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Incoherent Cain
(Note: my characterization of Cain’s views in the initial entry, based on my reading of Peter Wehner’s article, is somewhat incorrect. See, below, the transcript of the Cain interview which a reader sent and my reply/correction.)
As Peter Wehner at the Commentary blog points out, Herman Cain incoherently wings it on social issues. The man may understand balance sheets, but he seems to lack the ability to think logically about moral questions. Thus, on abortion, he says he is “100 percent pro-life.” But he also says that the decision on the rightness of abortion should be left entirely up to the woman and her family. In other words, he’s a liberal who wants no legal restraints on abortion at all.
On homosexuality, he is a pure liberal, without any conservative-sounding slogans to confuse the issue. He says that sexual orientation is a matter of the individual’s “choice.”
Mr. Cain’s position—what he calls his “gut instinct” … seems to be that, as [Piers] Morgan himself pointed out, a person—often in his teens—simply decides one day that he will be gay. And that decision, apparently, is enough to alter completely a person’s desire for one sex, replacing it with the desire for the other sex. But that seems rather simplistic and improbable.
Not if you’re a liberal! Liberals believe in radical self-autonomy. They believe neither in an inherent human nature nor in a transcendent moral order. They think that we determine own being through nothing but our own free choices. The fact that Cain, who has presented himself as such a hard-hitting conservative, could turn around and mouth pure liberal orthodoxy on the most fundamental problems, shows that he hasn’t begun to think through his own stands. One thing we can be pretty sure of: whatever conservative positions he does have, such as on Islam or illegal immigration, will, when tested in America’s liberal-dominated public square, dissolve under the force of his underlying liberal premises.
Wehner concludes:
[W]hen you declare your candidacy for president, people have a right to expect a certain level of preparedness, a de minimus [de minimis] understanding of the issues, and the ability to offer coherent arguments in order to explain and defend one’s position. Herman Cain falls short on each of these counts. And it’s one of the reasons he won’t win the GOP nomination.
- end of initial entry -
D. Edwards writes:
You write:
“As Peter Wehner at the Commentary blog points out, Herman Cain incoherently wings it on social issues. The man may understand balance sheets, but he seems to lack the ability to think logically about moral questions.”
But on Libya Wehner has written this earlier that day:
I for one am delighted that Muammar Qaddafi, an unusually malevolent head of state, is dead. He brutalized the Libyan people for more than four decades, and he met the end he deserved….
As a person who holds views very different from the president, I understand the impulse to deny him any credit at all—or to offer it only grudgingly when forced to. But this merely underscores a danger we all face, which is refusing to adjust our judgments in the face of facts and unfolding events. The temptation, for liberals as well as conservatives, is to make just about everything conform to our pre-existing worldview—and to deny inconvenient facts or twist them in a way that vindicates our assumptions and suppositions.
So I’m wondering why you respect Wehner’s judgment on one but not the other?
LA replies:
It’s an illogical question. All of us make distinctions like that all the time, between the things for which we respect a person, and the things for which we don’t respect him. I do not generally respect Wehner. In fact, I went over to Commentary to see what they were saying about Kaddafi, but the Cain item was at the top of the page, and it seemed to be presenting something about Cain that was both factual and well reasoned. Now perhaps Wehner misrepresented what Cain said—he didn’t have lengthy quotes, as he was responding to an interview he had seen on the Piers Morgan program. But what he did say about Cain seemed to hold together.
The fact that I regard Wehner as a mad neocon on the Kaddafi question has nothing to do with the correctness or incorrectness of what he said about Cain. If I followed your reasoning, that I may never cite a writer on any subject who I think is wrong on some other subject, then I could never cite anyone.
Ken Hechtman writes:
Here is the full exchange from the CNN interview. It’s brilliant. I’ve never seen a Democrat square the circle on social issues as well as this before. Even Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” riff on abortion doesn’t match it.
First Cain expresses what strikes me as a consistent conservative Christian position.
MORGAN: Back with Herman Cain.
I want to get stuck into you on your personal—I guess your personal views, is the all encompassing theme of this segment. First of all, let’s talk about homosexuality because—and is that wrong? Do you think it’s a sin?
CAIN: I think it’s a sin because of my biblical beliefs and although people don’t agree with me, I happen to think that it is a choice.
How is that not conservative? Homosexuality is a sin because the Bible says so. But if it’s a sin, it has to be a choice. A just God doesn’t send people to hell for things they have no control over. And that’s his first answer. His second answer, the one that says what he’ll do on the issue as president, will be something else. But his gut reaction was “It’s a sin because the Bible says so.”
Next, after some back and forth where the interviewer lays out the canonical liberal position (homosexuality is NOT a choice, it’s an inborn orientation) look at what Cain does:
MORGAN: My gut instinct, Herman, tells me it has to be a natural thing.
CAIN: OK, so it’s your gut instinct against my gut instinct. It’s a wash. It’s a push.
That being said, I respect their right to make that choice. You don’t see me bashing them or anything like that. I respect their right to make that choice. I don’t have to agree with it. That’s all I’m saying.
If it’s a choice, even a sinful one, then he has to respect it. That’s the (liberal) American way. The Bible is his moral code. It’s not all America’s moral code. He knows no president can change that. He knows no president should try.
Christian Republicans and libertarian Republicans are both going to watch that clip and come away thinking Herman Cain is their guy.
LA replies:
First, it appears that I, relying on Wehner and perhaps my own incorrect assumptions about what Wehner was saying Cain had said, misunderstood Cain’s remark about choice. When Cain said homosexuality was a choice, it was by way of counteracting the liberal position that homosexuality is inborn, therefore people have no choice about it, therefore society should tolerate and accept homosexuality and allow people of the same sex to marry each other. (This, of course, is a huge exception to the general liberal credo, discussed in the initial entry, that man has no inborn nature, is self-autonomous, and makes himself by his own choices. Liberals adopted this huge exception to their general blank-slate view in order to get homosexuality accepted.)
So Cain is saying that homosexual conduct is a sin, and that the people who commit this sin, freely choose to commit it. That is a conservative, traditionalist position. But then, as Mr. Hechtman points out, Cain reverses himself and says that he respects people’s right to make that sinful choice. So in practice he completely abandons any religious or traditionalist objection to homosexual conduct and adopts an all out liberal position. He says that it is a sin, but that he personally has no problem with it (just as he said that he’s 100 percent pro-life, but that he believes that the choice whether to have an abortion or not should be completely up to the woman). Now, Mr. Hechtman may be right that in today’s world this is clever self-positioning, but it is still woefully incoherent—as incoherent and as undeserving of being taken seriously as George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”—which, when I first heard it in an early speech of his as a presidential candidate in 1999, I thought was politically clever, but incoherent and unacceptable. And I say the same about Cain.
Where I was wrong in the initial entry was when I said that Cain’s stand on homosexuality was “purely liberal.” It is not purely liberal. It is a contradictory mix of conservative and liberal which in practice turns out to be entirely liberal, exactly like his position on abortion.
October 22
Jim C. writes (10/21):
Incoherent Cain—need to add a sic:
Wehner concludes:
[W]hen you declare your candidacy for president, people have a right to expect a certain level of preparedness, a de minimus[sic/de minimis]
LA replies:
Thanks. Also, apart from the spelling, he also doesn’t seem to be using the term correctly:
De minimis is a Latin expression meaning about minimal things, normally in the locutions de minimis non curat praetor (“The praetor does not concern himself with trifles”) or de minimis non curat lex (“The law does not concern itself with trifles”).[1][2]
He probably should have said, “a minimal understanding of the issues… ”
LA continues:
Also, when I posted the entry, I made an editorial amendation of Wehner’s text. He had written:
“And that decision, apparently, is enough to completely alter a person’s desire for one sex, replacing it with the desire for the other sex.”
To get rid of the split infinitive, I changed the sentence to:
“And that decision, apparently, is enough to alter completely a person’s desire for one sex, replacing it with the desire for the other sex.”
Tim W. writes:
Ken Hechtman wrote:
Homosexuality is a sin because the Bible says so. But if it’s a sin, it has to be a choice. A just God doesn’t send people to hell for things they have no control over. And that’s his first answer. His second answer, the one that says what he’ll do on the issue as president, will be something else. But his gut reaction was “It’s a sin because the Bible says so.”
That may be a correct reading of Herman Cain’s position, but I don’t think that’s a correct reading of the Bible. The Bible says homosexual conduct is a sin, not homosexuality. We are all born tainted by original sin, therefore we are all subject to temptation. Some are tempted to steal, others are tempted to commit adultery, some are tempted by homosexuality. There are countless temptations, some of which appeal to us as individuals, while others don’t. The ones that don’t are no problem. The ones that do require will power and faith to avoid. Christ was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. Christ didn’t sin by being tempted. But he would have sinned if he had given in to the temptation.
Many Christians believe homosexuality is a choice. I’m not sure one way or another on this issue. However, if it is not a choice, but an inborn characteristic, it doesn’t change a thing from a Christian perspective. It may be that some people are born with a predisposition to violence, to greed, to heterosexual promiscuity, or to substance abuse. If so, from a Christian perspective the predisposition is not the sin. It is giving in to the predisposition that is sinful. We all face temptations to sin every day. We please God by resisting the sin, not by declaring the sin to be a fundamental human right and engaging in it with glee.
Mr. Hechtman also wrote:
If it’s a choice, even a sinful one, then he has to respect it. That’s the (liberal) American way. The Bible is his moral code. It’s not all America’s moral code.
It’s news to me that “choice” is the liberal American way. Liberals may invoke that word when convenient, but they don’t practice what they preach. It’s clearly a choice if I, as a Christian, choose not to rent my property out for a same-sex “wedding,” but liberals think that should be a crime. Liberals may be correct in saying that the Bible is not all America’s moral code, but they surely want liberalism to be just that, as well as its legal code.
LA replies:
The contradiction that Tim points to is explained by the fact that liberals seek to liberate humanity from all traditional and non-liberal forces of constraint, in order to give the liberal order absolute control over humanity. I discussed this in the June 2003 entry, “Why is liberalism both liberationist and totalitarian?”:
Sexual liberationism is the means of weakening one of the principal bases of traditional order—i.e., the family—that serves as an alternative to bureaucratic and state control. The general idea is that the left-liberal state must be totalitarian in relation to everything that comes within its own purview, but libertarian in relation to everything that comes within the purview of other sources of order, such as the rule of law, traditional manners and self-restraint, family, church, ethnic nationhood, national sovereignty, and so on. For example, liberalism wants to supplant the nation-state with a global bureaucratic state; so it “liberates” individuals from any connection to the nation-state, via open borders, mass influxes of unassimilable foreigners, cultural rights for minorities, and so on, all of which has the effect of radically weakening the nation-state and ultimately cancelling it out of existence.
Thus the paradox or double standard implicit in the original question—why is liberalism libertarian in some areas, and totalitarian in others?—turns out to be not a paradox or double standard at all, but the rationally consistent activity of liberalism in building up its own authority and destroying all traditional sources of authority that stand in its way.
Gilda A. writes:
You wrote:
Also, when I posted the entry, I made an editorial amendation of Wehner’s text. He had written:
“And that decision, apparently, is enough to completely alter a person’s desire for one sex, replacing it with the desire for the other sex.”
To get rid of the split infinitive, I changed the sentence to:
“And that decision, apparently, is enough to alter completely a person’s desire for one sex, replacing it with the desire for the other sex.”
This is against the rules, especially the rules of scholarship. If your hatred of split infinitives is so consuming, you may either add “[sic]” or paraphrase in brackets (“[to alter completely]”), but you may not rewrite someone’s words while concealing the change.
This also leads your readers astray. I will no longer save your reprints of articles published elsewhere, because I cannot trust them as verbatim. Sorry.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 21, 2011 08:09 PM | Send
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