UNC students who choose to opt out of elective abortion coverage may do so, but they’ll pay the same amount for their mandatory Pearce & Pearce health plan as students receiving coverage for election abortions (unless they purchase equivalent health insurance from another provider).

Students have been left wondering why opting out of abortion coverage doesn’t reduce the cost of the health plan.  It appears that the premiums of even those students who opt-in to the Pearce & Pearce plan that doesn’t cover elective abortion will, in part, go towards covering elective abortions.

The signers want to implement what is essentially a tax to fund elective abortion.  This isn’t always the same as abortion that is deemed medically necessary, and students who favor adoption over optional termination shouldn’t have to pay for such procedures.

This is just the latest in an ongoing feud between the Obama administration and the cable giant. Some claim the network revolt to be a huge victory for the press and a major embarrassment for the president. Others, however, have pointed to the pool’s contractual agreement in which all members must be invited for the pool to be interviewed.

Whether out of outrage or technicality, the media stood up for their counterpart, even though Fox is largely their nemesis. Whiny rhetoric about Fox News has been spewing from the White House since January, but attempting to keep out a representative of the most-watched news agency in the country is crossing the line.

The major networks put aside their ideological differences and behaved like Americans should on Thursday. Regardless of your views on the state of the nation or the opinions of certain political commentators, we should never wish to see a group of people silenced. Fox may not be as “fair and balanced” as they claim, but they undoubtedly deserve a place at the table.

The media has long been a check on government. This fact may not be supported by the Constitution, yet it is clear every time we turn on the television. It is the job of Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs and Rachel Maddow to be critical. People want to be alerted when their government is out-of-bounds. So when the Treasury tries to prohibit the press from holding them accountable, we should be appalled. Thankfully, other networks saw the injustices of such actions and responded accordingly.

I am reassured by this story; it makes me feel good deep down. This was not a question of the trivialities of health care or troop numbers in Afghanistan, but instead a direct attack on one of our most sacred rights: the ability to be informed. The people of the United States won here. We will not stand for this Nixon-like assault on our freedom. Let’s hope this sends a message all the way to Obama himself. Censorship has no place in America today.

Most of the debate was tough to watch; there were almost as many fallacies as there were blank stares. Analogy after analogy, Erhman and D’Souza tried to one-up each other with superior appeals to emotion and examples of science. They attempted to educate us in Geology and evangelize for their side, but neither came out a victor.

A particularly painful claim was made by Erhman on several occasions. Apparently, the concept of free-will is overly simplistic and should be ignored. He went on to “disprove” it using this argument: If one believes that free-will results in suffering on Earth, and that we will have free-will in Heaven, then there must be suffering in Heaven- something contradictory to what we are led to believe by the Bible.

However, Erhman failed to consider a few important factors. The Bible does not guarantee admission into Heaven. In fact, sin is not permitted to enter Heaven, so only Christians will be present (Because we are all inherently sinners, and only Christians have accepted Jesus as their Savior). This is not to say that Christians do not sin, just that everyone in Heaven should have a drive to please God.

It is not free-will that causes suffering, it is the decisions that people make with their free-will. It was sin that brought suffering into the world, when Adam and Eve decided to disobey God. Consequently, both “moral” and “natural” evil emerged, talked about extensively by both debaters. Moral evil is when our choices deviate from God’s will, and natural evil results from the initial instance of moral evil. As far as we know, death and horrific natural disasters would never occur if we were not forced to leave the Garden of Eden.

We must also remember what led to the fall of man. It was, of course, spurred by Satan tempting Eve. Satan, known previously as Lucifer, was an archangel who became power hungry and lusted for God’s throne. In turn, he was banished from Heaven, and thus the great spiritual war begun (we all know this Sunday School story). It is easy to overlook the fact that Lucifer, a creature of Heaven, still had the free-will to chose not to follow God. Although free-will is present in Heaven, and we have the ability to use it to our detriment, suffering will only affect us individually. We will not be able to inflict pain or murder, since we will all be eternal beings- we will only be able to violate God in our thought and our speech. This may subsequently get us sent downstairs, but it will not torment others.

When Ehrman so affirmatively concluded that free-will had an inherent flaw because of Heaven, he did not take into account Hell or Lucifer. How easy it is for people to use the Bible for their own purposes and conveniently leave out passages that may oppose their pre-formed opinions. Ehrman did it, and perhaps even D’Souza. I’d even go as far as to say we all have done it at one time or another.

We learn Popular Christianity, and Christians and non-believers alike love to throw around phrases like “judge not lest you be judged” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” What a travesty. I cannot say I know too much about the Bible, or being a “good” Christian for that matter, but I am pretty sure this is not what God intends. Regardless, we have the ability to do it as autonomous humans. We can make God in our own image without fear of immediate punishment; this is our right. God will never force us to love Him because that would not be genuine love. We must do so voluntarily, in spite of our circumstances. This is the crux of the free-will argument, and it makes sense to me.

Obviously, not even I can say for certain that I am completely correct on the issue of suffering. My entire point of view, like D’Souza’s, is based around the premises of the existence of divinity and the infallibility of the Bible. But oftentimes we must make these leaps of faith. Religion cannot be explained with reason, only experience. It would be naive for us to think we could understand the logic of our Creator. We want to know the unknowable. Did Adam have a belly button? If God can do anything, can he make a donut too big for Him to eat?

Maybe we should be more concerned with using our free-will to love others and help those who most need it. Maybe we can make the most compelling argument for God’s existence by being like Christ, because He is in us. Maybe bickering over unanswerable questions does more harm to the Kingdom than good. Just some food for thought…

Weekend columns

We at CR Daily are excited to announce the inaguration of CR Daily Weekend, a lighter, easier read than most of our week-day posts.  We have two columnists lined up to write for Weekend, each with unique perspectives on various topics.

Check it out!

• We live in a center-right country. I think this election was more of a vindication of Obama himself than a vindication of his radicalism. We might still be ideologically conservative (see the Newsweek report on America’s ideological leanings) but operationally liberal… but at least we’re ideologically conservative…
• This is not the same as 1964, when Goldwater lost handily. That was a clear rejection of conservatism. McCain was always more impulsive than ideological.
• Perhaps the greatest irony of this election is that Iraq, the issue which led to both candidates’ victories in their respective primaries (Obama got traction in the Democratic Primary because he opposed the war from the beginning and McCain wouldn’t have had a chance to win except for his support for the surge), played such a small part in the election in the end.
• The silver lining for this election is that Bush has been clearly repudiated. Hopefully, the GOP will realize that America has repudiated “compassionate conservatism,” but not traditional Conservatism.

Dear Readers,

As Election Day nears, an increasing number of conservatives have announced their support for Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The list now includes (among others) Doug Kmiec, Ken Adelman, Christopher Hitchens and (most painfully) Christopher Buckley.

The Carolina Review will not be following suit. We are utterly unconvinced by the arguments of those on the Right who support Obama. We can see no loop holes in the conservative ideology that are big enough to enable any sort of conservative to support Obama, his positions or his temperament.

The aforementioned conservatives almost always say they support Obama in spite of his ideology and history of leftist positions. They typically say that, though he has always legislated as a leftist, he will govern as a centrist. Abir Chatterjee’s article deals with one plank of Obama’s platform- his tax policies- and argues that Obama exhibits an unreformed, uninteresting form of Liberalism which casts an ineluctable doubt on the notion that Obama will govern from the center. Case in point, Obama’s policies are so leftist as to satisfy Marx’s policy suggestions.

Further, we believe that Obama’s reaction to the financial crisis has been manifestly inept. Zachary Dexter and Anthony Dent trace the origins of the crisis and conclude that Obama is flatly wrong. The crisis was not caused by Wall Street greed and deregulation (as Obama has argued), but rather numerous actions of Congress, the FED, and several other government institutions.

Not only is Obama wrong about the cause of the crisis, he’s also wrong about how to fix it. For a multitude of reasons, we conclude that the $800 billion bailout of the financial sector is not going to solve the current catastrophe and will only prolong and worsen our economic downturn.

We also distrust Obama’s positions on the military. Christopher Jones’ article takes a look at Obama’s proposals concerning military spending and contends that an Obama presidency would do irreparable damage to the development of military technology. Without that technology our ability to preserve national security will be greatly hamstringed. There is no evidence to suggest that Obama’s military policies will be tempered by any kind of moderation.

Most often, conservatives site Obama’s temperament as the reason for their support. Brad Smith’s article argues that Obama has reached a celebrity status and that his campaign is supported to a large degree by simple groupthink and Obama’s “mindguards” in the media.

It follows that conservatives should naturally recoil from Obama. After all, we are the more sober wing, and the conservative temperament should be repulsed by anyone whose success is largely built on palpable insobriety. It takes a peculiar sort of temperament for a person to develop into a celebrity, and that sort of temperament is ill-suited for the presidency.

The conservative viewpoint can often be used to legitimately justify different positions on the same issue. The issue of the potential Obama presidency is not such an issue. In this election, a conservative should stand athwart Obama, and his supporters, yelling Stop.

Sincerely,

Bryan Weynand and Nash Keune
Co-Editors