The centrality of the “queen mother” in the Bible

Scott Hahn has been very good at explaining the importance of the mothers of ancient kings of Israel.  They were accorded more prominence than the many wives of the Davidic monarchs.  A queen mother wore a crown and sat on a separate throne at the right hand of her son.

The obvious question in light of that: why would some Christians scruple to give great honor to the mother of the King of Kings?

Professor Hahn points out that there is but a single chapter of the Bible written by a woman – the concluding chapter of Proverbs – and that woman is a Queen Mother giving advice to her son, King Lemuel.

An excerpt:

"Speak up for people who cannot speak for themselves.  Protect the rights of all who are helpless.  Speak for them and be a righteous judge.  Protect the rights of the poor and needy."

The bell tower and local patriotism

                                                   
"The local protective character of the American political system is a culture built not on family but on law and masculine adult agreements.  The Italians call local patriotism 'campanilismo' : seeing life from one’s own bell tower.

"Machismo and campanilismo are blood brothers.  The masculine inclination to form territorial groups is the biological basis of Aristotle’s contention that man is by nature a political being… Masculine patriotism needs a public manifestation in daily life.  Young men want to swagger.  Wise men will teach them to do it for the bell tower.”       
                                                                 (Pence)

"Religion is the soil of democracy"

Dr. Pence writes:

"We must return our country to its spiritual heritage that we are one nation under God.  None of our ideals about man make sense if there is no God.  If there is no God, man lives under biological determinism; he is not free.  If there is no God, then the world belongs to the strongest; there is no equality.  If there is no God, then the strongest state shall rule; there is no limited government.  The American tradition is grounded, not in the sovereignty of the individual, but in the sovereignty of God...

"Christian men must be at the center of a renewal of American manhood dedicated to the protection of life and the sovereignty of God as the sacred centers of our culture.  We must not turn the flag over to those who would defile the blessings of liberty in pursuit of license.  We must not allow the discussion of the war against the Islamic jihad to be a debate between pagan secular warriors and feminized Christian pacifists…

"The American tradition is built on a masculine fraternity, just as the Church is... It is this protective fraternity that is the bedrock agreement that undergirds political life."

This is what Minneapolis diversity looks like

                                          
Click on and ponder this photo of the Minneapolis City Council, with its lone black member; and recall the words from Pence’s book (2004):

"The moral capital of the civil rights martyrs was stolen by the white feminist and homosexual movements, which soon eclipsed in media and political influence their secularized and marginalized black partners… Adding first the baggage car of gender, then the braking caboose of homosexuality to the freedom train has depleted its fuel supply – religious tradition and natural law."

UPDATE –  Here’s a Pence excerpt that addresses the persistent claim of homosexual activists that they were born that way:

"Natural law is the way a personal God orders the world… Because something occurs with a certain frequency in nature does not mean it is natural.  There are all sorts of physical anomalies that babies are born with called birth defects or metabolic disorders.  They are known as disorders because there is a proper order that has been defined.  Something can be a disorder even if you are born with it if there is some definition of order that all creatures are meant for."

How the Democratic coalition busted up; or, “the ‘goo-goos’ are draggin’ us to perdition!”

James Piereson has penned a tribute to the recently deceased James Q. Wilson (the co-founder of the ‘broken windows’ theory of policing that helped turn New York City around).

Piereson does a good job of putting his subject into a larger context:

Professor Wilson lamented that the “urban problem” came to be defined in exclusively racial terms. He was also skeptical of the “new politics,” developed in tandem with the Great Society, that insisted that the way forward for minorities in the city was “to march on city hall” as opposed to completing school, learning a skill, and getting a job.

James Q. Wilson was a down-to-earth academic whose books, Piereson says, prove “his colleagues were mostly wrong and the ‘man on the street’ was mostly right”:

While intellectuals and federal policy makers were worried about poverty, inadequate housing, and civil rights, most residents of cities in the late Sixties were more worried about crime, pornography, the breakdown of public order, and disrespect for community standards. The rise of “amateurs” and the “new politics” were doing little to improve the quality of life in the cities.

R. T. Rybak (mayor of Minneapolis) and John Lindsay (NYC mayor in the 1960s) are the very models of the “good government” crowd:

To take one small example: contra that pair of goo-goo birds, Hubert Humphrey (Mpls mayor after WWII) and his police chief would have had no problem seeing the infamous "squeegee men" and today's freeway-exit panhandlers for what they are – big “broken windows”!