Impose conditions on the commercial sale of firearms.

The Court noted that this list is not exhaustive, and concluded that the Second Amendment is also consistent with laws banning “dangerous and unusual weapons” not in common use at the time, such as M-16 rifles and other firearms that are most useful in military service.

The AK-47 qualifies as a type of weapon that is "most useful in military service." So does the similar AR-15 assault rifle:

AR-15 assault rifle

Therefore, banning the AK-47 and the AR-15 would not violate Heller. Banning weapons like these would prevent untold numbers of mass shootings in America. So let's ban all privately owned military-style assault weapons now!

Let's Plant Some Trees!

"Scientists say planting a trillion trees globally could be the single most effective way to fight climate change." That quote comes from an article found here. The article continues:

According to a new study in the journal Science, planting billions of trees around the world would be the cheapest and most effective way to tackle the climate crisis. Since trees absorb carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, a worldwide planting initiative could remove a substantial portion of heat-trapping emissions from the atmosphere.

The researchers say a program at this scale could remove about two-thirds of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused by human activities since the start of the industrial revolution, or nearly 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

In other words, we need to pursue what advocates are calling "reforestation."

One of the best things about
forests is their natural beauty.

Humans have over the years cut down huge numbers of forest trees in order to expand their economic activities. Those economic activities have involved burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas — to generate power.

Cutting down trees causes the fallen trees to release their stored CO2 — carbon dioxide — back into the atmosphere. If the downed trees are burned, that process happens even faster.

Burning fossil fuels puts yet more CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is a so-called "greenhouse gas." The extra CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat that reaches us from the sun. The trapped heat raises temperatures at the Earth's surface. This is the cause of global warming, also known as climate change.

Reforestation — planting billions and billions of trees throughout the world — can help reverse much of the climate change that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution some two centuries ago.

*****

Where can these trees be planted?

One excellent place, surprisingly, is in our cities. Many of our cities were built, in fact, where forests once thrived. We simply cut down the trees to build our civilized, city-based habitats.

Now we need to restore the trees. And in performing that so-called "urban landscaping" today, we ought to prioritize the poorer communities in our cities. See "How Can We Get Trees to the Communities That Need Them the Most?" for ideas about why and how to do that.

Also see "The Benefits of Trees" for a rundown on all the many reasons why we'd be smart to plant trees wherever possible, including our cities, and particularly in our cities' poorer neighborhoods. In particular, notice that "Urban landscaping, including trees, helps lower crime rates."

*****

Senator Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have "unveiled legislation aimed at ensuring that climate change plans benefit low-income communities," according to The New York Times. They call their goal "climate equity." It's part of what's being called "the Green New Deal."

What better way to target our efforts to deal constructively with climate change than to aim urban landscaping plans, including the planting of trees, directly at poorer communities?

*****

Yet let's not fool ourselves. This would be a hard sell politically. "Study explains why thousands of Detroit residents rejected city's tree planting efforts" tells why. That article clues us in that once a city government or other organization plants trees in a neighborhood, it has to follow through and take care of the trees: giving them tender, loving care while they're young; pruning them back away from power lines when they get bigger; and raking up leaves every fall. Neighborhood residents have enough to worry about; they don't need the extra responsibility of tree maintenance.

Obviously, expanded tree maintenance done at the city level costs money. Often, that kind of money is not easily available in city budgets. So money for the maintenance of new trees planted in poorer communities needs to derive from the federal government. Such funding needs to be part of Sen. Harris's and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's "climate equity" plan; it has to be part of the Green New Deal.

Don't Panic!

Everyone should read the recent New York Times column by law professor Ilya Somin, "How liberals learned to love federalism." Its subtitle: "The left was skeptical of giving power to the states. Until the Trump era." Its premise: During the Trump years, liberals are finding reasons to rethink their rejection, especially during the civil rights movement, of the idea that state and local governments ought never to overrule or block the initiatives of the national government.

Graphic from the article. Click to enlarge.

Why the change of heart by liberals? Because today, state and local governments are flexing their muscles to block Trump's right-wing initiatives. A case in point: Trump's efforts to put the kibosh on "sanctuary cities" for undocumented immigrants are being effectively resisted by the affected states and cities themselves.

"Americans of every political stripe," Somin writes, "have much to gain from stronger enforcement of constitutional limits on federal authority. One-size-fits-all federal policies often work poorly in a highly diverse and ideologically polarized nation." This is because strong federalism, with political power duly exercised at all governmental levels, acts as a kind of ballast whenever polarization tries to yank us too far to the left or too far to the right.

President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal moved us decidedly leftward toward bigger national government. But let's not forget that his first New Deal effort, the National Recovery Administration, was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously declared that the NRA law was unconstitutional. This happened in 1935, within two years of its 1933 passage. The Supreme Court declared that it infringed the separation of powers under the United States Constitution. Then, when FDR in 1937 tried to pack the Supreme Court with extra pro-New Deal justices, the Senate defeated his bill.

Somin's viewpoint can accordingly be extended to lauding the checks and balances afforded by having three coequal branches of the national government, including not only the president but also the congress and the judiciary. Somin writes:

Many cities, plus a coalition of seven states led by New York, sued to challenge the new conditions linking [federal grants to the sanctuary cities] to immigration enforcement. At least a dozen federal trial court decisions and four appellate rulings have gone against the administration, while none have supported it. Only Congress, these decisions have affirmed, can impose such terms on grants given to states and towns.

Note also the importance to federalism of not just the Supreme Court but also the lower tiers of the federal judiciary, such as the trial and appellate courts.

The takeaway from all this is that there is a long history of federalism's ability to offset lurches to the political left or to the political right such as we're seeing every day in today's headlines and Twitter feeds. So much of the political rhetoric we hear today is proclaimed out of a sort of panic mode that bodes the end of the world as we know it. The lesson of Somin's benevolent history of American federalism, summarized in two words: Don't panic!

Racism, Busing ... and Joe Biden

In the recent TV debate among 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls, Sen. Kamala Harris upbraided former Vice President Joe Biden for, among other things that imply Biden was never sufficiently "woke" about race issues, his opposition to federally mandated "busing" as a young senator in the 1970s.

Kamala Harris (on left) and Joe Biden

Harris's ploy worked well for her. Although Biden still is at the top of the presidential polls, he quickly lost ground to Harris, who jumped up in the polls to somewhere between second and fourth place, depending on the poll.

There is a front page article in today's Washington Post, "What a lifeguarding job on the black side of Wilmington taught Joe Biden about race," that gives an in-depth look at how the young Joe Biden learned to despise the racism in American life and history. By the time a few years later when he entered politics, Biden had personally earned the friendship, respect, and support of the black community in Wilmington, Delaware. The loyalty from that time persists today.

The talk of "busing" in the TV debate was probably less than comprehensible to many younger viewers. Nikole Hannah-Jones's recent article in The New York Times, "It Was Never About Busing: Court-ordered desegregation worked. But white racism made it hard to accept" explains all.

Illustration from the article.

"Busing" was a term used in the 1970s to refer to a last-ditch effort by anti-segregationists to force public schools to integrate. After the Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, said segregated schools were unconstitutional, school boards and local governments in both the South and the North found a variety of ways to sidestep integrating their schools. Pro-integration forces in school systems responded by simply assigning black children to formerly all-white schools, and vice versa. Since the affected schools were not in the actual neighborhoods of the affected children, the children had to ride school buses to their new schools.

White families in particular — but also some black families — vociferously objected to the fact that "busing" was taking children away from their closest neighborhood schools. Objecting black families simply wanted their neighborhood schools to be brought up to white schools' standards of quality. But objecting white families assailed "busing" rather than admit that what they really hated was the fact that integration would force their children to sit next to black children in schools.

It's obvious, then, that those old battles about race have not really been won by the forces of justice and racial equity. (Nor are those who favor racial equity today necessarily on the same page as to how to achieve it.) In fact, as this graphic from the Hannah-Jones article shows ...

Click to enlarge.

... integrationist gains which had been achieved by "busing" and other means after 1968 were rolled back significantly after 1988. This sad fact was true in various parts of the country outside the Northeast. Even sadder was the fact that in the supposedly "blue" and liberal Northeast, there had been no integrationist gains in school systems in the first place.

Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 3

Last week, on June 26th and 27th, 20 of the Democratic presidential hopefuls squared off in a two-night, 10-candidate-per-night TV debate. As of today, July 2, Real Clear Politics shows (here) that the debate had a profound effect on how well the various contenders are polling. (See "Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 2" for how they were doing prior to the debate.)

Here's the crucial chart as of today:

Click to enlarge.

The crucial post-debate changes show up at the right edge of the chart. Joe Biden, though still on top, has dropped enormously. He's now polling at just 27 percent. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has shot way up from her earlier low support level to 13.4 percent. The reason for both those changes is the way that Harris took Biden to task during the debate for failing to support federally mandated busing and for having worked amicably in Congress with southern senators who were white segregationists.

The number two Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, has likewise lost ground in the post-debate polls. Elizabeth Warren, for her part, is still just barely in the number three position, having impressed on the first night of the debate ... but Harris, from the second night, is hot on her heels at number four. The number five candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, has declined in his post-debate support, even though I personally thought he did extremely well in the debate. All of the other Democratic candidates are coming in with less than three percent support apiece.