WORLD Magazine June 14, 2014 Vol. 29 No. 12

Too big to jail? | Six seconds of fame

Day of reckoning J u n e 14 , 2014

GM SCANDAL: How a grieving family and a determined attorney uncovered the truth

Beth and Ken Melton with a portrait of their daughter Brooke, killed in a car accident caused by a faulty ignition switch

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4/28/14 11:37:54 AM 5/21/14 2:14 PM

WE ARE SERIOUS ABOUT MINISTRY James M. Hamilton Jr. Associate professor of biblical theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

SOUTHERN SEMINARY’S DOCTOR OF MINISTRY DEGREE concentration in biblical theology equips pastors and ministry leaders to understand the Scriptures according to the Bible itself.

The degree builds on foundations established during the master of divinity by helping them present the whole counsel of God through expository preaching. And the degree cost is comparable to what many pastors normally spend on books and conferences.

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Learn more at sbts.edu/dmin sbts.edu/admissions

5/21/14 2:15 PM

We had you at ‘oikonomia’, didn’t we.

Our seven-part film series, FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD, examines God’s surprisingly wonderful “economy of all things” — from LOVE to WONDER to EXILE. And it’s done in a way that’s totally irresistible. Just like that word ‘oikonomia’.

sEe ThE tRaIleR At L eTteRsToTHe ExIleS .cOm/ Gift © 2014 Acton Institute

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Contents  ,  /  ,  

     

46 Man in motions

A lone Georgia attorney helps spur GM’s recall of . million cars, but a higher law drives his passions inside and outside the courtroom      

52 Playing defense

Behind the scenes in a blue state legislature, pro-life lobbyists go door to door for votes

56 ‘Too big to jail’

Are the world’s biggest banks beyond the reach of the law?

60 The examined life Personal historians preserve “ordinary” lives through published memoirs

 

11 News 24 Quotables 26 Quick Takes

64 Second opinions

Liberal policies at major medical associations are hard pills for conservative doctors to swallow, and some are fighting back with alternative groups

70 Loop de loop

If you think Vine is a plant, you’re probably over  and out of it on the latest social media video looping craze

 

31 Movies & TV 34 Books 37 Q&A 40 Music

37 70

  :     /; :   



75 Lifestyle 78 Technology 80 Science 81 Houses of God 82 Sports 84 Religion 

8 Joel Belz 28 Janie B. Cheaney 42 Mindy Belz 95 Mailbag 99 Andrée Seu Peterson 100 Marvin Olasky

64

75

  —.—    

WORLD (ISSN -X) (USPS -) is published biweekly ( issues) for . per year by God’s World Publications, (no mail)  All Souls Crescent, Asheville, NC ; () -. Periodical postage paid at Asheville, NC, and additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. ©  WORLD News Group. All rights reserved. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD, PO Box , Asheville, NC -.

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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

5/28/14 9:20 AM

Invest Wisely.

“The earth is the L’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.” —Psalm :     Marvin Olasky  Mindy Belz   Timothy Lamer   Jamie Dean   Janie B. Cheaney, Susan Olasky, Andrée Seu Peterson, John Piper, Edward E. Plowman, Cal Thomas, Lynn Vincent  Emily Belz, J.C. Derrick, Daniel James Devine, Sophia Lee, Angela Lu, Edward Lee Pitts  Megan Basham, Anthony Bradley, Andrew Branch, Tim Challies, John Dawson, Amy Henry, Mary Jackson, Thomas S. Kidd, Michael Leaser, Jill Nelson, Arsenio Orteza, Tiffany Owens, Stephanie Perrault, Emily Whitten   Les Sillars   June McGraw



Send Him.   David K. Freeland    Robert L. Patete   Rachel Beatty  Krieg Barrie    Arla J. Eicher     Dawn Wilson

Thousands of native missionaries in poorer countries effectively take the gospel to unreached people groups in areas that are extremely difficult for American missionaries to reach.

  Al Saiz, Angela Scalli, Alan Wood

4 They speak the local languages

 ..

4 They are part of the culture

4 They never need a visa, airline tickets, or furloughs

 

4 They win souls and plant churches

 Jim Chisolm

Native missionaries serve the Lord at a fraction of what it costs to send an American missionary overseas.

 ..

Help provide for a missionary with $50 per month.

  Kristin Chapman, Mary Ruth Murdoch Christian Aid Mission P. O. Box 9037 Charlottesville, VA 22906 434-977-5650

    Kevin Martin  Joel Belz   Warren Cole Smith   Larry Huff   Debra Meissner    wng.org   Mickey McLean   Leigh Jones   Lynde Langdon, Angela Lu, Dan Perkins   Whitney Williams     worldji.com  Marvin Olasky     worldoncampus.com  Leigh Jones

www.christianaid.org

   worldandeverything.com   Nickolas S. Eicher   Joseph Slife ’    gwnews.com  Howard Brinkman    David Strassner (chairman), Mariam Bell, Kevin Cusack, Peter Lillback, Howard Miller, William Newton, Russell B. Pulliam, David Skeel, Nelson Somerville, Ladeine Thompson, Raymon Thompson, John Weiss, John White   To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.

Contact us: .. / wng.org      ,    ,  ,        memberservices@wng.org  wng.org/account (current members) or members.wng.org (to become a member)  .. (within the United States) or .. (outside the United States) Monday-Friday (except holidays),  a.m.- p.m. ET  WORLD, PO Box , Asheville, NC -   , ,     .. /    .. or mailbag@wng.org WORLD occasionally rents subscriber names to carefully screened, like-minded organizations. If you would prefer not to receive these promotions, please call customer service and ask to be placed on our    list.

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5/15/14 1:52:15 PM 5/22/14 10:12 AM

Joel Belz

Grandpa J and the VA

Beware government bureaucracies, but don’t prejudge the motivations of every bureaucrat VA Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz.

>>



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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CHRISTIAN PETERSEN/GETTY IMAGES

C      of the Veterans Administration brouhaha, I was overwhelmed this morning with an important pair of ironies—and right beside those ironies, an important caution.

The first of the ironies is that smack in the middle of our all-consuming discussion about nationalized medicine (and for all practical purposes, as we’ll note in a bit, that’s the effect of Obamacare)—right in the middle of that discussion, we’re presented with a grand object lesson showing the vulnerability of virtually any program cast on so vast a scale. And we’re obligated to ask: If Uncle Sam can’t manage a mere subset of national healthcare, why should we even be discussing whether he can take on the whole assignment?

Some folks argue, of course, that the Affordable Care Act is not the same as nationalized medicine—and I’ll concede that, technically speaking, the proposal doesn’t reach quite that far. But there’s little doubt, after listening to President Obama’s audacious goals, that such is the direction he has in mind. And after watching the all-consuming nature of what has already happened even in these early stages of Obamacare’s implementation, who can pretend that healthcare consumers like us will ever again feel that we have much to say about insurance, our private doctor’s practice, our local hospital, or related ethical issues?

Whatever the extent of the ACA, my point remains the same: If Washington can’t oversee something like the VA, why should the same set and structure of people be trusted with ever bigger healthcare assignments?

Irony number two, of course, is to watch our healthcare-provider-in-chief stand there lecturing the nation and the media about the need for honesty and integrity within the structures of the Veterans Administration hospitals. It had been only a few hours since his own

staff had been scrambling clumsily to explain to the American public what their president knew and what he didn’t know about the deep-rooted lying behind the current VA crisis. The fit was awkward at best.

I would not be an honest journalist, however, if I failed in this context to report another facet to the VA story. Through family concerns, I’ve had significant opportunity to observe, up close and personal, at least one expression of VA care.

I came into this experience as a skeptic. My fatherin-law had spent five years in the s in the South Pacific—but had accepted virtually no veteran’s benefits in the  years since then. So three years ago, at the age of  and beset with Alzheimer’s, he and my mother-inlaw sold their home in Pennsylvania and moved in with my wife and me in Asheville, N.C. In God’s providence, we live only two miles from a wonderfully situated VA hospital. But cynical as I am about government care, I expected the worst when we applied to see if Grandpa J might qualify for some basic coverage.

The paperwork was onerous. And I worried that a full day of traipsing from one clinic to another was taking its toll on Grandpa J—and that asking him for still one more signature might expose his more stubborn side. Our final stop was in a clanky, discouragingly bleak room where he had to agree, in writing, that the hospital could share any and all information with me, his son-in-law. Nor did the woman behind the desk, displaying all the indicators of a bureaucrat, do much to encourage me.

I’ll never forget what happened next. Reaching across the desk, she took both Grandpa J’s hands in her own, looked him in the eye, and said quite simply but earnestly: “Before we do anything else, Mr. Jackson, I want to thank you for what you’ve done for our country.”

I wept. But that brief story is essential here because of its reminder that there will almost always be a difference between two categories of people. On the one side are the bureaucrats who love their high positions, who treasure and protect their ability to strike self-serving deals, and who love to do all that in ways hidden from the public they supposedly serve. On the other side are the foot soldiers within these bureaucracies—many of them sincere and devoted providers, committed to personal care, and just as personally loving as any of their counterparts in private practice.

Grandpa J died this past December—seven decades after the South Pacific. And when I tell you that the VA took good care of him, I can assure you that my report is in no sense just another politician’s spin. A

Email: jbelz@wng.org

5/27/14 4:17 PM

“ The question is not, who uses faith and who uses reason?

Everyone uses both.

The question instead should be, who has the most reasonable faith? “ J. F. Baldwin

CREDIT

REGISTER TODAY WORLDVIEW.ORG/CAMPS

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5/21/14 2:31 PM

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CREDIT

JOHN BORNSCHEIN, a nearly aborted child himself, is vice chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, an executive member of the National Prayer Committee, and author of The Front Line: A Prayer Warriorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide to Spiritual Battle.

Dispatches News > Quotables > Quick Takes

MAY 26: Sami Bolton mourns Marcus McLain at his grave on Memorial Day at West Tennessee Veterans Cemetery in Memphis, Tenn. Reservist Bolton served with the active duty McLain as a civilian with the Navy. She said McLain suffered from PTSD after multiple deployments and took his own life.

MIKE BROWN/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL/AP

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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

5/28/14 9:24 AM

Dispatches > News

k House uring arch 5, -CA) ions illa/

T h u r s d a y, M a y  

Covenant conviction

Email trail

Judicial Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group, released emails showing the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups originated in Washington.

President Barack Obama, Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS tax-exempt division, and other administration officials had blamed rogue employees in Cincinnati for the targeting uncovered in a May  inspector general report. The documents, which Judicial Watch sued to obtain, also showed Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., applied heavy pressure on top IRS officials to clamp down on groups he said were involved in political activity.

Columbus discovery?

An ocean explorer says he believes he found the wreckage of the Santa Maria, the ship Christopher Columbus used to discover America, off the coast of northern Haiti. Barry Clifford said the shipwreck includes old ballast stones that look to have come from Spain or Portugal. He made the find near where the crew of the Santa Maria is thought to have built a coastal fort for crew members after the vessel sank on Christmas Day . Clifford’s claim will be difficult to verify: He is not the first explorer to think he’s found the Santa Maria.

 

VA blame game Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and Undersecretary Robert Petzel faced withering questions from a Senate panel over long delays at VA facilities around the country—including a Phoenix facility where allegedly  veterans died while awaiting care.

Shinseki accepted Petzel’s “resignation” during his opening statement at the Senate hearing, but Petzel was already set to retire this year. Veterans groups said they need a plan to address the problems, not a scapegoat. The following week President Obama finally spoke out on the issue, and urged patience while investigators do their jobs.

LERNER: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES • CLIFFORD: ANTHONY BEHAR/SIPA USA/AP • SHINSEKI: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES • BLAIR: RIC DUGAN/THE HERALD-MAIL/AP

We d n e s d a y, M a y  

A Maryland jury convicted a former Bible study leader at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md., on five counts of child molestation (see p. ). Nathaniel Morales, , faces up to  years in prison. Critics say the Covenant Life leadership enabled Morales’ continued abuse during the s and ’s by not reporting it, and one former pastor admitted as much during the trial.

On May , Joshua Harris, the Covenant Life senior pastor since , told the congregation he asked the church board to consider putting him on leave until the issues are resolved.

Nominated Saira Blair,, a -year-old high school senior, on May  defeated an incumbent to become the Republican nominee for a West Virginia state House seat. Her father, state Sen. Craig Blair, offered her plenty of help during the campaign, but the teen won with less than , in campaign expenditures. Blair, who will not be able to vote until she turns  in July, ran as a pro-life, pro-family, pro–Second Amendment candidate and is favored to win in November. West Virginia is one of  states that allows persons under  to run for office.



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use

S a t u r d a y & S u n d a y, M a y   -  

LERNER: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES • CLIFFORD: ANTHONY BEHAR/SIPA USA/AP • SHINSEKI: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES • BLAIR: RIC DUGAN/THE HERALD-MAIL/AP

MODI: PRABHAT KUMAR VERMA/PACIFIC PRESS/SIPA USA/AP • BENHAM:HANDOUT • TURKEY: EMRAH GUREL/AP • TITANOSAUR: MAXI JONAS/REUTERS/LANDOV • HERNANDEZ: JARED WICKERHAM/GETTY IMAGES

Exploding tensions Turkish authorities arrested four people and detained  more in connection with a coal mine fire that killed  on May . Tensions ran high as Turks demonstrated against the government, saying the response to the disaster was too slow.

Police used water cannons and tear gas to quell protestors and banned protests in Soma. Investigators are still unsure why the mine exploded in flames.

F r i d a y, M a y  

Hindu win

The world’s largest democratic election resulted in a landslide victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Narendra Modi, who will become India’s new prime minister. BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, became the first party to take an outright majority of seats in the country’s lower house of Parliament in  years. The sweeping victory raises deep concerns for Christians and other religious minorities, who have suffered attacks at the hands of BJP members.

Heavyweight champion Scientists in Argentina unveiled a thigh bone of what they believe is the largest creature ever to roam the planet.

The yet-unnamed dinosaur, dubbed a “titanosaur,” stood about seven stories

Banking backtrack SunTrust Bank reversed a decision to sever ties with conservative brothers David and Jason Benham, a day after a bank official abruptly informed them an ongoing business relationship was ending. The overnight turnaround occurred a week after activists convinced HGTV to kill a reality show the Benham brothers were set to host this fall, citing the Benhams’ conservative views on marriage and abortion. A SunTrust spokesman said the company supports freedom of speech and religion and said a third-party vendor was responsible for the decision to stop using Benham REO Group to sell foreclosed properties.

high and weighed about  tons— equivalent to  large elephants. The behemoth find came in the midst of a string of discoveries in the same area of Argentina, which scientists call a dinosaur graveyard. The new animal is about , pounds larger than the previously largest creature found.

Indicted Authorities in Massachusetts on May  indicted former Pro Bowl NFL tight end Aaron Hernandez, , in connection with a  double homicide. Police believe Hernandez opened fire on a vehicle of strangers he had met at a Boston club on July , . The shots killed two and injured one, and two men escaped unharmed. Hernandez, who played for the New England Patriots from  to , was already in jail awaiting trial for the  killing of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd. The Patriots released Hernandez after his August  arrest.

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JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD



5/27/14 10:22 AM

Dispatches > News M o n d a y, M a y  

Abedini beaten

China’s cyber espionage The Justice Department announced indictments against five Chinese military members accused of cyber espionage against six American companies. The announcement marks the first time the United States has charged foreign countries with using the internet to infiltrate companies. Attorney General Eric Holder alleged the Chinese military unit carried out the illegal activity to give Chinese companies, some of them state-owned, an advantage, and said the amount of stolen trade secrets and other sensitive business information was significant. China said the United States “fabricated” the charges.

Tu e s d a y, M a y  

Martial law Soldiers patrolled intersections and tanks rolled through the streets as Thailand woke up to a state of martial law. The country’s military chief, Gen. Prayuth Chan-Ocha, issued a  a.m. public declaration on national television and insisted he was not carrying out a military coup—only restoring order after months of political unrest. But two days later, the military conceded it was indeed a coup and the caretaker government was no longer in charge. It’s the country’s th coup since .

Establishment GOP wins

Establishment Republicans gained a string of victories from coast to coast as primary voters went to the polls in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. Not a single incumbent lost, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Marriage melee A day after a federal judge in Oregon struck down the state’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, another federal judge did the same in Pennsylvania, continuing a wave of overturned marriage laws in states around the country. The Pennsylvania ruling was the th district court decision since the Supreme Court last year struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Guilty Conservative author, speaker, and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza on May  pleaded guilty to charges that he made straw donations to a  U.S. Senate campaign. D’Souza, the former president of The King’s College in New York City, admitted he caused two close associates to contribute , with the understanding that he would reimburse them. D’Souza, who initially disputed the charges, faces  to  months in prison at his September sentencing. In the meantime, D’Souza is free to promote his new film, America.



ABEDINI: HANDOUT • ESPIONAGE: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • THAILAND: PAULA BRONSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES • MCCONNELL: JOHN GRESS/GETTY IMAGES • D’SOUZA: RICHARD DREW/AP

At the end of a two-month hospital stay, Iranian authorities severely beat American pastor Saeed Abedini before returning him to prison. Abedini, a U.S. citizen who turned  on May , was admitted to the hospital in March for internal bleeding and other injuries related to his imprisonment. Although he received little treatment, his family was allowed to visit and bring him meals. Iran detained Abedini in  when he was in the country to work on a government-approved orphanage. Abedini’s sudden return to prison came days after the United States and Iran failed to make progress in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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5/27/14 10:30 AM

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1/27/14 11:56 AM 5/21/14 2:34 PM

Dispatches > News

T h u r s d a y, M a y  

The missing girls in prayer, according to Boko Haram. The still is from a video provided by the group.

Rewriting rules

We d n e s d a y, M a y  

Doing enough?

President Obama deployed  U.S. troops to Chad to assist in the search for missing Nigerian schoolgirls. Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States can and should do more. At a hearing earlier in the day, Royce and other lawmakers criticized the administration for not recognizing Boko Haram as a radical Islamist group motivated by hatred of Christians. Boko Haram killed  in three village attacks on Wednesday, a day after twin bombings claimed  lives in a Christiandominated market in Jos. (Muslim shops reportedly closed ahead of the blasts.)

Authorities in New York City announced they arrested nurses, police officers, a Boy Scout leader, and a Jewish rabbi as part of a child pornography sting operation spanning months. Investigators say the arrests of  men and one woman were the result of one of the largest-ever operations of its kind, netting some  electronic devices and thousands of illegal child images. Those accused face a variety of state and federal charges, including prison sentences of between five and  years. The first arrest came in January and involved a man who taught sex abuse awareness to schoolchildren.

Victorious Ryan Hunter-Reay on May  became the first American since  to win the Indianapolis , denying Brazilian Helio Castroneves a record-tying fourth Indy  win in the race’s final lap. Hunter-Reay, , used a series of high-risk moves to edge Castroneves by . seconds—the second-closest finish in the -year history of the race. Marco Andretti, , grandson of Mario Andretti, finished a close third.



Surveillance slowdown

A bipartisan bill to curtail the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program passed the U.S. House on a - vote. The USA Freedom Act, which awaits Senate approval, would prohibit the collection of bulk metadata on phone call times, durations, and numbers dialed. The NSA would have to obtain a court order to access the information. Advocates hailed the bill as a win for personal privacy, but critics say last-minute changes inserted by the White House watered down the bill and allow the bulk collections to continue.

NIGERIA: AP • PORNOGRAPHY: JASON DECROW/AP • IRS: J. DAVID AKE/AP • HUNTER-REAY: CHRIS GRAYTHEN/GETTY IMAGES

Pornography sting

The Internal Revenue Service announced it will rewrite a controversial proposal that would have drastically curtailed politicalrelated activity for many nonprofits. The proposed rule drew a record , comments during the three-month public comment period. The latest announcement left many critics unsatisfied, since the IRS still plans to make changes to the decades-old guidelines for social welfare organizations. “The IRS should completely abandon any attempt to rewrite these long-standing rules instead of trying to find another way to harass American taxpayers,” said U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.

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Dispatches > News S a t u r d a y & S u n d a y, M a y   -  

Murders in Santa Barbara The troubled son of a long-time Hollywood filmmaker killed six and injured  during a murderous rampage that created nine crime scenes in Santa Barbara, Calif. Elliot Rodger, , son of Peter Rodger, stabbed three acquaintances to death at his apartment, then killed three more during drive-by shootings before taking his own life.

Police had visited Rodger in April after relatives reported his alarming behavior. In a -page account of his life—in which he assailed the rich and lamented being a “kissless virgin”—Rodger said authorities would have stopped him if they had searched his room.

Trading fines

A Russian court ordered the U.S. Library of Congress to pay , a day until it turns over seven Jewish texts the court says Russia loaned to the library for  days in . Russia and the New York–based Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch group claim the texts, which are part of the much larger Schneerson collection. Last year a U.S. court ordered Russia to pay , every day for not turning over the rest of the texts.

Memorable trip

President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to troops in Afghanistan on the eve of Memorial Day. Obama told a rally of more than , troops: “I’m here on a single mission, and that is to thank you for your extraordinary service.” The trip wasn’t devoid of controversy: It came as the administration is mired in the VA scandal, and then the White House mistakenly released the name of the CIA’s top spy in Afghanistan, who was scheduled to take part in the event.

SANTA BARBARA: PETER VANDENBELT/THE NEWS-PRESS/AP • POROSHENKO: REX FEATURES/AP • OBAMA: EVAN VUCCI/AP • SCHNEERSON COLLECTION: YURI KADOBNOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • IBRAHIM: HANDOUT

F r i d a y, M a y  

Detained Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, a Sudanese woman condemned to death for her Christian faith, gave birth May  to a healthy girl at a prison hospital in Omdurman. Ibrahim, , is married to an American citizen but has been detained with her -month-old son since February. A court in Khartoum convicted Ibrahim of apostasy in mid-May but delayed the execution two years to give her time to birth and nurse the child. Ibrahim’s lawyers have appealed the decision, and Sudan has come under international pressure to reverse the ruling. 

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MUDSLIDE: DEAN HUMPHREY/GRAND JUNCTION DAILY SENTINEL/AP • O’BANNON: ISAAC BREKKEN/AP • KERRY: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP • NUCLEAR ILLUSTRATION: GLAM-Y AND MSTAY/ISTOCK EXECUTION GURNEY: AP • SEINFELD: LLOYD BISHOP/NBC/AP • SEMINARY: NATHAN SHANDS

King and president A billionaire candymaker known as the “Chocolate King” dominated Ukraine’s presidential election.

Petro Poroshenko won more than  percent of the vote in a -candidate race, signaling Ukrainians back his top priority: closer ties to the European Union (see p. ). Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to respect the results. Meanwhile, in European parliamentary elections, voters in several nations elected representatives who want to distance their countries from the EU—or cut ties completely.

SANTA BARBARA: PETER VANDENBELT/THE NEWS-PRESS/AP • POROSHENKO: REX FEATURES/AP • OBAMA: EVAN VUCCI/AP • SCHNEERSON COLLECTION: YURI KADOBNOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • IBRAHIM: HANDOUT

MUDSLIDE: DEAN HUMPHREY/GRAND JUNCTION DAILY SENTINEL/AP • O’BANNON: ISAAC BREKKEN/AP • KERRY: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP • IRAN: GLAM-Y AND MSTAY/ISTOCK • GURNEY: AP • SEINFELD: LLOYD BISHOP/NBC/AP • ANGELOU: NELL REDMOND/AP

June 9 Former college basketball star

Ed O’Bannon’s class-action lawsuit against the NCAA heads to federal court today.

O’Bannon, a standout on the  UCLA national championship team, claims the NCAA violates the Sherman Antitrust Act by prohibiting athletes from making money off their likeness and image while student athletes. The suit has the potential to remake the collegiate sports landscape.

M o n d a y, M a y  

Massive mudslide Emergency workers failed to find three men who went missing after a rain-drenched ridge collapsed late Sunday, triggering a massive mudslide near a small town in western Colorado. The slide ran three miles long and measured  to  feet deep even at the edges.

The three missing men, including a county road and bridge employee and his adult son, had gone to the area to investigate an initial smaller slide reported by a local rancher.

LOOKING AHEAD June 16

World leaders from seven nations will meet in Vienna today for five days of talks on Iran’s nuclear program. An emissary from Iran will be present, as will ones from the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia. Western powers fear Iran’s purported nuclear energy program is simply a cover for a nuclear weapons program.

June 18 With state-sanctioned executions

   . Keep up with breaking news from Washington and all over the world, and find more commentary from Marvin Olasky, Mindy Belz, Andrée Seu Peterson, Janie B. Cheaney, Cal Thomas, and others.

stayed or commuted in May, the next round of executions of convicted capital offenders is scheduled for June  when Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Florida are all scheduled to put an inmate to death.

The death penalty has undergone intense scrutiny since a botched execution in Oklahoma in April.

Execution gurney in Oklahoma

June 12 Secretary of State John Kerry

will testify today before Congress on the terrorist attacks in Benghazi in September . Kerry, who was a U.S. senator at the time of the attacks, said testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee should excuse him from appearing before a new House select committee investigating the attacks and the State Department’s reaction.

June 19 Comedian

Jerry Seinfeld will return to the internet with a fresh season of his web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee today.

According to a trailer released in May, the new season will feature interviews with comedians Robert Klein, Aziz Ansari, Jon Stewart, George Wallace, and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Died Poet and author Maya Angelou died May  at the age of . Angelou was known for her poetry and her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her background included stints as a singer, dancer, actress, and prostitute before she became a civil rights activist and a celebrated writer. Her work also drew sharp criticism, including from parents concerned about Caged Bird’s depiction of her experience of being raped as a child. She recited a poem at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in , and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.

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5/28/14 12:35 PM

Dispatches > News

Orphan rescue >>

The day before Ukraine’s presidential election on May 25, ­dozens of orphans and foster families arrived in Kiev, eager to find out where their temporary residences would be. Evacuated from the eastern town of Mariupol near the Russian border, they were the latest group to arrive as part of a growing

LAZARENKO NIKOLAI/ITAR-TASS/Landov • original map by pop_jop/istock

ukraine

a ov

20

RUSSIA

ld mo

NEW ERA: effort to remove at-risk Poroshenko orphans from a region (left) greets that has attempted to residents of declare independence Lvov. from Ukraine.

Ukrainians hope the election of a new president, billionaire candy tycoon Petro Poroshenko, will usher in a new era of stability and end the separatist takeover of Donetsk and Luhansk, two crucial regions in the east. So far, Moscow has not given orders to annex the regions as it did with Crimea in March. But should the standoff between Russian separatists and Ukraine’s military continue in the east, NGOs and local churches are armed with a plan to protect orphans from a Russian system that has shunned American adoptions.

The endeavor has been both challenging and dangerous for Alex Gowen, director of The Fisherman, a nonprofit

parental rights. Further complicating the situation, government orphanages have not approved the transfer of children to other regions, limiting the evacuation at this point to nongovernment orphanages and foster care families.

The Fisherman is working closely with The Alliance for Ukraine without Orphans based in Kiev, and Gowen says they’ve faced difficultly getting their national emergency response plan approved. “It’s sad, but governments by and large don’t care. It’s at the bottom of their priority list, and that’s especially true when faced with the possibility of being invaded by Russia.”

Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov, a Baptist minister, eventually approved a plan to return as many children as possible to parents who were willing and capable of providing care, place some children in foster belarus care, and relocate the rest to western poland regions where 3,200 Kiev churches have Lvov Khmelnitsky offered transportaluhansk tion and housing.

Unfortunately, donetsk they arrived on the scene too late to help Mariupol romania in Crimea. “In Odessa Crimea, [orphans] 3 Donbass are completely cut region crimea off. You cannot adopt 3 Annexed Sevastopol them. You cannot

by Russia Black Sea support them. They

based in Raleigh, N.C.: “If I show my face in the eastern regions, I’m supposed to be killed on the spot.” Gowen—whose organization provides for the medical needs and general well-being of orphans around the world—said he has been targeted for being part of the team that is making it possible to move children legally out of the east and into homes and churches in western Ukraine.

The separatists, he says, claim the orphans are Russian not Ukrainian. ProRussian rebels declared victory during an illegal referendum on May 11, despite polls showing that at least 70 percent want to remain with Ukraine.

There are approximately 40,000 orphans in the eastern Donbass region but less than 8,000 are legally orphans.

The rest have parents in the area who cannot care for them but still have

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jill nelson

Groups mobilize to bring orphans in unstable eastern Ukraine to western regions as tensions with Russia continue By Jill Nelson

LAZARENKO NIKOLAI/ITAR-TASS/LANDOV • ORIGINAL MAP BY POP_JOP/ISTOCK

JILL NELSON

FAMILIES NEEDED: Orphans in Khmelnitsky, Ukraine, in 2010. The two girls standing are Josie (left) and Ella Nelson, shown a few days after courts approved their adoption.

are totally at the mercy of the Russian system,” Gowen said. Americans have adopted , Ukrainian children over the years, and there has been an uptick since a  law halted American adoptions in Russia.

Alliance for Ukraine without Orphans board member Ruslan Maliuta says Crimea was the top summer camp destination for orphanage children, so they are currently looking for alternative camps in western regions.

Americans can help by financially supporting orphan refugee relocation efforts and participating in summer hosting programs that bring Ukrainian orphanage children to the United States to experience family life for several weeks, he added. Many of these host families bond with the children and pursue adoption.

Adoptions have continued in Ukraine despite unrest that many say is

Email: jnelson@wng.org

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localized and primarily in the east. One adoption facilitator I spoke with is expecting the arrival of two families in early June, and Maliuta knows of a third family on their way. He doesn’t recommend adopting in Donetsk or Luhansk regions, he said, where there is no guarantee of safety, but families arriving in Kiev for their appointment with the State Department of Adoptions are able to view the files of children referred and make an educated decision based on their locations.

Russian separatists continue to control key roads and government buildings in a number of eastern cities, and on May  armed rebels tore down the Donetsk prayer tent that had served as a pillar of hope for almost three months (see “Putin’s playbook,” May ). The men threw the tent in the river, stole the speakers and electronic equipment, and beat pastor Sergey Kosyak.

“Prayers will continue,” Kosyak told me.

Ukrainians say the election of their new president with  percent of the vote has the potential to stabilize the

situation in the east where only  percent of polling stations were open after separatists threatened election officials and smashed ballot boxes. Nationwide, voter turnout reached  percent with long lines reported in the pro-Western capital of Kiev.

The day after his election victory, Poroshenko— nicknamed the “Chocolate King” and lauded as a pragmatist—swiftly approved military air strikes against separatists who had taken over Donetsk International Airport, killing dozens of insurgents. The new leader says he plans to pursue strong ties with Europe while mending relations with Russia and returning stability to the east.

But Maliuta said the thousands of Russian separatists with machine guns are unlikely to go away any time soon and vowed to continue pursuing rescue efforts of the remaining children in government orphanages. Russian President Vladimir Putin says Russia will respect the results of Ukraine’s election, but many fear Moscow is behind a covert campaign to destabilize the east.

Gowen—who has also worked on programs to alleviate human trafficking— says the odds are against these kids if they aren’t adopted before they age out of Ukraine’s orphanage system at age  or . “Those traders are just standing out there waiting for these kids to come out, and usually they know exactly who is going to be released on certain days,” Gowen said. “So the more we can do here to support these children, the better.” A

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Dispatches > News

Called to report

After a criminal trial of child sex abuse, questions linger over how much pastors knew

BY DANIEL JAMES DEVINE

>>



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WJLA, “I started Covenant Life Church in crying. It was …

Gaithersburg, Md. overwhelming to know that the struggle, the fight, the  years of trying to bring this forward, was worth it.” Morales’ sentencing is scheduled for Aug. . He faces up to  years in prison.

A separate civil lawsuit names Mahaney, Covenant Life, SGM, and other affiliated pastors as defendants, claiming they agreed to hide sexual abuse allegations from police, and allowed child sexual predators to work with children on church and private school property. The legal complaint accuses two former SGM leaders (but not Mahaney) of committing sexual or physical child abuse.

A judge dismissed the civil case last year on technical grounds, saying the statute of limitations was passed since the alleged abuse occurred many years ago. But lawyers have appealed, with a decision expected this summer on whether the case will proceed.

Prosecutors could still file criminal charges against other alleged abusers since Maryland has no statute of limitations for felonies.

COVENANT LIFE: GAIL BURTON/AP • MORALES: LAS VEGAS METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT/AP

A   has stoked the embers in a smoldering, two-year controversy surrounding Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM), an association of about  Reformed, charismatic churches. Victims of childhood sexual abuse have claimed their pastors failed to report abuse allegations to police during years their families attended former SGM churches. The May trial of Nathaniel Morales offered legal confirmation of at least some of those victims’ claims.

In Montgomery County (Md.) Circuit Court on May , a dozen jurors convicted Morales, , of repeatedly molesting three teenage boys in the late s and early ’s. At the time, Morales was a member of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md., where popular author C.J. Mahaney served as senior pastor, and from where Mahaney launched SGM. Morales led Bible studies, participated on worship teams, and attended sleepovers with teenage boys during his years at Covenant Life. He later moved away, married a woman with five boys from a previous marriage, and became a pastor in Las Vegas.

After hearing the verdict, victim Jeremy Cook told local ABC affiliate

Attorneys routinely tell clients not to speak with media about ongoing lawsuits, and Mahaney, Covenant Life, and the other defendants have largely taken that approach. Last year, Covenant Life published a statement saying the church “had no knowledge of such abuse until many years after” it occurred.

However, testimony during the Morales trial undermined the church’s claim. Grant Layman, a longtime Covenant Life pastor who stepped down from his position in March, and the brother-in-law of Mahaney, admitted to public defender Alan Drew he knew of child abuse allegations against Morales but failed to report them to police.

Best-selling author Joshua Harris is the current lead pastor at Covenant Life, which left SGM in . (Mahaney stepped down as SGM president last year and is the senior pastor of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville in Louisville, Ky.). Harris said during a tearful Sunday morning message May  that when church leaders wrote the statement last year, they believed it was accurate, but they were now getting “conflicting information.” Harris said the pastoral team was cooperating with an independent investigation the church has commissioned.

The same day, a redesign of the website for The Gospel Coalition, a network of Reformed churches, revealed that Harris and Mahaney had resigned as members of the network’s leadership council. Harris said he resigned because of the ongoing lawsuit, while Mahaney did not publicly state his reason.

But Mahaney did break a nearly two-year silence about the civil allegations a few days later, when he issued a statement on his Louisville church’s website. “I have never conspired to protect a child predator, and I also deny all the claims made against me in the civil suit,” he wrote, reiterating he could not speak in detail about an ongoing lawsuit. Mahaney added, “I look forward to the day when I can speak freely.” A

Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more

5/28/14 11:51 AM

light up your life We’ve all had an “aha moment” in our lives, an insight that changes everything. With everyday examples and trademark testimonies, best-selling author Kyle Idleman (not a fan) draws on Scripture to reveal how three key elements—awakening, honesty, action—can produce the same kind of “aha!” in our spiritual lives.

kyleidleman.com

CREDIT

Available in print and digital editions everywhere books are sold

12 NEWS p22.indd 23

5/23/14 1:58 PM

‘The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over.’

ROBERT P. GEORGE, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, speaking to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on the cost of discipleship.

‘I have no anger or angst towards you.’

SANDRA WALKER of Duluth, Ga., in court, to the woman who caused a vehicle crash that killed her husband and left Walker with a traumatic brain injury. Walker hugged Tamara Matthews when the judge sentenced Matthews to  months probation and  hours of community service.

‘I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends.’

A tweet from Wheel of Fortune host PAT SAJAK. He often tweets about his disbelief in catastrophic man-made climate change, but his May  posting caused an internet uproar. “Of course I was joking,” he later said. “Just mocking the name-calling that is directed at global warming skeptics within and without the scientific community.”

‘I want to give my services away for free at my leisure, and I can’t do that.’

Arkansas orthodontist ELIZABETH GOHL on trying to offer a “free extraction day” to poor people in her area. The state told her she couldn’t make that offer, because she is a licensed orthodontist.



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

12 QUOTABLES.indd 24

NOW HIRING: MARK LENNIHAN/AP • GEORGE: ROANOKE COLLEGE • WALKER: SANDRAGLEN.WORDPRESS • SAJAK: TOM DONOGHUE/POLARIS/NEWSCOM • GOHL: PHOTO COURTESY INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE

47%

The share of unemployed Americans who have completely given up looking for a job, according to a HARRIS POLL conducted for Express Employment Professionals.

Listen to WORLD on the radio at worldandeverything.com

5/28/14 12:26 PM

CREDIT

Dispatches > Quotables

CREDIT

now hiring: Mark Lennihan/ap • George: Roanoke College • walker: sandraglen.wordpress • sajak: Tom Donoghue/Polaris/Newscom • gohl: Photo courtesy Institute for Justice

5/28/14 12:40 PM

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Dispatches > Quick Takes

A trio of college students at SUNY New Paltz in New York earlier this year bought a lumpy couch for  at a Salvation Army store. It wasn’t until May that they found out why it was so lumpy. One of the students, inspecting the cushions to find the source of the lumps, found a bank bag filled with  and  bills. In total, the couch contained more than ,. But it also contained a withdrawal slip from a bank.

Using that slip, the students were able to track down the money’s owner—a -year-old woman who kept her money in her sofa because she doesn’t trust banks—and give it back. Her children had sold her couch when she went into the hospital last year.

  Without a jailhouse, a police officer, or even a set of handcuffs, justice in one small Alaskan village can be difficult to mete out. That’s why village elders in Tanana, a community located in the tribal lands of the Athabascan Indians, have looked to their past in order to deal with violent criminals in their midst. In May, the town council voted to exile two men who contributed to the shooting death of an Alaska state trooper flown in to quell violence. Banishment, an ancient tribal practice, occupies a legal gray area in Alaska.



  The pay isn’t much, and the hours will be long. But officials with China’s Giant Panda Protection and Research Center should expect a deluge of applications. After all, the job opening is entitled “Panda Caretaker.” Officials with the center, located in Sichuan Province, advise that applicants must be at least  years old and have basic knowledge of pandas.

According to the listing, which was posted in May and expires July , “Your work has only one mission, spending  days with the Pandas and sharing in their joys and sorrows.” The new hire at the panda base will earn about , per year.

COUCH: MIKE GROLL/AP • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • TANANA: ERIC ENGMAN/FAIRBANKS DAILY NEWS-MINER/AP • PANDA: GLOBALP/ISTOCK

-  Templeton, Iowa, is home to the famous Templeton Rye whiskey distillery. It may soon become known for its whiskey pigs. Distillery president Scott Bush says he is experimenting with ways to infuse pigs with a rye whiskey taste. Bush says his pigs—collectively known as the Heritage Pork Project—are being fattened on spent grain mash left over from the rye-making process at his distillery. And though the company hopes to sell the small batch of slaughtered animals online at the end of June, Bush concedes he has no idea what the pork will taste like. “We’re dealing with some logistical challenges ... we’re not delivering a pack of gum here,” Bush told the Los Angeles Times.

WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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5/28/14 11:21 AM

BEES: SUCHAT PEDERSON/THE WILMINGTON NEWS-JOURNAL/AP • SWEDEN: © JESPER MODIN • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • COOPER: MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS SYNDICATION • BAKER: LES STUKENBERG/THE DAILY COURIER

 

COUCH: MIKE GROLL/AP • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • TANANA: ERIC ENGMAN/FAIRBANKS DAILY NEWS-MINER/AP • PANDA: GLOBALP/ISTOCK

BEES: SUCHAT PEDERSON/THE WILMINGTON NEWS-JOURNAL/AP • SWEDEN: © JESPER MODIN • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • COOPER: MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS SYNDICATION • BAKER: LES STUKENBERG/THE DAILY COURIER

 

  A truck wreck in northern Delaware on May  caused quite a buzz. That’s because the truck’s contents— million honeybees—careened out of their hives and swarmed Interstate . The tractor-trailer fell on its side during a turn onto the interstate near Newark, Del. That led to  individual hives in the hold, each containing about , bees, to break apart. Those closest to the crash were stung dozens if not hundreds of times.

Emergency crews sprayed down the angry swarm with water hoses. “There’s no rounding them up,” State Police spokesman Paul Shavack told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. “The water will disperse and calm the bee activity.” No one was seriously injured in the crash.

There was no way pro skier Jesper Modin could avoid the accident. Driving toward his home in Ostersund in Northern Sweden, Modin crested a hill and an elk appeared in the middle of the roadway. “It smashed into the windscreen and went tumbling over the roof,” Modin told The Local. The elk perished in the accident. From there, Modin had his totaled car towed  minutes to a local town where the skier received the surprise of his life. When he went back into his car to retrieve some items, Modin noticed a newborn elk with umbilical cord still attached alive and well beside his passenger seat. In the shock of the accident, Modin had not noticed the baby elk jettisoned from its mother, and landing safely inside the cabin. Authorities turned the baby elk over to animal control experts.

  They told him the news industry would be hard. But not this hard. Michael Dresser, a Baltimore Sun reporter who covers state government in Annapolis, made a startling discovery in May: He’s allergic to newspapers. In particular, the scribe is allergic to pine resin, a component in newsprint ink. Dresser, who has toiled for nearly  years at The Sun, told colleagues in a May  memo that he’s relieved finally to have an explanation for his allergy symptoms, but he noted the irony isn’t lost on him. “Any sympathy is appreciated,” he told co-workers, “but feel free to laugh.”

  Alex Cooper would like to thank the thief who stole his car. The Oldham, U.K., -year-old discovered his Vauxhall Corsa stolen on May .

Initially Alex panicked. But then he and his mother remembered they had enabled GPS tracking on the vehicle. The teenager’s prized Corsa was undamaged when they recovered it three hours later. But the best part came next. Because of Alex’s car insurance, the Coopers had a black box device installed in the car monitoring safe driving.

The safer Alex drives his car, the cheaper his insurance gets. Normally, Alex scores  of  points for safe driving. The car thief who took his Corsa on a three-hour joy ride scored a perfect driving score—meaning Alex’s family will get to pay less for the teen’s auto insurance.

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

12 QUICK TAKES.indd 27

-  With wildfire season approaching, firefighters in Arizona are encouraging landowners to take precautions to minimize the chance of fueling an incidental fire. For most landowners, that means clearing brush. But for Tanya Baker, owner of Settler Valley Ranch in Dewey, Ariz., that means sending in the goats. Like other Arizonans, Baker is employing goats this year to clear brush and other fire hazards around her property.

“They eat pretty much  hours a day, seven days a week,” Baker told KTAR. “They take breaks every now and then to digest, but, if it’s a full moon, they just keep going.”

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD



5/28/14 11:22 AM

Janie B. Cheaney

Let’s be reasonable

Considered rationally, court-led revolutions in abortion and marriage do not make sense

>>



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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Narrative has a strong immediate grasp on the human mind. Try a little thought experiment: If I had not begun with the three short narratives at the beginning of this column, would you have kept reading? And what was your emotional response? The “hard case” appeal is almost irresistible—who would be so cruel as to deny these decent people their happiness? The actual trumps the theoretical.

But the theoretical makes the actual. Let’s consider marriage “rationally”: We see the human race divided into two sexes that are distinct yet complimentary.

Biology tells us that only a fusion of these two produces children, and children have to be raised. Experience shows us the best context for raising a child, and research confirms it. History teaches us that same-sex marriage has never been accepted in any civilization anywhere.

Traditional marriage was never a “law”; it was a given. Rather than dismiss eons of human experience as mere bigotry in order to serve  percent (at most) of the population, we should take more time to consider what’s at stake for society as a whole.

Legalized abortion-ondemand was supposed to diminish child abuse and solve the problem of illegitimacy.

Since , rates of illegitimacy and child abuse have ballooned, which might be a rational outcome of regarding unborn humans as discretionary. Behind that poor pregnant teen lurks a string of unintended consequences adding up to over  million lost lives and immeasurable skewed sensibilities. We don’t yet know the full consequences of the young men signing a marriage license or the transgendered boy coming of age as a girl, but redefining marriage and erasing gender distinctions to accommodate individual narratives may not be rational.

You know someone else who isn’t rational? The devil. He understands the stakes much better than we do and still, like a compulsive gambler at the blackjack table, believes he can win. We humans likewise believe we are practically limitless, even as our practical limits are staring us in the face. A

KRIEG BARRIE

T --  was raped by her stepfather. Now she’s pregnant. Her vacillating mother is useless, and no larger community stands ready to support her. Should she be forced to have the baby?

The young man was raised in a Christian home but always knew he was different. After struggling for years with his sexual identity he moved to another city, established himself as a gay man, and found his soul mate in that community. Should they be denied the right to enshrine their love in marriage?

The mother of a -year-old boy has decided (presumably with his consent) that her son is really a daughter. She changed his name and puts him in dresses and insists that her Christian family support her or they will have no contact. Does she have the right to make this decision?

All these (true) stories challenge our preconceptions and help pave the way for laws about abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender identity. “Hard cases make bad law,” as the saying goes, because the legal rigidity meant to clarify a situation only complicates it—if certain crucial terms are not clarified to begin with.

Last month, a county circuit judge in northwest Arkansas ruled that the state had “no rational reason” to keep same-sex couples from marrying. This rather redundant phrase echoed locally what other judges have said in larger contexts, from Massachusetts to Oregon and all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Rational basis review” is an accepted legal technique for challenging laws that appear to serve no legitimate end. But the judges have it precisely wrong: Regarding marriage, and other emotionally charged issues, rationality means stepping back from one’s instinctive reactions, looking impartially at the arguments pro and con, pondering root questions (such as, What is marriage?) and determining the likely effect for all involved parties as well as future generations.

This doesn’t seem to be the way courts usually proceed.

Email: jcheaney@wng.org

5/23/14 1:59 PM

krieg barrie

12 CHEANEY.indd 29

5/23/14 1:59 PM

TRUTH. LOVE.

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A critical resource for: • Pastors • Ministry Leaders • Teachers • Families

5/27/14 10:07 AM

alan markfield/marvel/twentieth century fox film corporation

FOR THOSE WITH LOVED ONES WHO STRUGGLE WITH HOMOSEXUALITY.

Reviews Movies  TV > Books > QA > Music

Fast backward MOVIE: Days of Future Past is blockbuster fun but not much more BY SOPHIA LEE

ALAN MARKFIELD/MARVEL/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION

>>

N     in the X-Men series, one might wonder how much more anticipation the X-Men franchise can draw out from its audience, but fans still dutifully buy movie tickets and buzz about it on social media.

The latest installment, X-Men: Days of Future Past (rated PG-  for sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity, and language), pulled a solid . million on its Thursday midnight opening, and packed a decent . million over the Memorial Day weekend, the fourth biggest weekend opener of the year.

With all the superhero flicks reliably zipping out every blockbuster season—oh, what are they: Spider-Man, Batman, Ironman, Captain America, and so on—the world is apparently not weary of yet another CGIloaded story about supernatural strength, world destruction, and self-serious allegories.

Let’s tick off the basic predictable plots: The X-Men, a minority feared and hated for their unbelievable mutant powers, are in mortal danger of being wiped out.

GOING BLUE: Professor X Beast (Nicholas Hoult) (Patrick Stewart) lashes out at Erik Lehnsherr (Michael and Magneto (Ian Fassbender) in X-Men: McKellen) are still Days of Future’s Past. butting heads over philosophical differences on how to solve this prejudice issue. Formidable adversaries arise, this time in the form of mutant-proof, mutanthunting supermachines called the Sentinels, which were created by reverseengineering the powers of a karate-kicking,

Email: slee@wng.org

12 MOVIES & TV.indd 31

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD



5/28/14 11:33 AM

Reviews > Movies & TV

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WORLD • J u n e 1 4 , 2 0 1 4

12 MOVIES & TV.indd 32

The Fault in Our Stars

by Emily Whitten

>>

When Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) looks up at the stars, she doesn’t see the promise of God as Abraham did. As a 16-year-old dying of cancer who doesn’t believe in heaven, she sees an impersonal universe headed toward oblivion. Yet, living inside that bleak canvas, struggling with depression and “side effects of dying” such as lungs that barely work, she meets a boy named Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort). Her relationship with Gus wakes her up to joy and the possibility that his love could make her life “OK” in the best sense of the word.

Like John Green’s 2012 novel, the PG-13 film version of The Fault in Our Stars displays powerful storytelling. Part of the reason is well-acted characters who are every bit as star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet. Add to that the sympathetic portrayal of families struggling to cope with cancer, and you’ll start to see why the story resonates with both teens and adults. In terms of their love and self-sacrifice, Hazel’s parents are some of the most positive role models in a YA film.

But it’s that moral vision, along with artistic excellence, that makes the rest of the film so hard to swallow. Although John Green claims to be a Christian (at least in his votefor-Obama essay), the movie is peppered with profanity and crass humor. Most offensive is a running joke about the “literal heart of Jesus.” In a story about teenagers grappling with death, for a “Christian” author to make the name of Jesus nothing more than a running gag—it’s simply unconscionable.

Furthermore, Hazel and Gus find their answers to life’s big questions in a hotel bedroom. Without God’s defining love, they glory in premarital sex and worship at the feet of our culture’s most deceptive idol: human love.

Despite acclaim the movie is likely to receive, The Fault in Our Stars isn’t “OK” for teens in any sense of the word.

Mature viewers, however, may find its faults a perfect opening for the gospel.

See all our movie reviews at wng.org/movies

5/28/14 11:34 AM

About a Boy: Jordin Althaus/NBC • rossi: Larry Busacca/Getty Images

MOVIE

The Fault in Our Stars: james bridges/ twentieth century fox film corporation • Lawrence: alan markfield/marvel/twentieth century fox film corporation

directed the first two X-Men shape-shifting blue mutant movies—manages to make called Mystique, or Raven the whole messy process (Jennifer Lawrence). fun and highly entertaining.

In Days of Future Past, To get the most out of the the X-Men live some time in movie, however, do a little the future. They realize that research into the characters, by preventing Mystique particularly on Wolverine, from killing the maker of Professor X, Magneto, and the Sentinels, Dr. Bolivar Mystique.

Trask (Peter Dinklage), the The self-healing, broodSentinels will never be ing Wolverine, of course, is ­successfully created, thus the character favorite, so preventing a war against much so that some fans the mutants. So they timecomplain that “The X-Men” teleport Wolverine (Hugh should be dubbed “The Jackman) back to 1973 to stop Wolverine Show” instead.

Mystique. The post–Vietnam War anachronism is delightful: We meet former President Richard Nixon (Mark Camacho), see a lot of leather blazers and midriffs, and recall lava lamps and Lawrence waterbeds. Wolverine as Mystique does not wear bell-­ bottoms, unfortunately.

Lots of anger sizzles in this film, mainly But a (comparably) minor among the persecuted X-Men character, Quicksilver mutants, and mainly against (Evan Peters), steals the best each other. This anger is the scene in the movie, a little central drive that electrifies comedic piece that will the plot. The young, fullprobably be replayed over haired Professor X, or and over once the DVD is Charles Xavier (James released. It involves a prison McAvoy), is a broken drunk break, the kitchen of the who hates everyone, and the Pentagon, a spontaneous young handsome Magneto, coffee tasting, and a ramor Erik Lehnsherr (Michael bunctious, blithely cheerful Fassbender), is still an icy teenager with aviator gogmilitant who hates humans. gles and headphones.

Those unfamiliar with Lofty metaphors and The X-Men series may, by the humanistic themes still end of the movie, be panting exist, but they’re faded into to catch up with who’s who the background for those and what’s happening. Days who care to grasp them. As of Future Past can get overa blockbuster movie, Days whelming with its convoof Future Past is a bag of luted plot, the bonus parade fun, kind of like a giant of unintroduced X-Men Christmas sock stuffed with characters, and the various surprise but classic toys. But background storylines from it’s little more than an previous films. But director entertaining show. A Bryan Singer—who also

DOCUMENTARY

Ivory Tower

by Sophia Lee

>>

According to his filmography, director Andrew Rossi likes to narrate the crumbling of great institutions. He’s investigated the tumultuous traditional newspaper business, followed the demise of formal dining culture through a legendary New York restaurant, and recorded the effort to reshape traditional marriage in Massachusetts. Now Rossi’s attention turns to American higher education in Ivory Tower, a documentary that hits select theaters starting June 13.

TELEVISION Rossi himself is a graduate of Yale and Harvard. In researching this topic, however, he plays devil’s advocate to the “mythology” that

by Emily Belz higher education is a guaranteed pathway to social mobility and career success.

In NBC’s About a Boy, 30-something bachelor Will Expect the typical apocalyptic vocabulary that’s almost (David Walton) is wealthy after composing a hit synonymous to “higher education” today: We’re in a Christmas song: He impulsively buys a $500 margarita ­“crisis” of heaping student loan debt, which by 2011 had machine, hosts parties in the afternoon when everyone exceeded $1 trillion—higher than credit card debt. The else is working, and seduces women. Surprisingly for a “unsustainable” growth of tuition prices is a “cost disease” show targeted at families, the casual sex of Will’s lifestyle spawned by universities that act more like big businesses comes up regularly in episodes and not just in conversathan educators. “Sticker shock” is no longer a shock, but tions. Then an eccentric divorced mom, Fiona (Minnie resigned stress for parents who scrape and beg for funds— Driver), and her socially outcast son, Marcus (Benjamin yet some are paying for their children to waste away at Stockman), move in next door. “party schools.” Students from both top and mediocre You know where this is going. Will finds himself drawn schools fail to graduate or find a job. out of his bachelor world and into his neighbors’ lives, The film presents all sorts of education models: elite where he reluctantly becomes a father figure to Marcus. research universities such as Harvard, huge public schools Will teaches Marcus baseball, builds a tree house with such as Arizona State, community colleges, innovative him, and lets him eat ribs while his New Age vegan mom online courses, and offbeat anti-college programs. One isn’t looking. featured niche school is Deep Springs College, a work About a Boy recently wrapped up its first season, and ­college nestled within a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in NBC has renewed it for a second. The show is loosely based California’s Death Valley, where 26 young men provide on the 2002 movie About a Boy, which is based on a 1998 ranch work in exchange for novel by Nick Hornby. The underlying premise is two years of free liberal arts that Marcus needs both a mother and a father as education. he’s growing up. Fiona is a mom overflowing Ivory Tower also goes back with love and attention, but her maternal to history, when college was instincts regularly put Marcus in social binds For the weekend of May 23-25 ­ according to Box Office Mojo an “offshoot of the church” that send him running to Will. Fiona fills a piñata and lectures were a “version with healthy apple slices and carrots instead of cautions: Quantity of sexual (S), v ­ iolent (V), and foul-language (L) ­content on a 0-10 of sermons.” College was a candy for Marcus’ birthday, has a dorky secret scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com molder of purpose and direchandshake with her son, and sings duets with S V L

tion that transformed stuhim.

1̀ X-Men: Days of dents into informed agents of Will’s clear role is to help Marcus learn to be a Future Past* PG-13...................3 7 5 social change. Then came the man, and in the process he finds that he needs 2̀ Godzilla PG-13............................. 1 5 3 lure of prestige and money.

Marcus in order to grow up himself. Will func3̀ Blended PG-13 ............................5 3 4 Throw in economic recestions in a world of adults, though: his closest 4̀ Neighbors r................................9 6 10 sions, tight-fisted state dolfriend and confidant is mostly happily married 5̀ The Amazing lars, and rapid technology and has children. In some ways the show is a Spider-Man 2* PG-13.............. 1 6 3 6̀ Million Dollar Arm* PG..........3 2 2 upheavals—and our nation’s corny throwback—Fiona, Marcus, and Will talk to 7̀ The Other Woman PG-13......5 4 5 ivory tower is falling down. each other across their backyard fence like in a 8̀ Rio 2 g........................................... 1 3 1 Well, at least most of it.

1990s sitcom—but it’s a welcome one.

9̀ Chef r............................................4 2 9 10 Heaven Is for Real* PG..........2 3 1 `

About a Boy

About a Boy: Jordin Althaus/NBC • rossi: Larry Busacca/Getty Images

The Fault in Our Stars: james bridges/ twentieth century fox film corporation • Lawrence: alan markfield/marvel/twentieth century fox film corporation

>>

Box Office Top 10

*Reviewed by world

12 MOVIES & TV.indd 33

J u n e 1 4 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

33

5/28/14 11:34 AM

Reviews > Books

Two treadmill books about the need for restraint in positions of power BY MARVIN OLASKY

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J  you think there’s nothing more to be said about the Constitution’s framers, F.H. Buckley’s provocative The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America (Encounter, ) comes along. Buckley argues that our predecessors disliked the idea of a king or an elected king, and thought they were setting up a government that would be dominated by Congress. The presidency and the Supreme Court, though, turned out to be stronger than expected,

and the result was a separation of powers.

Then the plot thickens: Buckley asserts that in the long run a president can readily become an autocrat because power gravitates from disorganized groups to a single person, particularly when he has tens of thousands of bureaucrats and regulators to do his bidding.

Buckley also points out that mass media turn presidents into rock stars and egg them on to break deadlocks by unilateral action:

P R E M I E R

P O D C A S T S analysis, and the interviews by Nick Eicher, Joseph Slife, Kent Covington, and others, plus commentaries on movies, politics, and music. Best of all, of course, are Susan Olasky’s features on the people we meet and places we see while traveling, with the actual sound of Ugandans watching a solar eclipse or Estonians competing in a choir contest.

People have long spoken of WORLD as the Christian alternative to Time;; if so, our podcast/ radio show is the

Christian alternative to NPR’s All Things Considered. We’re now trying to extend the comparison by adding Warren Smith’s interview show, Listening In. But, being of WORLD but not just in it, I’ve started listening semi-regularly to three other podcasts as well: White Horse Inn (Michael Horton leading a theological discussion), The Briefing (Albert Mohler’s lucid daily commentary on society and politics), and The Gospel Coalition.

Coalition Two sets of sermons— those of John Piper (from Desiring God) and Tim Keller (available by subscription from Redeemer Presbyterian Church) make my walking joy complete. —M.O.

PHONE: HOCUS-FOCUS/ISTOCK, WITH CONTENT ADDED

My dad (see the Father’s Day column on p. ) once strolled through beautiful Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania reading a book rather than looking at the world-famous flowers. That’s a talent I’ve never acquired, so while away from my treadmill for two months and walking on Texas streets I’ve listened to lots of podcasts. If I may deviate from books this time, here are some recommendations.

Prime place, of course, belongs to The World and Everything in It, our Monday through Friday half hour program (or two hours on Saturday melded from the past week’s offerings). I like the daily news summaries but also Mary Reichard’s Monday review of key Supreme Court cases, John Stonestreet’s Friday cultural



They “can make laws by regulation and unmake them by refusing to enforce the law.” Buckley, born in Canada, prefers a parliamentary system that he says won’t lead to the impatience and frustration that empower an executive-order-wielding president.

He’s right that in our system much depends on the Supreme Court restraining itself and the president respecting his role as administrator rather than legislator. Sadly, the Supreme Court cast off selfrestraint a half-century ago

and President Woodrow Wilson tried to do the same a half-century before that.

Lee Craig’s scholarly biography, Josephus Daniels: His Life & Times (University of North Carolina Press, ), is informative concerning his prime subject but also about Wilson, whose proBritish slant during World War I led the United States into war over the vocal objections of Secretary of State (until ) William Jennings Bryan, and the muted ones of Secretary of the Navy Daniels.

While many historians see U.S. entry into the war inevitable, Craig shows that Daniels understood what Wilson was doing and didn’t like it. Nevertheless, the Democratic partisan held his peace and let Wilson lead the United States into upsetting the European balance of power in a way that would push revenge-minded Germans to try again.

WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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HANDOUT

Against tyrants

NOTABLE BOOKS

Four recent works of speculative fiction > reviewed by  

Raising Steam Terry Pratchett In this th stand-alone Discworld novel, Moist von Lipwig has already successfully created the Bank, the Mint, and the Post Office for the cosmopolitan city-state of Ankh-Morpork. When a young engineer comes to town with an idea for a steam-powered engine, benevolent dictator Lord Vetinari taps the scoundrel-turned-bankmanager to gently usher in the new transportation technology.

Moist is soon caught between inevitable technological progress and a dwarf-led opposition. The immensely funny adventure seamlessly blends slapstick, irony, satire, and word play to capture the wonder of technology and ruminate on its societal consequences.

Cautions: some swearing for comic effect and a rare innuendo.

Red Rising Pierce Brown Darrow is a low-class Red in the Neo-Roman empire of planet Mars.

When he and his wife are executed for viewing the forbidden stars, Darrow arises from his grave reborn a high-class Gold and a potential leader for the coming Red revolution. But first he must pass the Institute, a mettle-testing training ground for elite Golds. Those who pass live, those who don’t die. Darrow must not only survive, but also lead his House to victory. Will he do so through fear and intimidation, as Golds do, or can he find another way? This riveting story ponders how good men can lead in an evil world. Pitting autocracy against democracy, selfishness against selflessness, and cowardice against heroism, this novel melds The Hunger Games with Game of Thrones.. Cautions: expletives, innuendo, and graphic violence.

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent Marie Brennan

Isabella has always loved dragon biology and morphology, but society does not deem such scientific pursuits proper for a young lady. When a chance encounter leads Isabella to Jacob, a young man with similar passions, they embark on an expedition to study dragons in their native habitat. Jacob and Isabella’s intellectual and marital partnership provides a good example of love under trial as they experience danger at the hands of animals and people who fear that knowledge of dragonkind’s nature could upset the regional balance of power. Brennan’s elegant voice captures the flavor of Victorian-era scientific adventure. The self-deprecating first-person memoir-style narration keeps the plot lively and entertaining.

HANDOUT

PHONE: HOCUS-FOCUS/ISTOCK, WITH CONTENT ADDED

The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies

Clark Ashton Smith Smith was a prolific writer of short stories, prose poems, and poetry—all in a fantastic vein—throughout the s. While contemporaries like William Faulkner or James Joyce espoused a modernist view of the world, Smith saw a cosmic struggle in which evil was a powerful force. He renders real this otherworldly evil in horror stories of a haunted pond of “Genius Loci,” a necromancer in “The Dark Eidolon,” and a monster in “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis.”

Smith evokes his imaginary worlds through vivid sensory detail and the use of archaic language. Like Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, Smith shows that evil is never trifling and will consume those attracted to it. Cautions: “Mother of Toads” contains grotesque sexual imagery.

To see more book news and reviews, go to wng.org/books

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SPOTLIGHT The annual Hugo Awards are the premier prizes in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Supporters of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) nominate and vote on them. This year there is controversy because Larry Correia, a Mormon and self-described “rightleaning libertarian”—often outspoken in his criticisms of liberals—proposed nominees in each category. When seven of Correia’s candidates, including the oft-vilified Vox Day (Theodore Beale), made the final ballot, his critics immediately called for a “No Award” vote, to protest Correia and Day’s political and moral stances. John Scalzi, former president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America and a Hugo winner, attempted to quell the hubbub by calling for each nominated work to be “judged solely by its artistic merits.”

Nonetheless, the “No Award” calls continue, though other nominees are not connected to Correia.

Winners will be announced Aug. . —J.O.

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD



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Reviews > Q&A

Pioneering Palaus

Evangelist Luis Palau and his sons are spearheading new approaches toward public schools and gay leaders in a hugely secular city By Marvin Olasky

Ben Brink/Genesis Photos

>>

Evangelist Luis Palau over five decades has introduced Christ to millions—and at age 79 he’s moving down from 70 percent of his time on the road to only 45-50 percent. He and his sons Kevin and Andrew are pioneering new approaches.

Luis, for a long time you did crusades like Billy Graham’s, but 15 years ago you moved toward “festivals.” How did that start, and what’s the difference?

Portland invited us. We were going to call it a crusade and go to the football or baseball stadium, but my sons said, “Why don’t we go to the riverfront park? And let’s not have

a choir full of clergy wearing ties. Let’s dress casual. Let’s bring contemporary bands.” I thought, “Oh, here goes the end of my ministry. What are the old-timers going to think?”

I was afraid it would be a disaster, that the clergy would be upset at the bang-bang, the noise and the music, and the smoke.

What happened? It was a wonderful victory. Before I even finished the second day the ministers were saying, “You’ve got to do it again next year.” God opened doors. We added things as we went along. I didn’t even know what a skateboarder was, but these fellows put on a great show

and then give their witness for Christ. Some come and hear the good news for the first time in their lives. The city of Portland was nervous about it at first: Our mayor was Jewish, but then she said, “Palau, do it every year. This is so good for Portland.” We were proclaiming the good news, and the gospel was exactly the same, except we don’t call it a crusade.

Kevin, tell me about the ministry’s relationships with City Hall and the schools. Many people in Portland have very negative stereotypes about what it means to be a committed Christ-follower. We were

known unintentionally for being against things, and not so much for being for things.

We realized that one way to build a relationship with our city leaders was to go humbly and say, “We don’t want to be known primarily for opposing things. Mayor, if we could mobilize 15,000 followers of Christ from these churches to love and serve the city, what would you have us do?” The mayor came up with some obvious focus areas: hunger, homelessness, healthcare, the all in the family: Kevin, Luis, and Andrew at the ministry offices in Beaverton, Oregon.

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Reviews > Q&A

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Kevin and Luis

what is an evangelical and how we interpret Scripture. There are times and places where we have to oppose things, but we didn’t want that to be the primary way we’re known. Our openly gay mayor would now say, “Nobody has helped the city of Portland more than the evangelical community.” His understanding of what Christians are like has totally turned around.

What effect has this had on evangelism? We’re beginning to see churches grow and new churches planted, because we’ve demolished that straw man argument of “Oh, you’re just anti-this and anti-that.” South Lake, for example, has planted a church in the Roosevelt neighborhood with 150 people coming. We invite the whole city to come to our festival, our mayor gives a welcome, and the ­gospel is proclaimed.

Kevin, I’m sure folks have said that Christians should concentrate on strengthening Christian schools and homeschools.

Yeah, but we’re simply saying, “The majority of the kids that we’re trying to reach and fami-

lies we’re trying to reach are in public schools. That’s where the people are.” If we’re trying to demonstrate the love of Christ to people where they’re at, that’s an obvious place.

When you see kids or families in desperate spiritual need, are you allowed to talk about Jesus? With our city leaders in Portland we’ve always been clear: We genuinely ask, “How can we serve?” No strings attached.

At the same time we always say, “As evangelicals, our joy is to share the Good News, and we’re looking for chances to do that.” In public schools during school hours it’s not the time to hand out tracts and preach, but we build relationships and open doors.

How do you communicate with homosexuals who are looking not just for toleration but for affirmation?

We simply say, “Let’s find where we can work together for the good of the city.” We’ve had gatherings where the mayor brought members of the gay community, we brought evangelical pastors, and the mayor said, “This is not a meeting where we”—

meaning the gay community— “try to convince the evangelicals to stand with us on gay marriage. That’s not going to happen. Let’s simply get to know one another, because we think it’s good for our community not to accuse each other of things without even knowing who we are.” In a sense it’s no different than with anyone who doesn’t know Jesus Christ.

Luis, I take it that in meeting with anyone you say not, “you sinners” but “we sinners”? Yes, we all have a sin nature. On television shows interviewers would ask, “Do you think all Jews are going to hell?” And I would say, “I beg your pardon, why are you singling out the Jews. Are you anti-Semitic? No! We’re all sinners. I’m going to hell if I don’t repent. The Jews happen to be part of the human race.

They also must repent.” All of us are sinners by birth because we inherited a sinful nature, therefore all of us need to repent. We’re all in the same boat, sinking unless a Savior saves us.

—For Andrew Palau’s story, go to wng.org

Ben Brink/Genesis Photos

environment, partnering with public schools.

Did you get the 15,000? It worked much better than we anticipated: 25,000 came up out of the pews. South Lake Church, with a couple of thousand people, did a makeover of Roosevelt High School, the toughest inner city school in Portland. Roosevelt, built in the 1920s for 2,000 students, had only 400 students left, with no football team because the grandstands had been condemned. It was a very ­discouraging environment. But 1,000 persons came, did a great job fixing up the school, and fell in love with that neighborhood and that school.

Then what happened?

They began volunteering to the point where about six months later the principal said to the outreach pastor of the church, “Christine, you’re here every day of the week with volunteers. Why don’t you have an office here?” So now for five years, a full-time staff member of the church has an office at Roosevelt. We are mentoring every kid in the freshman class. The graduate rate’s climbed 15 percentage points.

Did other schools want in on this? Our school superintendent, who happens to be a very prominent member of the gay and lesbian community, came and said, “We want you to find a church partner for every school in Portland public schools.” So we now have 252 public schools with an evangelical church partner simply asking the question, “How can we serve?” It’s been a revolution in relationships.

Don’t you have to ­compromise on biblical teaching? We are not compromising: We are clear on

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High-stakes struggle

Albums show composer FRANCIS Poulenc giving musical life to a battle with sin By arsenio orteza

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40

WORLD • June 14, 2014

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Poulenc died in 1963 at the age of 64, and his homosexuality has long been established. That he was also a Roman Catholic and struggled with what Roger Nichols describes as a “penchant for handsome young men of no great intellectual pretensions” is, if not less well known, certainly less celebrated nowadays.

How hard Poulenc struggled remains unknown. He once claimed to be “as sincere” in his faith as he was in his “Parisian sexuality.”

But he must have known that light hath no such fellowship with darkness. It’s

we can bear, the music seems to say, but He seldom gives us less either. By programming it immediately after Lili Boulanger’s musical prayer for the faithfully departed, “Pie Jesu,” Neil himself would seem to have had something along those lines in mind.

A different situating of Poulenc within a sacred or at least sacred-friendly milieu occurs within the striking new album by the Italian violin and pianoplaying sisters known as Duo Gazzana: Poulenc, Walton, Dallapiccola, Schnittke, Silvestrov (ECM New Series).

The gorgeously idyllic Suite im alten Stil (1972) by Alfred Schnittke that opens the disc and that leads into Poulenc’s Sonate pour violon et piano (1942-1949) predates Schnittke’s own Trinitarian baptism by a decade. But the piece’s evocation of soul-restoring green pastures and becalming waters foreshadows it.

And while the Poulenc that follows is more restless, suggesting both higher peaks and deeper valleys, it’s no less beautiful.

Ultimately, like the album as a whole, it’s triumphant.

Coincidentally, in the years that Poulenc was composing Sonate pour ­violon et piano, C.S. Lewis was giving the BBC radio talks that would become Mere Christianity.

“The sins of the flesh are bad,” he said in one, “but they are the least bad of all sins.” He probably didn’t have Poulenc’s duress-­ defying musical achievements in mind when he said it. But he could have. A

Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

With most studies putting the percentage of homosexuals somewhere between 1 percent and 6 percent, the West’s current infatuation with same-sex attraction seems less like a case of the tail wagging the dog than the tail stub wagging the Manx cat.

Nevertheless, as the issue increasingly preoccupies Christians, two recent albums showcasing the music of Francis Poulenc, generally considered the greatest French composer of the 20th century, are worth pondering.

telling that two of his greatest mature-period compositions are the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites (1953-1956) and Stabat Mater (1950), a 12-movement sequence for orchestra, chorus, and solo soprano based on the sorrows of Mary.

The date of Poulenc’s rededication to the faith of his father (his mother was an atheist) is usually given as 1936, the year that the sudden death of a friend plunged Poulenc into despair. Following closely on his Mass in G (1937), he composed the Concerto in G minor for organ, strings and timpani (1938), and it’s the centerpiece of Poulenc: Organ Concerto (MSR Classics) by the National Presbyterian Church organist William Neil.

“While all of Poulenc’s other concertos are relatively light-hearted works,” writes Richard Freed in the liner notes, “sometimes evoking the music hall, his Organ Concerto … is dramatic and almost unrelievedly more serious in character.”

Freed goes on to cite the attribution of the work’s seriousness to Poulenc’s “formal return to the Roman Catholic Church” (“a by no means casual gesture”), implying that one of the several ways the concerto can be heard is as an aural dramatization of the high-stakes, grace-enabled struggle against deeply rooted sin—a kind of regress-bedeviled pilgrim’s progress if you will. God doesn’t give us more than

Email: aorteza@wng.org

5/27/14 3:14 PM

Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Reviews > Music

NOTABLE CDs

SPOTLIGHT

New or recent classical albums > reviewed by  

Animals in Music Various artists These  selections coming in at two hours and  minutes overstress the compilers’ point, which is that composers the world over have long striven to capture the variety and vibrancy of the animal and insect kingdom in song. What the selections don’t overstress is the consistency with which the  composers represented herein succeeded. Rimsky-Korsakov’s bumble bee and Prokofiev’s wolf, bird, and duck you know. Prepare to meet Elisabetta Brusa’s ant and grasshopper. And save a special place for Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ascending lark.

On the Horizon: New Music for Trumpet and Piano Jason Bergman, William Campbell, Ellen Elder Jason Bergman’s trumpet is as clear, bold, and bright as the gloriously sunlit sky on the album cover, doing justice and then some to the sharply defined melody lines of the six st-century compositions referred to in the subtitle. It’s to William Campbell’s credit that when he joins Bergman for Erik Morales’ Concerto for Two Trumpets and José Pasqual-Vilaplana’s “Les Noces Del Manyà” there’s no loss of expressiveness or quality—and to the pianist Ellen Elder’s credit that she doesn’t so much accompany as complement.

Rome, Paris, Madrid: European Baroque Guitar Music Pierre Pitzl Listeners wishing to add understanding to their enjoyment of this exquisite recording of th-century compositions for guitar will appreciate Pitzl’s liner interview, which ranges from the historical to the technical to the plainspoken. (His goal, he says, was simply to “present the guitar in its most varied ways of playing ... just as it was presented in the various European centres at that time.”) Listeners well adjusted enough to accept that the th century has passed will appreciate the soft-focus engineering, which adds an appropriately ghostly touch.

LIPNITZKI/ROGER VIOLLET/GETTY IMAGES

ULF ANDERSEN/GETTY IMAGES

Scarlatti Recreated: Transcriptions and Hommages Sandro Russo The Scarlatti is Domenico, the baroque composer of over  keyboard sonatas. The keyboard is the piano.

And the pianist is a Sicilian who has racked up numerous accomplishments since, as his website proclaims, graduating in  “summa cum laude from the V. Bellini Conservatory and [earning] the Pianoforte Performing Diploma from the Royal College of Music in London ‘with honors.’” Six long-deceased virtuoso composer-pianists provide the transcriptions; two relatively recently deceased and two still-living ones the homages. How could Russo go wrong? He doesn’t.

To see more music news and reviews, go to wng.org/music

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Since its inception, electronic music has tended to be regarded as “serious” (i.e., “classical”) even when there was little perceptible difference between it and the equally pioneering (i.e., weird) experiments of “rock” musicians.

Consider Iannis Xenakis’s GRM Works - (Recollection GRM) and New Music Collection: Electronic (NMC). Although separated by several decades, both still feel as if they’re contemporaneously rushing in where people who can’t stand Einstürzende Neubauten or Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music fear to tread.

Xenakis was no fool. There was method in his madness. Yet neither knowing nor understanding it will much enhance or reduce the visceral pleasure of simply absorbing his middle-period “musique concrète.” (Normal people will be content to call it “exhilaratingly otherworldly racket,” and they’ll be right too.) The composers represented on New Music Collection: Electronic obviously owe Xenakis a lot. The worst that you can say about them is that at their occasionally self-defeatingly abstract they obviously owe him more.

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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5/27/14 3:13 PM

Mindy Belz

Hashtag wars Victims of terrorism past, present, and future deserve more than a sentimental campaign dressed as foreign policy

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WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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corruption but in reality because the country is out of step with the Hillary Clinton/ Obama doctrine supporting gay marriage and so-called reproductive rights.

Across the Hill at the same time, another hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations committee revealed more of the White House rationale on terrorism. There top administration lawyers argued in favor of ending the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) approved by Congress three days after /. While there’s broad bipartisan support for revising AUMF—which makes explicit the president’s authority under the Constitution “to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States”—the president has said he wants to repeal it and may veto any revision.

To put it more plainly, Obama wants to end a U.S. war on terror even if the terrorists won’t go along. The terror threat is growing, if in places dispersed from where al-Qaeda began. It isn’t the same threat the United States faced after /, but it’s no less menacing.

Yet the administration is determined to make up facts on the ground to fit its agenda. Asked about Boko Haram, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said it’s “not core al-Qaeda” and insisted, as the administration has since it killed Osama bin Laden, “core al-Qaeda has been decimated.”

Notably FBI Director James B. Comey, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Michael Flynn, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, take issue with that assessment. So do the militants.

The same day of the House and Senate hearings, a fighter in Syria climbed atop the hill of Tel Ahmar on the Golan Heights, planted an al-Qaeda flag and praised Osama bin Laden for his warfare in Afghanistan—all within sight of Israeli jeeps patrolling the Golan. The Americans may hedge, but the terrorists know it’s a fight without boundaries aimed ultimately at the United States and its allies. A

EXPERT: Deborah Peter spoke at the House hearing about the  killing of her family by members of Boko Haram in Nigeria.

—For full coverage of Boko Haram, visit wng.org/topic/nigeria

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A   I   to speak on Capitol Hill about terrorism in Nigeria along with a panel of Nigerian experts.

Despite good publicity by stalwart activists, the event drew maybe  policymakers. By contrast, at a May  House hearing on the latest terrorist attacks in Nigeria, members of the public were turned away for lack of space. What a difference a hashtag makes.

Boko Haram, the terror outfit that’s been attacking Nigerians for years, has become a household name after rights groups, with a boost from First Lady Michelle Obama, launched a Twitter campaign— #BringBackOurGirls—to protest the April abduction of  young women from a girls’ school. On the day of the May hearing, The Wall Street Journal and other papers carried Nigeria on their front pages.

The sudden attention is welcome, but it will take more than a news splash to seriously combat Boko Haram and to truly Bring Back Our Girls. Here the Obama administration continues to display its lack of seriousness on fighting terrorism.

After jumping on the hashtag bandwagon, the president has sent but  U.S. troops to neighboring Chad to aid in surveillance efforts aimed at tracking the  students presumably still in captivity—six weeks after they were taken. Remember the KONY frenzy that sparked Obama to send  elite troops to hunt down Joseph Kony in central Africa? It, too, predictably went nowhere. This time the limp-wristed response has emboldened Boko Haram, which has launched daily attacks in the area since, including a May  bombing that killed .

At the May hearing, Under Secretary of State Sarah Sewall was dismissive and curt when asked why it’s taken so long to take seriously Boko Haram—two long years with many thousands dead before the State Department even declared the group a foreign terrorist organization (which has important implications on weapons buying, transit, and organization for such groups).

Sewall said poverty is at the root of Boko Haram’s activities, and told lawmakers the group has killed more Muslims than Christians. Both are verifiably untrue and, as Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., pointed out, an insult to poor people: “These are radical Islamists.”

Incredibly, some in the State Department are looking to cut off funding to Nigeria, citing government

Email: mbelz@wng.org

5/27/14 1:55 PM

“This project has enormous potential. If the books are chosen well and the translations are first class, the potential influence for the gospel, the promise of edifying and strengthening believers, the hope for raising biblical and theological literacy, can scarcely be overestimated.”

- Dr. D.A. Carson, Professor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Legal Christian Publishing in China One of The Most Significant Opportunities for the Advancement of the Gospel in a Generation.

In recent years it has become possible to receive government approval for some forms of Christian literature in China. These changes have enormous implications for the future of the Chinese church!

The Robert Morrison Project is a non-profit, non-denominational Organization dedicated to legally translating and publishing reformed literature in China. Our aim is to focus on areas of the world where the church is poor, faces great hardship, and often has no access to quality Christian literature.

Why is legal Christian publishing in China so important? China has one of the largest publishing vacuums of legal Christian books in the world. Once a book receives official approval it can then be sold to anyone, anywhere, in any quantity without any fear of reprisal. The book has complete, unrestricted access to the entire nation. With only about 1,500 Christian books in legal circulation in China, this is truly a once in a generation opportunity.

Our goal over the next ten years is to legally publish 120 reformed titles in China which will provide urgently needed resources for Chinese pastors and missionaries to shepherd the church. The challenge in fulfilling this goal is a lack of funding. Christian publishing in China is still very much in its infancy, and consequently it must rely on outside financing.

Pictured here is one of the eight Christian bookstores in Beijing.

Currently, there are about 200 Christian bookstores in China.

Fifteen years ago there were none.

Will you prayerfully consider making a financial contribution towards this publishing project? Together we can make a difference by supporting the church in China.

For more details or to make a tax-deductible donation, please contact:

Robert Morrison Project BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

P.O. Box 51788, Durham, NC 27717 Email: rmp@psmail.net  www.robertmorrisonproject.org Examples of legally published Reformed books in China

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Presented by Noble Institute & HSLDA. Hosted & Sponsored by the Christian Home School Associations, Support Groups, Co-ops and Local Churches of each state.

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WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MATURE YOUR PEOPLE?

Is it working?

Highlighting the successful “life-on-life missional discipleship” practices that his church has refined for over twenty years, Randy Pope inspires pastors and church leaders to leave behind ineffective programs and to stop “outsourcing” the task of discipleship by moving it from the margins of the church back into the mainstream.

“From this book you will learn both principles and practices for shaping people into Christlikeness by the Spirit’s power” Tim Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City

Additional Ministry Planning & Collaboration Resources from Life on Life:

Go to: lifeonlife.org for more information and resources on how to bring Life-on-Life Discipleship into your church.

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A lone Georgia attorney helps spur GM’s recall of . million cars, but a higher law drives his passions inside and outside the courtroom

MAN in MOT IO

by JAMIE DEAN in Atlanta

                   /      

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B

T IONS

 M’   began with a singing voicemail message from her father, a birthday email from her mother, and excitement over a birthday dinner with her new boyfriend. After her shift as a pediatric nurse, Brooke climbed into her  Chevy Cobalt, fastened her seatbelt, and headed down a misty, two-lane highway just north of Atlanta.

She never made it to dinner.

Instead, Brooke’s day ended with her car suddenly losing power, veering across the highway into an oncoming vehicle, and turning the date of her birth into the date of her death.

Three years would pass before Brooke’s parents, Ken and Beth Melton, learned why their daughter’s car crashed on a Georgia night in March . But from the moment she died, Ken Melton was convinced the accident wasn’t Brooke’s fault: She had taken her car to a dealership for service after she lost power less than a week before her crash.

As he leaned over her cold body at a local DOGGED hospital, Ken Melton kissed Brooke goodDETERMINATION: bye, told her he loved her, and promised Lance Cooper. he would find out what happened.

The search eventually led to a oneattorney legal firm in Marietta, Ga., where lawyer Lance Cooper oversees a staff of two paralegals and three assistants.

Though the firm is small, its influence is huge: Cooper’s investigation into Brooke Melton’s death spurred the General Motors (GM) recall of some . million vehicles earlier this year.

The recall began in February, with GM admitting a faulty ignition switch in some vehicles could cause the engine to turn off while driving, cutting power to vital systems like antilock brakes, power steering, and airbags. The company acknowledged at least  deaths tied to accidents involving the defect—a mechanical problem Cooper’s firm had uncovered.

GM also admitted at least some company employees knew about the potential hazard more than a decade ago, even before GM began selling Chevy Cobalts—a revelation Cooper discovered while digging through nearly , pages of documents with one paralegal in his Georgia office.

On May , the federal government announced GM had agreed to pay a  million fine for failing to report the ignition switch defect in a timely manner. It’s the maximum fine allowed by U.S. law, and the largest ever levied in a recall investigation.

The recall sparked a series of scorching congressional hearings, a reported investigation by the Department of Justice, and continuing questions about the role of the federal agency tasked with regulating auto safety. Sean Kane, a longtime analyst with The Safety Institute, underscored the importance of Cooper’s role: “There’s a direct line between what he did and the GM recall.”

On a desk in the home Cooper shares with his family outside Atlanta, a three-inch-thick binder holds papers for just one motion in the GM case. But Cooper’s study is filled with other tomes as well: Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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O

n a recent Sunday morning, Cooper and his wife, Sonja, sat on the third row of their local church in Powder Springs, Ga., as a pastor in the high pulpit at Midway Presbyterian Church (PCA) acknowledged God as the “omniscient and perfect judge.”

It’s a fitting meditation for an attorney who has spent more than two decades in man-made courtrooms. Cooper, 51, graduated from law school at Emory University in 1989, and has specialized in personal injury, wrongful death, and product liability cases, including automobile defects. He started his own practice—The Cooper Firm—in 2006. (Since the GM case, Cooper has added an associate.)

But when Cooper begins his story, he starts with a crisis pregnancy in Berkeley, Calif., in 1962. That’s when an unmarried college couple with good grades and full social circles

WORLD • June 14, 2014

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COBALT: Molly Riley/AP

C.H. Spurgeon’s devotional classic STILL STRUGGLING: Ken and Beth Melton Morning and Evening, and Steve with a photo of Brooke.

Lawson’s profiles of A Long Line of Godly Men. A hand-painted motto on the wall in the nearby kitchen reads: “Soli Deo Gloria”—the Latin phrase for “Glory to God Alone.”

News outlets from ABC to Al Jazeera have reported parts of the remarkable story of how Cooper and his team of a paralegal, a mechanic, and an engineer uncovered a massive safety scandal at one of the biggest companies in the country.

In an interview with WORLD, Cooper describes how his road to legal notoriety—and his continued pursuit of GM—also includes a crisis pregnancy, a blind date, a local church, and a hankering to uncover the truth.

‘If someone had not swept this under the rug, my daughter would still be alive.’

COBALT: Molly Riley/AP

— Ken M elton

learned they were expecting an unplanned child.

“Thankfully, they decided to keep me,” says Cooper.

Cooper’s parents married, and he professed faith in Christ during a Christian camp in high school. His commitment waned during his college years, but he says it grew when he met Sonja—a committed Christian—on a blind date in 1982: “Her influence on me was dramatic.”

The two married in 1987 and now have five children, ages 24 to 17. Cooper’s own background drew the couple into pro-life work, including service with Cobb Pregnancy Services, a local pregnancy care center where Sonja counsels women. She often uses her husband’s story to encourage abortion-minded women to keep their unborn children: “I tell them, ‘You don’t know what that baby will become.’”

Cooper’s role in the massive GM recall deepens that ­conviction. “Here’s an unplanned pregnancy that resulted in someone very valuable to people he will never meet and to society as a whole,” says Sonja. “I think that’s a beautiful aspect of this story.”

B

y the time Cooper met the Meltons in 2011, the bereaved parents’ suffering still ran deep. Ken had spent a year poring over internet postings, trying to

find if other Cobalt drivers had experienced power loss like Brooke had described a few days before her fatal accident.

During that incident, Brooke told her father the engine had turned off, and she struggled to steer the car to the side of the road. She took the Cobalt to a local dealership on a Friday, and retrieved the car on a Tuesday, believing it was fixed. She died the next day. Police said she had hydroplaned on the slick road.

Nearly a year later, when the Meltons thought the driver Brooke struck might sue her estate, an insurance agent suggested they contact Cooper. In the first meetings, Ken told the attorney he suspected something was wrong with the car.

Cooper sent the Cobalt’s black box to a mechanic, thinking it might reveal a power steering problem, but the results ­surprised him: The data indicated an ignition switch failure.

“I began to think, ‘What happened to her?’” says Cooper.

The mechanic suggested sending the ignition switch to Mark Hood, an engineer in Pensacola, Fla., who investigates mechanical failures. Hood tested the part, but couldn’t determine why it might have failed. When he bought a replacement part at a local GM dealership, he was surprised: A tiny plunger in the new switch was longer than the same part in Brooke’s car. But both ignition switches had the same identification number.

That meant GM had begun quietly changing the switches on newer models without informing owners of older models— owners like Brooke Melton. The change was significant: The longer plunger in the new switch made it less likely to turn to the off position while the car was still running. It was safer.

Hood documented his findings by searching salvage yards across the Pensacola area for ignition switches from Chevy Cobalts. After acquiring at least 10 switches from various years, Hood X-rayed, disassembled, and compared them. His research confirmed his discovery: GM had made a safer part without telling drivers of older cars.

Hood says he’d never encountered anything like it in 15 years of investigations. Cooper hardly could believe it. “It was astonishing,” he says. According to Cooper, the weaker switch in Brooke’s car likely failed and turned off the engine, causing her to lose antilock brakes and power steering, ­making it too difficult to correct quickly when the car began to skid.

(It’s unclear why many cars never experience the problem, but engineers say the car’s design could allow a driver’s knee to hit a low-hanging key chain, and possibly move the switch. A heavy key chain could cause the same problem. GM now says the cars are safe if drivers don’t use key chains.)

In other accidents involving GM cars, drivers experienced crashes unrelated to the ignition switch. But when the car hit an object or another car, the faulty switch turned off, cutting power to airbags that could have saved drivers if the bags had deployed.

Meanwhile, Cooper made another major discovery. After prevailing in a lengthy court battle against GM’s legal team to obtain thousands of company documents, Cooper learned some engineers knew about the ignition switch problem as early as 2004—the year before GM began selling Cobalts. At least one engineer experienced the problem while test-driving the car before its release.

J u n e 1 4 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

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The Sacramento Bee/MCT/newscom

hadn’t recalled all the vehicles with the switch. Cooper sent a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), informing the federal agency that GM should widen the recall to other makes and models, and revealing the company knew about the problem as early as 2004.

After USA Today published Cooper’s letter, GM eventually recalled 2.6 million vehicles with the faulty switch, and acknowledged at least 13 deaths related to the problem. The company also revealed some employees knew about the issue as early as 2001, as they tested the ignition switch in other cars. CEO Mary Barra said she didn’t learn about the problem until January of this year, and she apologized for the deaths linked to the switches.

Senate committee members weren’t appeased. In a scorching hearing with Barra, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., accused GM of a “culture of cover-up,” and revealed another bombshell: Additional documents subpoenaed by Congress

BARRA: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa USA/AP • MCCASKILL: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Instead of solving the probSCORCHED: Sen. Claire McCaskill (right) questions lem or holding back the car, GM CEO Mary Barra (left) GM suggested dealers give during the Senate hearing; owners a snap-on key cover to the Meltons meet with Cooper (below). help reduce weight on the key and wear on the ignition switch—but only if drivers complained. GM released the Cobalt with the faulty switch in 2005, but didn’t offer the partial fix of a key cover unless drivers later complained about a problem.

Cooper hammered those discoveries in depositions with GM engineers. First, he confronted engineer Ray DeGiorgio about the changed ignition switch. DeGiorgio denied authorizing any changes—a claim that would come back to haunt him.

Cooper also confronted Gary Altman, the chief engineer for the 2005 Chevy Cobalt. As he pressed Altman about whether GM had put profits over safety, and had released the car despite knowing about the problems, Altman relented. Cooper asked if GM “made a business decision not to fix this problem,” and then sold the vehicle to Brooke Melton five months later. Altman glanced at the GM lawyer, but replied: “That’s what happened, yes.”

The Meltons settled their case against GM in September 2013, but the revelations about the GM ­controversy didn’t stay private.

By February 2014, GM recalled 619,122 vehicles, citing a problem with the ignition switch. (The recall repairs now include a replacement ignition switch and new keys.)

But despite the massive recall, Cooper noticed a big problem: GM

Faulty switch GM recall involves three parts: 0 Ignition switch 0 Ignition lock cylinder 0 Key

Detent plungers

Small spring-loaded parts snap into the switch plate notches

Complete steering column assembly

it Ign

i on a

 

ssembly

0.42 in. (10.6 mm) long, overall

0.23 in. (5.9 mm)

Sleeve fits around steering column

0.29 in. (7 mm)

 

Ignition lock cylinder

Might allow key to fall out during vehicle operation, leading to a possible vehicle roll-away or crash

Ignition switch

Might unintentionally move from the “run” position to the “accessory” or “off” position— reducing or cutting the vehicle’s power; issue was with a small plunger pin inside the switch

Vehicles affected

0 Chevrolet

BARRA: KRISTOFFER TRIPPLAAR/SIPA USA/AP • MCCASKILL: PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP

THE SACRAMENTO BEE/MCT/NEWSCOM

0

Cobalt and HHR Pontiac G5, Pursuit, Solstice 0 Saturn ION, Saturn Sky

New key

New design features a hole instead of a slot to lessen the risk of the key falling out of the ignition switch; this risk may be increased if the key ring is carrying added weight

indicated GM engineer Ray DeGiorgio had approved a change to the faulty ignition switch in , contrary to his testimony during Cooper’s deposition. “He lied,” said McCaskill. (GM has placed DeGiorgio and Altman on paid leave during an internal investigation.)

The revelation about DeGiorgio led Cooper to ask a judge on May  to reopen the wrongful death lawsuit in Brooke Melton’s case, saying GM concealed evidence during the settlement. GM denied wrongdoing in Melton’s settlement, and the judge hasn’t set a court date. (GM didn’t respond to WORLD’s requests for a comment for this story.)

Meanwhile, questions remain about the NHTSA’s involvement in the GM debacle. Documents show the federal agency learned of potential ignition switch problems through multiple complaints as early as , but didn’t pursue a formal investigation. An NHTSA spokesman told WORLD the agency didn’t have enough information from GM at the time. Sean Kane of The Safety Institute says it’s a puzzling claim: “I’ve seen recalls on far less data.”

G

0.48 in. (12.2 mm) long, overall

M  ’  a list of the names of the  people they think died in crashes connected to the switch. Some attorneys and families believe the number is much higher. Dozens of lawsuits are underway, and hundreds of families believe they may have been affected by the defect.

0 Original design had a shorter spring, producing less tension 0 Weight of a heavy key ring could push a plunger out of place

Old slotted key

SOURCES: GENERAL MOTORS, MCSWAIN ENGINEERING INC.

Indeed, Brooke Melton isn’t included among the  deaths GM acknowledges, since the company only counts cases when airbags didn’t deploy in front-end crashes. The oncoming car in Brooke’s accident struck her vehicle on the side.

Brooke’s parents grapple with anger and disbelief over GM’s admission of making a business decision not to fix cars.

“I have to believe if you put those  people in the room with those GM employees before they died—surely they wouldn’t have said they were expendable,” says Beth Melton. Ken Melton says it’s hard to bear the thought: “If someone had not swept this under the rug, my daughter would still be alive.”

Four years after Brooke’s death, the Meltons struggle daily with her loss. Brooke was close to her parents, visiting at least twice a week. “Everywhere you go, she’s there, but she’s missing,” says her mother. Ken Melton constantly grieves the daughter who dreamed of marrying and having children of her own. “She wasn’t just my daughter. She was my friend,” he says. “I really miss her company.”

The Meltons say they hope the recall will save lives, and they’re thankful for Cooper’s “dogged determination” to uncover the truth about their daughter’s death.

Cooper says pursuing the GM case highlights the importance of the courts in exposing injustice and corruption. He’s enjoyed the challenge but says for all the notoriety of the case: “When we wake up tomorrow morning, Brooke Melton still won’t be here.” A JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD



Email: jdean@wng.org

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Behind the scenes in a blue state legislature, pro-life lobbyists go door to door for votes

by EMILY BELZ in Albany, N.Y.    /



Kathleen Gallagher had gotten up at : a.m. to drive from her home in Schenectady, N.Y., to the state legislature in Albany where she is a lobbyist for the New York Catholic Conference. In a blue state that can be an unrewarding job. Gallagher does not fit the stereotype of a Catholic pro-life lobbyist. On this Tuesday in early May she’s wearing a skirt and jacket, and just above her ankle is a recent (small) tattoo with the first initials of her husband and children. One of her colleagues suggested a visible tattoo might not be “work appropriate,” but she thought a tattoo of her family’s names couldn’t be more appropriate to her work.

Jason McGuire, an evangelical pastor who heads up New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms and its affiliate New Yorker’s Family Research Foundation, had gotten up at : a.m. along with his teenage son who has been working with him to drive from his home near Rochester to Albany. McGuire and Gallagher aren’t on the same side on every issue, like gun control, but they are allies on abortion. On this Tuesday, the duo is tracking a bill scheduled to be voted on in committee to remove many abortion restrictions in New York. They will work most days in Albany until the legislature wraps up its session, likely in June.

While red state legislatures are busy passing restrictions on abortion, some blue state legislatures are trying to loosen them. Pro-life lobbyists in blue states, instead of seeking restrictions, typically have to work on blocking laws. Last year, California’s legislature passed a law allowing nonphysicians—physician’s assistants or nurse practitioners—to perform first trimester abortions. The outcome on a similar bill, the Women’s Equality Act (WEA), was different in New York last year, thanks to a closely divided Senate and the lobbying effort from the state’s pro-life groups.

The New York Senate—by one vote—blocked the bill, which had an abortion provision as one point in its -point agenda. The abortion provision would have expanded the legality of late-term abortions; allowed nonphysicians to perform abortions; and removed criminal penalties associated with botched abortions and second-degree abortions, where someone would commit an abortion without the mother’s consent. New York currently offers legal protections to babies in the womb who are older than  weeks. The bill would have allowed an abortion at any point in the pregnancy for the sake of the mother’s life or health, including emotional health.

In the split Senate, the lobbyists needed the votes of two Democrats to block the bill. One Democratic vote was a former pastor from the Bronx, Rubén Diaz Sr., who is unabashedly pro-life. The other Democratic vote was a Jewish senator from Brooklyn, Simcha Felder, who votes conservatively on a number of issues but not necessarily on abortion. Felder declined an interview on the subject. McGuire said Felder had been nervous about how his UPHILL BATTLE: vote would play with the rabbis in his community.

Gallagher This session, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to pass the at the New WEA again, but he has not pushed it as hard as he did last session.

York State Despite continuing pressure from NARAL Pro-Choice New York, Capitol in Albany.

Cuomo faces reelection this year, so he is unlikely to push a controversial abortion bill. Democrats last year insisted on keeping the abortion provision tied to the other uncontroversial items, like an anti-trafficking measure, but they have recently shown willingness to pass portions of the WEA separately.

WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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On this Tuesday in May, McGuire and Gallagher have another abortion bill to worry about.

They need nine votes to defeat the Reproductive Health Act (RHA) in the Senate Health Committee. The RHA is essentially a stand-alone version of the abortion provision in the WEA, but strikes more regulations on abortion than the WEA. It also calls abortion a “right,” a concern to the pro-life lobbyists because that terminology could threaten conscience protections for healthcare professionals. The bill has trodden water in the health committee for seven years.

Over coffee and pastries, Gallagher and McGuire meet in a conference room with their staff and volunteers to map out the day. They focus on the Senate Health Committee hearing at noon, but parse other committee schedules to see if anything has snuck past their attention.

Stephen Hayford, on staff with New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, mentions a bill increasing the number of physician’s assistants a physician could supervise.

“I did look at it and I was OK with it,” said Gallagher. “It’s about supervision. It doesn’t allow them to do things on their own.” McGuire jumps in to ask whether loosening such regulations might “open the door” for abortion providers.

“I don’t think so,” said Gallagher.

“OK, I just haven’t looked at it,” McGuire said.

Gallagher has forgotten to make copies of a bill that they will pitch to legislators that day.

McGuire’s colleague Hayford has copies ready for her.

“You’re going to talk, we’re going to print the copies,” McGuire said to Gallagher, laughing.

They all pray and go separate ways, with Gallagher and McGuire on duty to visit the office of each senator they need to vote “no” in the health committee. In the elevator, a woman cordially greets Gallagher, and after we exit Gallagher identifies her as the former top lobbyist for Planned Parenthood. The WALKING THE TALK: McGuire. friendliness is “ebb and flow,” Gallagher said.

ROCCO LAURIENZO/ The Gallagher-McGuire duo circled the halls of the legislative offices, GENESIS and dropped into each office on their list. They had some anxiety that the senators who would vote against the RHA might not show up to the hearing because of an annual memorial for fallen police officers scheduled at the same time. In each office they double-checked whether the senator would be at the hearing or send a proxy. At one Republican senator’s office, they met with a staffer and pulled up NARAL Pro-Choice New York’s website that showed his boss as an “undecided.” The staffer was bemused, and assured the duo the senator would be voting “no” on the bill.

Some legislators in the Republican caucus describe themselves as pro-choice, so getting uniform Republican votes against an abortion bill isn’t a given. But this is also an election year, and while the Catholic conference doesn’t get involved with campaigning, McGuire’s group has a political action committee that is swinging into gear. Throughout the day, several senators made a point to speak with McGuire.

Next, the duo had a meeting with a senator to pitch their draft of a bill, which would tighten health inspections of abortion clinics. Normally, they would never dream of pitching a bill with more abortion restrictions to a New York legislator, but recent events in New York opened the possibility. An April report showed that the state health department had neglected to inspect eight of the  abortion centers under its purview over the last twelve years. Both Democratic and Republican legislators decried the health department’s negligence. The health department told me that it would reinspect all  centers and have the goal of inspecting them every four years. Soon after the duo’s initial pitch to a senator to introduce legislation on the matter, a Republican assemblywoman introduced her own bill that would require inspections of abortion centers every two years and a report on the inspections.

By the time Gallagher and McGuire finished their pitch, the health committee hearing was about to start. They slipped into the hearing room, where an overflowing crowd surrounded a table of senators. Senate Democrats began by discussing the RHA, saying it was “well past time” to move the bill to the floor. One of their colleagues, the pro-life Democrat Diaz, piped up—Diaz is not on the health committee, but came to the hearing to speak anyway.

“They are killing our babies, they’re stopping the growing of our communities,” said the senator from the Bronx. “This legislation is not only a menace to our minority community but also a threat to our women. ... It will move New York state in the opposite direction of ‘safe, legal, and rare.’”

Democratic Sen. Diane Savino said the bill would not expand late-term abortions, and Diaz shot back that it would.



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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Email: ebelz@wng.org

5/27/14 2:19 PM

“If you don’t support a women’s right to choose, there’s nothing I can say to you,” Savino said to Diaz.

Republican Sen. Greg Ball jumped in: “No one is even suggesting the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The only extremists in this room are the legislators who are supporting this.”

After more heated discussion, the chair of the health committee, Republican Kemp Hannon, was demure in announcing that he would vote “no.” “There are many technical problems with this bill,” Hannon said. He took the roll call; the bill failed, with exactly the nine votes needed despite the police parade happening outside the window of the hearing room. Felder, the Brooklyn Democrat, remained silent during the hearing, but provided a key vote against the bill.

“That’s all we get around here, is victory by one vote,” said McGuire.

As the senators spilled out of the hearing room, McGuire thanked each one who voted “no.” Then McGuire stood in the hallway holding the pink purse of the head of a Rochester pregnancy center while she did a TV interview. It was past lunchtime, and the lobbyists decided to assess the vote at the only eating establishment past security in the capital, Dunkin’ Donuts, which turned out to be the great crossroads of state politics. Several of the senators from the committee passed through the Dunkin’ Donuts and greeted Gallagher and McGuire, offering thoughts about the hearing or tips on their jobs.

One sat down and told Gallagher to be “more aggressive” and set up events with families to highlight the extreme stance Senate Democrats were taking on abortion. After he left, Gallagher laughed to herself about a senator telling a Catholic lobbyist to be more aggressive on the abortion issue. Senators’ interest in highlighting the extreme position of Democrats could possibly be related to the election this fall. But both Gallagher and McGuire are hopeful that a few Senate seats will change this year so they can block abortion bills with more than one vote.

“It can get discouraging at times,” said McGuire. “But the biggest thing you can do is hold back the flood ... while this generation becomes more and more pro-life.”

“I always used to say, as a lobbyist, the most important thing a person could do was write a letter to your legislator,” Gallagher said. But she has revised that: “The most important thing we can do is talk to your neighbor.” A

‘That’s all we get around here, is victory by one vote.’

— McGuire

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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Are the world’s biggest banks beyond the reach of the law?

by WARRE N COLE SM ITH    /   

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Former

o jail’

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer seemed to hit hard in December  when he announced that global banking giant HSBC would pay the government a fine of . billion. HSBC, he said, permitted “narcotics traffickers and others [to] launder millions of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries, and to facilitate hundreds of millions more in transactions with sanctioned countries,” including Cuba, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Myanmar.

Breuer said HSBC had a multiyear “record of dysfunction” and was guilty of a “stunning failure of oversight.” But he did not mention that the settlement allowed HSBC to avoid a criminal conviction that would have blocked the global bank from the U.S. banking system— what court watchers call a “death sentence.” In his triumphal announcement, Breuer also failed to mention that HSBC had earned more than  billion in , and more than  billion in . The fines amounted to less than  percent of its profit for BEHEMOTH: a single year.

The headquarters of HSBC Holdings In March  Breuer’s boss, Attorney in London.

General Eric Holder, went before the Senate Finance Committee to explain why HSBC wasn’t indicted for these crimes. He said some banks may be too large to prosecute without wrecking the economy. Holder’s “too big to jail” comments caused an immediate uproar. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said “big bankers know that if they commit financial crimes, they can expect a passive response from the Justice Department.”

The one-year anniversary of Holder’s remarks has created new interest in the questions: Have banks become too big to fail, and too big to jail? According to Mark Calabria of the Cato Institute, “Banks are not too big to fail, but the bailouts created an impression they are. The notion of ‘too big to fail’ is a problem created by a perception the government will intervene, and that prevents market forces from working.”

Tony Plath, a professor of finance at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, not far from the headquarters of Charlottebased Bank of America, takes a slightly different view. “The Big Four banks [JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, CitiGroup, and Wells Fargo] are too big to fail in the sense that I don’t think there’s anything the government can do to them.” He says the government has tremendous resources, “but so does Bank of America. It’s a  trillion bank.”

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‘There is increasingly bipartisan concern about the immense discretionary power that FSOC has and how little transparency there is.’

HENSARLING

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FSOC should “cease and desist” designating more financial firms “too big to fail” during a hearing on May .

“There is increasingly bipartisan concern about the immense discretionary power that FSOC has and how little transparency there is,” Hensarling said.

The answer to the second question—are banks too big to jail?—is a bit more complicated. “Banks don’t do things. People do things,” Calabria said. Even if the failure of some large institutions poses systemic risks to the financial system, “it doesn’t threaten the institution to convict a person who behaves illegally, so there should be no reason not to pursue individuals guilty of wrongdoing.” But, while banks tend to settle and move on, individuals tend to fight. “If you’re a bank executive, you don’t want to go to jail, so you will defend yourself vigorously,” Calabria said. That’s why so few individuals get convicted. In the aftermath of the  financial crash related to mortgage-backed securities, authorities arrested two Bear Stearns officials, Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi. Bear Stearns ultimately went out of business after JPMorgan Chase bought the firm— with a  billion loan from the U.S. government—but Tannin and Cioffi were ultimately found not guilty of misleading investors.

Nonetheless, Calabria believes regulators already have “tremendous authority” to pursue individuals.

That’s why he thinks additional regulation is not the answer. In fact, he says evidence shows the banking system is overregulated in ways that “pervert justice.”

Rich and powerful bank executives may have to pay a

FSOC: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • HENSARLING: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

Plath and Calabria both say that legislation enacted in the wake of the financial crisis—particularly the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—has made matters worse. “To begin with,” Plath said, “Title  and Title  of Dodd-Frank are in direct contradiction.” Title  created the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) that can designate financial institutions as creating “systemic risk” if they fail. This is the so-called “too big to fail” list. Title  provides for the orderly distribution of CONCENTRATED POWER: assets of those financial Federal Reserve Chair Janet institutions not on that list Yellen, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, and Martin Gruenberg of that do fail. Critics of Doddthe FDIC at a meeting of the Frank say these provisions Financial Stability Oversight send mixed messages to the Council (left to right). markets.

Calabria and Plath also criticize the FSOC’s broad authority to keep adding banks to the “too big to fail” list. They say the risk to the banking system of letting a big bank fail has been dramatically overstated. If a lot of big banks failed simultaneously, that would be a problem. But Calabria believes government bailouts and excessive government intervention—not bank failures— are the real threat to the banking system. “The current system of securities law is broken,” Calabria said. “It undermines market discipline.” That’s why House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, told Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew that the

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FSOC: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • HENSARLING: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

lot of money to defend themselves, but they usually get off—whether guilty or not. Large banks pay civil penalties as a “cost of doing business”—again, whether guilty or not.

“There was a time when penalties and fines meant something,” Calabria said. “It was a way to tell the good guys from the bad guys. But today that’s not the case.

All the big institutions have paid something, sometimes just to avoid the trouble of a protracted investigation or litigation. Today, it’s hard to tell if punishment relates to guilt at all.”

To counter this trend, Mary Jo White, who became chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in , promised to get more wrongdoers into court.

But Calabria is dismissive of her efforts. “What she said was good,” he said, “but she’s doing it mostly on the small guys. She’s trying to look tough without actually being tough on the big guys. All that does is reinforce ‘too big to jail.’”

Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute believes there’s a simpler reason so few bankers have gone to jail in the aftermath of the financial crisis: In order to prove criminal activity, you have to prove criminal intent.

“Why did the banks lose so much money?” he asks.

“It was because they kept the mortgage-backed securities themselves. If they were trying to defraud someone, if they knew these mortgages were bad, why did they keep them? I’m no defender of the banks, but we’ve been told the banks must have known, and I see no evidence of that.”

Wallison blames government intervention beginning in the s to increase “affordable housing”— not criminal activity—for the financial collapse. By Wallison’s definition, as many as  percent of new loans were subprime at the height of the housing bubble. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Obama administration set up the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, on which Wallison served. He co-authored a report arguing that these high-risk loans, and a bungled government response in , bear most of the responsibility for the crisis.

Tony Plath agrees that “it’s tremendously difficult to establish the burden of proof necessary to identify personal responsibility.” But he doesn’t think the banks were innocent victims.

“Goldman Sachs wasn’t long on the securitizations,” Plath said. “They were on the short side.” By that, he means that Goldman Sachs essentially bet the mortgagebacked securities would collapse in value. When that happened, Goldman Sachs made more than  billion.

They ultimately paid about  million in penalties for their activities, but that was just a fraction of the profits

Email: wsmith@wng.org

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they realized. Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum, the two Goldman Sachs executives who masterminded the deals, escaped criminal prosecution. (Swenson continues to work at Goldman Sachs. Birnbaum has since left Goldman Sachs and started his own investment firm. Neither responded by deadline to a request for an interview.)

In recent months, Attorney General Holder has encountered criticism of his inaction from both the left and the right. The Cato Institute’s Calabria recently published an article with Lisa Gilbert from the liberal group Public Citizen. They wrote: “A libertarian from The Cato Institute and a progressive from Public Citizen may not often agree on politics or what the proper role of government should be, but we agree the public has been kept in the dark on the ‘too big to jail’ issue for too long.”

In part as a response to such criticism, Holder and his team at the Justice Department have announced a few criminal prosecutions. On May , Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to criminal charges of helping Americans evade income taxes. As part of the deal, the bank will pay . billion in penalties, and must hire an independent monitor. Credit Suisse’s profits last year were less than  billion, so this penalty may actually be punitive and affect the behavior of the bank.

Another global bank, BNP Paribas, is accused of doing business with countries sanctioned by the United States. A plea arrangement with that bank should come any day.

But none of the experts I consulted think these plea deals will end “too big to jail” because they do not address the systemic problems. Plath called for greater transparency and stronger “firewalls between the regulatory side and the risk-taking side.” In other words, Plath said, “we need regulators with a career interest in going after the bad guys, and not in getting a job with the financial institutions they are supposed to be policing.” Now, Plath said, there’s a “revolving door between the regulators and the industry they regulate.

They come and go at will. It renders the regulatory structure toothless.”

A case in point: Remember Lanny Breuer, the prosecutor we met at the beginning of this story?

Just three weeks after delivering his tough speech announcing HSBC’s . billion penalty, he left the Justice Department to take a job with legal heavyweight Covington and Burling. Through a spokesman, Breuer declined to comment for this story, but according to the firm’s official biography of Breuer, the former prosecutor is now “the firm’s Vice Chairman and one of the leading trial and white collar defense attorneys in the United States.” A

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The

examined life Personal historians preserve ‘ordinary’ lives through published memoirs by

 

                         

W

 B MN wrote a memoir about growing up with a mother who was emotionally unstable, a literary agent told her the book was extremely well written. It might even have been picked up by a major publisher, he said, if only her mother had been a little more crazy. Or if McNellen herself had been a celebrity whose mother was merely garden-variety nuts.

That was in . Extreme fame or misery, it seemed to McNellen, , of Lakeside, Calif., were the hot tickets in memoir. But years later she wondered, “What about stories of ‘small’ lives with big, heroic deeds?” … such as the Portuguese woman who in  told her family she was going out for a loaf of bread, but instead sailed alone  miles between two Hawaiian islands to rescue an infant nephew she heard was being neglected and abused. … or five siblings who suffered orphanage atrocities after losing their elders to typhoid and insanity following the  San Francisco earthquake, only to pull together to create a close, loving family and sufficient wealth to care for generations to come.

All these people feature in books McNellen began writing last year after launching The Sound of Your

Voice Memoir, a business she uses to help Greatest Generation clients preserve their life stories—not in hopes of a movie deal or a hand-wringing session on Dr. Phil, but for their descendants’ edification.

McNellen’s work echoes the biblical emphasis on honoring and recording family lineage, passing on the wisdom and folly of ancestors, and learning from both.

It is also part of a growing career field: the personal historian. Formerly an “encore career” populated mainly with professionals from related fields like social work or journalism, more people are choosing personal historian as a first career, said Sarah White, president of the -member Association of Personal Historians, an international trade group. White pegs the trend to the convergence of high-end home video and self-publishing options, as well as web-enabled genealogical research.

The rise of the blog may also be a contributing factor, leading more professional writers to conclude that the lives of “ordinary” people are, well, interesting.

Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner said of memoir that God is always at work in history—even history not deemed worthy of The New York Times. “The Exodus, the Covenant, the entry into the Promised Land—such mighty acts of God as these appear in Scripture,” Buechner wrote, “but no less mighty are the acts of God as they appear in our own lives.”

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Lots of nonwriters set out to put their lives to paper. But these projects often wither due to a lack of skill, White said: “How do you find the compelling stories in the messy stuff of a life?” Busyness also intrudes: Many people plan to interview aging family members but put it off until it’s too late, then grieve history and wisdom forever lost.

By contrast, personal historians come alongside clients, get the main events down on paper (or film or audiotape), and make sense of it all. Beth McNellen spends anywhere from six to dozens of hours with each client, recording their lives on tape. Then she uses transcripts to sculpt a chronological ­narrative emphasizing high, low, and turning points. McNellen sends the completed manuscript to book packagers that ­produce retail-quality volumes in hard- or softcover.

Betty Slaughter Harriman, 88, of La Jolla, Calif., received 50 copies of Three Lives, the memoir she wrote with McNellen—just enough for family and friends. I interviewed

compelling stories: McNellen meets with Rose Tchang at a retirement community in La Jolla.

“Today’s generation could learn a lot from mine,” Betty said, referring to the way Depression-era Americans coped with poverty, struggle, and loss. “I do not minimize the economic hardships people faced during the country’s recent recession.

It’s more about what people today expect. The last thing people wanted to do in my day was go on [government] relief.”

When the couple’s adult children (his two and her four) first read Three Lives, they ribbed Betty about the details and pointed out stories she left out.

Betty laughs and waves a brush-away hand: “I told them, ‘Write your own book!’”

McNellen admits she is “madly in love” with Betty’s ­resilience and grace. In fact, she’s been inspired by her Greatest Generation clients’ near-universal ethos of throughthe-fire sacrifice and extended-family cohesion, both of which seem rare in today’s world of entitlement programs and quickie divorce.

‘Memoir forces people to look inward. … What soul have you forged as you overcame the obstacles of your struggle?’

—McNellen

62

Take Paul Tchang, for example. The Chinese émigré was able to squeeze onto the last ship out of Hong Kong before the Japanese bombed the city on Dec. 8, 1941. His wife, Rose, later survived a harrowing escape. Once in America, Tchang found work as a draftsman. Then, with Rose’s consent, the couple lived on a fraction of their income so that he could finance his siblings’ college educations.

McNellen notes the generational and cultural differences between such families and herself and Baby Boomer peers: “I felt no responsibility to pay for my siblings’ college educations,” she said, adding with a laugh, “I might not even give them a loan!”

Some of McNellen’s clients are wealthy, but they have little to say about money. Working with the elderly, she has noticed that the approach of death is “the great leveler.” They don’t seem interested in cars, boats, jewels, or cash, no matter how much they’ve accumulated.

“Memoir forces people to look inward,” McNellen said.

“What soul have you forged as you overcame the obstacles of your struggle? It’s all you have hope in now.” A

Casey McNellen

Harriman and her husband, Hank, at the upscale retirement community where they live, a few miles east of the Pacific. We sat in their spacious living room, Southern California sun streaming in through open balcony doors, Betty in a coral blouse, slacks, and sandals; Hank lanky in loafers and pressed khakis. Betty was elegant and articulate; Hank kindly and smiling. Hank suffers from Alzheimer’s. Its inexorable advance was one reason Betty wanted to get their story down, so that he could enjoy it while he still remembered.

Three Lives chronicles Betty’s childhood as the only ­daughter of a divorced mother—a rarity during the Great Depression—and her two marriages. Her first husband, Jim Slaughter, contracted polio at age 29, but built and ran a ­boatyard on the San Diego waterfront, directing the entire operation from his wheelchair.

Slaughter died in January 1975. Later that year, Betty ­married widower Hank Harriman, an insurance executive.

The two had been neighbors for years, but got to know each other better through a grief therapy program at their church and decided to join forces.

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Second opınıons

Liberal policies at major medical associations are hard pills for conservative doctors to swallow, and some are fighting back with alternative groups

by DANIEL JAMES DEVINE ILLUSTR ATION BY BEN JA MIN SCHIPPER

LAST YEAR IN JUNE , one of the largest medical societies in the United States, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), published a policy statement describing how doctors should treat “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.”

Pediatricians, the organization warned, should guard themselves against “homophobia and heterosexism,” which it claimed could contribute to “higher rates of depression and suicidal ideation, higher rates of substance abuse, and more sexually transmitted and HIV infections.” It added that doctors should never refer such patients for “conversion” or “reparative therapy.”

Quentin Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist from Atlanta and a -year member of AAP, was outraged: There was no evidence the health risks linked with LGBTQ lifestyles were primarily driven by social stigmatization.

After nearly four decades of heavy involvement in the AAP—including



serving as chairman of the Uniformed Services West chapter—Van Meter decided not to pay his  annual dues.

When a member services employee called, Van Meter told her the AAP no longer represented his views. She answered, “Yeah, we’ve heard a lot of that,” the doctor recalls.

For Van Meter, the LGBTQ policy was one overdose too many. Back in —the year he became a member— the organization had been more ideologically balanced. But by the late ’s and ’s, he says, AAP leaders were appearing in photo ops with Democratic politicians and promoting gun control across the United States.

“Whatever the Democrats wanted, the AAP said, ‘How high should we jump, and what should we say?’” says Van Meter. “I’m saddened that something that could have turned out to be very beneficial for kids has actually turned out to be a political slimeball.”

AAP is one of several mainstream medical associations founded decades ago that appear to have trended leftward in recent years. They were created to represent and further the interests of the medical field and local doctors, but

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increasingly, conservatives who belong to them believe their views are no longer represented among leadership.

The stakes are high: Groups like the AAP, the American Medical Association, and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers in Washington, D.C., pressing for changes to healthcare insurance, abortion laws, sex education funding, and more. They publish regular policy statements intended to reflect best practices in their fields. Doctors, lawmakers, and even judges use the statements to guide their own decisions.

Conservatives see the leftward lurch and want to push back, but as Van Meter says of the AAP, “If you don’t believe in the political views of the leadership … you are shunned.” Instead, some are joining smaller, distinctly

conservative medical associations that are acting as an antidote to their liberal counterparts.

One of them is the American College of Pediatricians (ACP), where Van Meter serves as a board member: “We are all about science. We are all about proofs.” The organization is not religiously affiliated, but Van Meter describes members as “moral people who are like-minded, and want truth, and want what’s best for children.”

Den Trumbull, the president of the organization, became fed up with AAP in 2002, when the organization issued a controversial policy statement in favor of allowing same-sex couples to adopt children.

“They said it was based on science,” says Trumbull. But he and many of his colleagues found it to be shaky science:

In the technical report accompanying the statement, the AAP argued children of same-sex couples were emotionally and socially well-adjusted. Yet, they admitted of their research, “the small and nonrepresentative samples studied and the relatively young age of most of the children suggest some reserve.”

That year, Trumbull and three other doctors—including former AAP ­president Joseph Zanga—founded the ACP as an alternative pediatric association. “All of us were members of the AAP,” says Trumbull, a pediatrician from Montgomery, Ala. “We felt like the AAP was increasingly placing its social issue policy on political correctness and not on science.”

The ACP promotes abstinence before marriage, respects the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, and recognizes the “father-

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GOVERNMENT-CONTROLLED

healthcare has been a noticeably polarizing force among doctors. In a surprise move in , the American Medical Association (AMA), representing about  in  U.S. doctors, endorsed Obamacare.

The move sparked an exodus of about , from the organization, or 

THIRTEEN DOCTORS founded the

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) in . Now based in Washington, D.C., the association calls itself “the nation’s leading group of professionals providing healthcare for women,” with over , members. (The group’s companion (c)(), the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, formed in  to take over lobbying activities and also uses the ACOG acronym.)

In , ACOG encouraged doctors to recommend intrauterine devices and

Email: ddevine@wng.org

5/27/14 2:02 PM

DEL MONTE: PATIENT-CENTERED PRIMARY CARE COLLABORATIVE

by the board of directors.” It added it has “no political affiliation.”

Trumbull said ACP submits all its policy statements to a member vote: Policy does not become official unless three-quarters of the membership approve. (ACP does not publish its membership size but has members in  states. Its current-year budget is about ,, it said.)

Even without a lobbying arm, ACP has waded into big controversies, filing amicus briefs in cases like Welch v.

Brown, in which it defended the right of California doctors to offer sexual orientation change therapy to adolescents.

“When we take a look at the amicus briefs that are filed … we find ourselves as the only secular group speaking on behalf of the child,” said Trumbull.

“Our focus has to be on the well-being of the child, not the wants of adults.”

HANDOUT

mother family unit, within the context of marriage, to be the optimal setting for childhood development.” Citing scientific studies, it opposes same-sex parenting as potentially harmful to children, and calls it “unethical” for doctors to withhold psychotherapy as an option for adolescents questioning their sexuality. (Some research suggests as many as  percent of youth who experience same-sex attraction ultimately declare themselves heterosexual.)

Since , by contrast, AAP has issued policy statements in support of gay marriage, in favor of providing teens with emergency contraceptives and condoms, and in opposition to parents keeping guns in their homes.

AAP policy doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of the members it claims to represent. The organization’s policy statements are written by committees (appointed by elected board members), and its , member pediatricians do not vote on them. In a statement, AAP told me, “Each policy statement is reviewed extensively by internal AAP expert bodies and approved PROFESSION: Van Meter with patient.

percent of its membership.

(Its ranks have recovered since then.)

Some of those frustrated doctors presumably joined other, smaller medical associations, such as DocsPatientCare, formed in  specifically to oppose nationalized healthcare.

Around that time, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons saw an uptick in membership. It was the first medical society to sue to overturn the Affordable Care Act. “We believe that physicians should work for patients and not for third parties, including government,” says Jane Orient, a doctor from Tucson, Ariz., and a spokeswoman for the group, which was founded in . It has about , members, and its budget is a fraction of the AMA’s: Officers and directors attending the group’s meetings pay for their own plane tickets.

By comparison, AMA is a giant: Along with state affiliates, it has spent nearly  million on lobbying efforts since , and last year it was the nation’s eighth most active Washington interest group. It has traditionally supported Republican efforts toward malpractice reform and opposed government control of healthcare, even opposing Medicare in the s. “Since that time the AMA has drifted farther and farther to the left, and actually seems to be one of the primary advocates of government medicine,” says Orient.

DEL MONTE: PATIENT-CENTERED PRIMARY CARE COLLABORATIVE

HANDOUT

contraceptive implants to adolescents, endorsed over-the-counter access to emergency contraceptives for young girls, and said doctors should “support media campaigns clarifying that emergency contraception will not terminate an established pregnancy.” (Doctors who believe life begins at fertilization would dispute that claim.)

In September last year, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, ACOG issued a statement endorsing homosexual marriage.

ACOG’s “progressive” tendencies began early on. In  ACOG issued a statement saying doctors should be legally free to provide contraceptives even to an unmarried adolescent “who refuses to involve her parents.” In , ACOG said minors should have access to legal abortion with or without parental consent. Just a few months later, in January , the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.

A week after the Supreme Court decision, a Florida obstetrician and gynecologist named Matthew Bulfin got on the phone and began asking colleagues about starting a pro-life special interest group within ACOG. By April, the American Association of Prolife Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) was born.

Today, AAPLOG is a nonprofit entity with , associates and members, many of whom remain members of ACOG because of the professional benefits provided. “We exist to give a second opinion,” says Donna Harrison, AAPLOG’s executive director. On its website, the organization has posted documents addressing subjects ranging from surgical abortion to emergency contraception to breast cancer.

The second opinion is needed: Fact sheets on ACOG’s website describe abortion as a “low-risk procedure,” claim there is “no evidence that having an abortion increases the risk of getting breast cancer,” and claim “most experts agree that one abortion does not affect future pregnancies.”

But Harrison points out studies have linked abortion to breast cancer, depression, suicide, and alcohol abuse.

And women who have abortions are more likely to have a subsequent pre-

mature birth, she says: “This association is well known and well documented, and yet ACOG, in their publications, refuses to acknowledge it.”

For Harrison, the final overdose came in November , when ACOG published “Committee Opinion Number .” It said doctors who morally object to “reproductive services” like abortion or emergency contraception “have a duty” to refer patients to doctors willing to provide them—or in an emergency, are obligated to provide them themselves, “regardless of the provider’s personal moral objections.”

“I told ACOG that I would no longer be a member when they put out ethics statement ,” says the Michigan doctor, who has not paid her dues since then.

ACOG spent . million on lobbying efforts in  alone, according the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks publicly reported political spending and contributions from individuals, businesses, and organizations. According to lobbying records ACOG was legally required to file, the organization has weighed in on issues related both to women’s health and to abortion. Between  and , ACOG lobbyists pressed their case on abortion access, emergency contraception, international family planning, stem cell research, and the pro-abortion Freedom of Choice Act. Records from  to  indicate pro-life bills, such as the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, were also on their political agenda. (The records don’t always say whether they lobbied for or against a bill.)

A  filing noted an ACOG lobbyist worked to “urge House and Senate to shift federal funding from abstinence-only sexuality education to fund comprehensive sexuality education.”

Toward the end of the year, ACOG weighed in on the “Mexico City Policy” (pro-abortion groups called it the “Global Gag Rule”), a ban on using federal funds to provide or promote abortion overseas. President Bush had upheld the ban throughout his two terms. But near the close of , an ACOG lobbyist “communicated with the Office of the President-Elect on the

PAID IN CASH For a glimpse into the political culture at the American Academy of Pediatrics, just follow the money. According to the Sunlight Foundation, employees of AAP and its affiliates have given about  out of  dollars in reportable campaign contributions to Democratic candidates or causes.

The giving habits of AAP’s lobbying chiefs are also telling: Elizabeth “Jackie” Noyes, who served as director of AAP’s Department of Federal Affairs in Washington, D.C., from  until retirement in , donated at least , to Democrats (including Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton) and liberal causes between  and . At least , of that went to EMILY’s List, an organization that works to elect pro-abortion, Democratic women to office.

AAP’s new lobbying director, Mark Del Monte, gave at least , to Democratic politics between  and . Of that,  went to support an initiative opposing California’s ban on homosexual marriage, Proposition . According to AAP’s IRS documents, Del Monte received , in compensation and benefits from the organization in .

—D.J.D.

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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PRO B I N G I N CO N G R E SS The “health professionals” industry spent $85 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies in 2013, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Employees and PACs from dozens of the industry’s associations and interest groups contributed $152 million to political campaigns and causes during the 2011/2012 election cycle.

Of contributions to politicians and parties, 57 percent went to Republicans—mirroring the industry’s long-term giving trend, although some organizations favor Democrats.

Health professionals industry top five lobbyists (2013) American Medical Association $18.3 million

American College of Radiology $3.8 million

American Dental Association $2.9 million

American College of Emergency Physicians Donna Harrison

$2.5 million

American Academy of Family Physicians $2.5 million

American Medical Association Founded 1847. Membership: 228,000 Campaign contributions since 1990 cycle: $30.2 million Democrat/Republican split: $10,300,000

$16,200,000

Lobbying since 1998: $290.6 million

American Academy of Family Physicians Founded 1947. Membership: 115,900 Campaign contributions since 1998 cycle: $2.8 million Democrat/Republican split: $1,600,000

Lobbying since 1998: $34.8 million

American Academy of Pediatrics Founded 1930. Membership: 62,000 Campaign contributions since 1992 cycle: $43,135 Democrat/Republican split: $34,500

WORLD • June 14, 2014

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$8,300

Lobbying since 1998: $4.9 million

American Congress/College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Founded 1951. Membership: 58,000 Campaign contributions since 2010: $1.2 million Democrat/Republican split: $800,000

Lobbying since 1998: $10.8 million

68

$1,100,000

$500,000

Harrison: Kristina Hernandez • Sources: Sunlight Foundation; Center for Responsive Politics; National Institute on Money in State Politics

Global Gag Rule.” Newly inaugurated President Barack Obama repealed the ban as one of his first orders in January 2009.

ACOG did not return my request for comment on its lobbying records and fact sheets.

AAPLOG has sometimes succeeded in halting actions that could threaten the rights of pro-life doctors: In 2008 the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ABOG), an organization that certifies ob-gyns to work in hospitals, updated its certification standards to require doctors to “adhere to ethical standards outlined by ACOG and sanctioned by ABOG.” The move could have forced pro-life doctors to provide abortion referrals or lose their certification, and consequently, hospital jobs.

“They changed their wording very subtly,” says Harrison. “So we screamed.” The Bush administration listened and months later issued rules to strengthen doctors’ conscience rights. ABOG soon after deleted the problematic language.

Looking to the future, Harrison is concerned the new healthcare law’s cost-cutting measures could make it harder for doctors who refuse abortions to get hired at cash-strapped hospitals.

The fight, she says, will be tough: “It feels kind of hostile for those of us who practice Hippocratic medicine.” A

5/27/14 2:06 PM

L D A IT OA G L I D N W O D A Six Part Audio/Video Series Learn from the Foremost Puritan Writer on Family Life This six part video series is based on William Gouge’s classic work, “Domestical Duties,” using the edited and modernized version by Scott Brown and Joel Beeke. This series is designed to help husbands love their wives like Christ loved the church.

We will be taking critical chapters in the book that are specifically directed to husbands. Each session will focus on a particular chapter of the book.

Harrison: Kristina Hernandez • Sources: Sunlight Foundation; Center for Responsive Politics; National Institute on Money in State Politics

husband respond when he sees sin in his wife? Gouge shows concern that husbands not misuse their authority.

What should a husband do when his wife’s conscience is against some lawful thing he wants her to do? How should a husband instruct or even correct his wife in a way that shows her love and honor? William Gouge provides husbands and wives one of the most detailed and honest treatments of the husband and wife relationship ever written. This book is heavy on application, analyzing nearly every possible aspect of married life.

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Based off the new Release, Building a Godly Home

Purchase: www.ncfic.org/husbands

Audio/Video Series Topics and Speakers Session

Topic

Guest Speaker

Session 1

Authority, pp180-195

Joel Beeke & Scott Brown

Session 2

Gentleness, pp196-214

Joel Beeke & Scott Brown

Session 3

Correcting, pp215-224

Jeff Pollard & Scott Brown

Session 4

Kindness, pp225-236

Sam Waldron & Scott Brown

Session 5

Provision, pp237-256

Derek Thomas & Scott Brown

Session 6

Love, pp257-273

Jeff Pollard & Scott Brown

Audio/Video Download—www.ncfic.org/husbands

12 MEDICAL GROUPS.indd 69

5/23/14 2:09 PM

BY ANGELA LU  : Do the names Nash Grier and Cameron Dallas ring a bell? Does the phrase “Dat backflip, doe” mean anything to you? Are you despairing over the breakup of Magcon?

If you answered yes to these questions, you are most likely a teen girl, reading this on a break from watching infinitely looping six-second videos on Vine.

If you answered no, you’d be surprised to learn that  million users—mostly ages  to —use the social media app each month. There they’ve created their own terminology, inside jokes, and their own brand of celebrities. Beyond that, it’s a gold mine for companies struggling to reach that vital youth demographic, as well



as young Viners (the common term for the video creators) looking for their slice of fame and eager to rake in more than a few bucks.

Case in point: The most-followed Viner, Nash Grier, is a -year-old from North Carolina with no real talents besides charming girls with his blue eyes and capturing typical teenage antics on camera—like playing pranks or having his little sister sing rap songs. A whopping . million users follow his daily exploits, and hundreds were willing to pay between - to meet him and  other top Viners in person at Meet and Greet Conventions (Magcon) around the country.

When Grier and three other popular Viners decided to pull out of the tour for a movie deal, heartbroken fans swarmed Twitter, where seven of the  trending topics were Magcon-related.

WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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Vine, which is owned by Twitter, started in  to much buzz as a platform for creating short videos. Months later Instagram offered a -second video option that many claimed would shut down Vine. Yet over the past year, legions of teens joined Vine not to make videos but to watch videos created by burgeoning celebrities.

The content on Vine runs the gamut from the inane to the spectacular: Viner Jerome Jarre pranks strangers on the sidewalk, Logan Paul focuses on physical comedy, Andrew Bachelor (or KingBach) creates short comedic sketches, and Zach King uses special effects to create “magic tricks.” To increase fan frenzy, popular Viners find each other to appear in each other’s videos.

That’s one thing that separates social media celebrities from those in Hollywood, said King, a  Biola University grad. Rather than competing for the same roles, Viners are eager to collaborate on videos, realizing that fan bases often overlap and grow as their faces appear in front of new audiences.

The bigger the audience, the more varied the opportunities, including partnerships with businesses to create ad campaigns, appearances on talk shows— or in Grier’s case, getting a movie deal.

King started making Vine videos in his garage-converted studio last September after he found all his friends using the app. He had made a name for himself as the effects-laden Final Cut King on YouTube with his viral video about light saber–wielding kittens. It cleverly targeted the two largest demographics on the internet, cat lovers and Star Wars fans. When he saw that the six-second format could work with his special effects sleight of hand, he vouched to make one Vine video a day for  days.

“At first it was really difficult,” King remembers. “I thought, ‘This is going to be really easy, just a six-second video,’ and it wasn’t at all. You have to get the timing since it is so short, you have to tell a whole story with a beginning, middle, and end in that time.”

His first Vine was created from a longer Youtube video he made involving a kitten photoshopped to look like

anime character Pikachu. When he originally brainstormed with roommates, someone suggested it’d be funny if the adorable kitten would actually electrocute those who pet it. So in the six-second video, King is duped by a kitten and sent crashing into a bookshelf across the room. Quickly, King saw his following jump—first to , then , in a month and now, eight months later, to more than . million followers.

In that time, he’s jumped into a moving car, put a marshmallow peep in his mouth and transformed it into a live chick, jumped through a fence (although his clothes didn’t make it to the other side), and created Vines backstage at The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

While many of his fellow Viners can make a video in, well, six seconds, King’s stunts take between one and  hours to edit. For his Vine jump into the car, he had his roommate drive slowly down the street as he jumped at the car, then cut to a perfectly aligned clip of him sitting inside the car (it and others available at vine.co).

While it may seem all fun and pranks, King has an audience to develop. Followers may at anytime click the “unfollow” button. Like a TV show, Vines depend on consistency, so King creates at least two Vines per week. He gauges which type of videos earn the highest number of views (those with physical contact, an element of surprise, and more camera movement), but he also has to calculate viewers—with their short attention spans—don’t want to see the same things over and over again: “The story has to be creative and new every time, so obviously it’s a lot of creative work and creative juice to figure out how to make it new.”

With slickly edited Vines and a large following, King is also becoming attractive to companies wanting to reach a young audience. Taco Bell, Nike, and Coca-Cola, rather than placing ads on the social media app, have asked King to create Vine videos showcasing their products. In one recent Vine, King is seen torching a bag of Doritos that magically turns into Taco Bell’s Doritos-shelled tacos.

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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5/27/14 4:59 PM

T RU S T WO R T H Y C H R I ST I A N I N T E R N ET R A DIO RefNet, an always-on streaming radio station from Ligonier

Ministries, features biblical preaching and teaching from Alistair Begg, John MacArthur, Albert Mohler, John Piper, R.C. Sproul, and many others, as well as daily news briefs from WORLD News Group, Bible readings, audiobooks, music, and more. Now optimized for larger screen sizes and features improved playback, a weekly schedule, sleep timer, and other enhancements.

Listen anytime, anywhere from your phone, tablet, or computer at RefNet.fm

The partnerships are so lucrative that King and other top Viners are able to make a living solely creating digital content. Niche, a startup connecting companies with social media celebrities, said it has made . million in revenue since last fall. One Viner, -year-old Cody Johns, told Business Insider that he worked on one ad campaign that paid off his entire college tuition.

Johns has  million followers.

King recognizes his influence with young, impressionable followers, and as a Christian wants to create clean entertainment within the unruly Vine world: “My goal has always been that when I have kids, I want them to be able to watch every Vine I’ve done without any doubts of it being unclean, so that’s kind of my standard, my voice in my Vines.”

The danger for Christians in such an instant culture is to post videos that aren’t well thought out and instantly misrepresent Christ to

millions of onlookers, King said.

A scroll through Vine accounts reveals that some Viners cite Jesus in their bio sections, but tell a different story with their profanity-laced, sexually explicit content. For it and other social media, said Christian culture critic Brett McCracken, “it’s a good idea not to post in the heat of the moment or in the heat of your emotions, be conscious of the fact that this is public and you are representing Christianity to the world.”

As King continues to seek creative ways to tell stories in six seconds, the big question on his mind is how he can tell the ultimate gospel story in that time. “I wake up every day and think about it for five minutes, and I have no answer,” King said.

Yet he’s certain “there has to be no talking because the gospel relates to everyone in the world. It can’t just be talking, it’s got to be an image.

That’s my creative block.” A —See King’s vines at vine.co/Zach.King

Email: alu@wng.org

LIG-312_2014_06_14_REFNET_WORLD_1-3V_FINAL_2.indd5/21/14 1 3:08 PM 12 VINE.indd 72

5/27/14 5:00 PM

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eternal perspective.

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5/21/14 3:16 PM

Notebook Lifestyle > Technology > Science > Houses of God > Sports > Religion

Produce policing Growing regulation is stifling small farms, but is it reducing food-borne illness?

BY ABIGAIL MAURER

>>

OLIVIER KONING

W D F closed its final Hawaiian sugar plantation in , Jeanne Vana took her former employer up on the offer they made her:  acres of a sugar plantation.

Today, Vana primarily grows heirloom tomatoes on the land located on the north shore of Oahu. She sells her produce at three farmers’ markets a week and employs one full-time employee. Keeping her tomatoes free of dangerous bacteria is important to Vana. She knows her customers and values their health. And if customers become ill because of her tomatoes, they will eventually stop buying.

DO NO In , Vana FARM: Vana. decided to complete a voluntary certification through Hawaii’s Department of Agriculture. She thought it would increase her credibility as a farmer and ensure she was observing the latest food-safety practices in anticipation of increased national regulations.

When the required certification

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

Download75 WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad 12 LIFESTYLE.indd

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

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5/22/14 10:47 AM

Notebook > Lifestyle



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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‘You work hard for your money, and we’re wasting it to comply. … We were trying to have a sterile farm, and that’s not reality.’

—V systems, and multiple production locations. … Accommodating all the diversity found in the produce industry will take a massive amount of resources.”

Although farmers seek to keep their produce safe, some believe the laws place too much of the food safety burden on the farmer. Vana contends that the ultimate responsibility for food safety rests with the consumer.

According to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, bacteria like E. coli and salmonella can be spread from consumer to produce and through cross-contamination, and those bacteria can also be removed by carefully washing fruits and vegetables.

Jessica Smith, an Indiana livestock and produce farmer, believes that small

to midsize farms need to establish new and viable food safety practices to protect their operations from crippling regulations.

Smith is an advocate for food hubs, regional processing facilities that store, market, and deliver locally produced foods.

These hubs would allow fresh, local produce to be cleaned, processed, and packaged with uniform processes, enhancing food safety while removing some of the burden from farmers.

Smith’s own business, This Old Farm, works with more than  producers throughout Indiana to aggregate their products, ranging from beef to vegetables, and market those to businesses and restaurants that might find it difficult to find local producers. And Smith believes that encouraging businesses like these could be the key to enhancing food safety and protecting farmers.

“We say thank you for the farms that produced our food, but we don’t know how to think highly of our farmers,” Smith said. “We need not to criminalize our farmers. We need to give them options.” A —Abigail Maurer is a World Journalism Institute graduate

OLIVIER KONING

audit was completed, Vana was exasperated and out ,.

“You work hard for your money, and we’re wasting it to comply,” Vana said when explaining why she didn’t renew her certification. “From my perspective, we were trying to have a sterile farm, and that’s not reality.”

As part of the program, Vana installed an on-farm portable restroom and cleaned it two times per day. She cut grass around the perimeter of the food processing station to prevent animals from settling, and she kept the area above the fields free of tree branches to deter birds from flying over and dropping their feces on the fields.

New paperwork designed to help consumers trace the source of their produce required time, a scarce resource for farmers like Vana who manage their own operations. She installed field signage and logged each row’s harvest by quantity and date, documenting that information on her customers’ shipping containers.

But that’s not enough. The  federal Food Safety Modernization Act granted the FDA new authority over produce farms and regulated minuscule details of farming operations in the hope of minimizing pathogens. The FDA estimates that  million people each year become ill from food-borne disease. Although animal products are the usual suspects, events like the  listeria outbreak caused by tainted cantaloupes have drawn attention to the risk fresh produce poses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than one-third of all food-related illnesses come from tainted fresh produce.

Scott Monroe grew up on a melon farm in southwest Indiana and currently co-chairs Purdue Extension’s statewide produce food safety team, teaching about the topic across Indiana. Monroe believes that a “codified baseline” for agricultural producers could be a good idea, but fears that the law expects too much and doesn’t take into account that “the produce industry is a very broad and diverse industry with multiple products, multiple production

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

5/22/14 10:52 AM

“ Bond’s most important book on the most important controversy in the world: the gospel.“ —R. C. Sproul Jr.

“

Grace is not the enemy of works, but the only proper source. It’s amazing how many ways we can get that wrong—usually, as Doug argues, by incremental and often imperceptible changes. There is a lot of wisdom in this book.

“

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This is a key book for everyone who loves the church of Christ.

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WHEN THE CHURCH DOWNPLAYS THE GOSPEL, it breeds its own assassins: moralists who yawn at the notion of free grace in Christ alone and rebels who can’t get out of pharisaical churches fast enough. Sounding the alarm, Douglas Bond celebrates the amazing, effective power of grace while showing us how to identify destructive “law-creep” in our churches and lives.

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Notebook > Technology

Fake followers Twitter is awash in fake accounts, undermining its credibility as a social status gauge BY DANIEL JAMES DEVINE

>>

Fast Followerz, advertises  followers for , or , for . It claims all those followers will be active Twitter accounts, solicited by promoting your account among Twitter users who share your interests or are willing to follow you in exchange for a “token,” or for you following them.

There’s nothing wrong with paying for advertising, but “buying” Twitter followers is generally considered unethical, especially if those followers aren’t genuine fans. It seems a dishonest way of pumping up your apparent clout and

Quiet reading

PLATE AWAKENING: One of Vigilant Solutions’ license plate recognition cameras.



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

12 TECHNOLOGY.indd 78

A license plate tracking company has a condition for police departments that want to comb its database: You must remain silent. Vigilant Solutions runs a massive network that collects photographs of over  million license plates each month, including the date and location where they were spotted (often in big cities). Investigators can search the database to track the whereabouts of a suspect.

But police aren’t allowed to talk to the media about the license plate database unless they get preapproval from Vigilant, a move apparently intended to stave off unflattering media attention and criticism from privacy advocates. Vigilant’s nondisclosure agreement said the restriction was meant, in part, to “protect Vigilant’s competitive interests and ensure consistency with other media messaging.” —D.J.D.

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • CAMERA: PRNEWSFOTO/VIGILANT SOLUTIONS/AP

T, the social media platform where users compose messages of  characters or less, now hosts an impressive  billion user accounts. Whether half that many people are actually using the service is another question.

A Twitter-tracking service called Twopcharts recently reported  percent of Twitter accounts have never composed a tweet. Around one-third of accounts have composed a total of  or fewer tweets, and only a quarter have tweeted within the past month.

Some of these accounts might be users who lost interest, but many are fake: Twitter is awash in dummy accounts created by computer bots and low-paid Asian workers. Unscrupulous businesses known as “click farms” in Bangladesh and Indonesia pay workers to sit behind computers creating fake Twitter accounts and “following” legitimate ones. They might earn  by following , accounts. (They’re also paid to “like” Facebook pages and drive up YouTube video views.)

The click farm workers and other shady outfits get business through dozens of websites or eBay accounts that offer to boost Twitter followers for a fee. One of the more popular sites,

importance in the world of social media.

Some celebrities and politicians have been accused of buying followers. Mitt Romney’s Twitter account, currently boasting . million followers, added , during a single weekend in July .

His campaign denied they had bought those followers.

According to StatusPeople, a tool for checking fake Twitter accounts,  percent of Romney’s follower accounts appear fake, and another  percent are inactive. Of President Barack Obama’s  million Twitter followers,  percent appear fake, and  percent inactive.

Some popular figures may be magnets for click farm workers looking for celebrities to follow, whether those celebrities have paid for it or not. But as long as Twitter is filled with bogus accounts, it’s hard to take seriously a person’s number of followers as a sign of social status. Fake followers undermine the credibility both of Twitter users and of Twitter itself.

Email: ddevine@wng.org

5/21/14 3:33 PM

illustration: krieg barrie â&#x20AC;¢ camera: PRNewsFoto/Vigilant Solutions/ap

5/23/14 9:39 AM

12 TECHNOLOGY.indd 79

Notebook > Science

False security

1995

As HIV spreads, the government recommends an expensive and questionable prevention plan By daniel james devine

80

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2014

Dwindling storm The colossal storm on Jupiter known as the “Great Red Spot” is undergoing a big red shrink.

Astronomers who observed the ­swirling anticyclone in telescopes in the 19th century ­estimated it to be about 25,000 miles wide, and a few decades ago the Voyager space probes measured it at 14,500 miles.

Recent images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal the storm at its smallest yet—just 10,250 miles in diameter.

A NASA astronomer said atmospheric eddies feeding into the storm might be altering its dynamics.

It is still large enough to swallow the Earth.

—D.J.D.

Truvada: JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images • Jupiter: NASA/ESA/A. Simon/GSFC

The Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada as the first prophylactic (pre-emptive) treatment against HIV in 2012.

Relatively few people use it. One study that checked about half of U.S. pharmacies found just 2,319 prophylactic prescriptions for the drug as of last September, half written up for women.

Although cheaper than drugs needed to treat an HIV infection, Truvada is extremely expensive—$13,000 a year. The CDC’s recommendation will raise awareness of its availability and put pressure on doctors to offer prescriptions. If every person the agency defined as eligible for the drug started taking it—about half a million Americans—the undiscounted cost would rise above $6 billion a year, with much of the burden falling on insurance companies.

Surprisingly, Truvada has even divided AIDS experts. Dozens of AIDS groups endorsed the CDC’s policy last month, but the largest in the United States, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, did not. The organization’s president, Michael Weinstein, has drawn sharp criticism for calling Truvada a “party drug.”

He believes promoting it will give the gay community a false sense of security and lead to an increase in sex without condoms. Truvada only protects against HIV, so a person with multiple sex partners who takes the drug but doesn’t use a ­condom can still contract a host of sexually transmitted diseases.

“This is a position I fear the CDC will come to regret,” Weinstein said in a statement, warning it could have “catastrophic consequences” on the fight against AIDS. “It’s good to prevent disease … even if the disease is caused by behavior we don’t approve of, whether it’s smoking or homosexual activity,” said David Stevens, the CEO of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations. But he is skeptical those at risk of HIV will remember to take a pill every day, an oversight that greatly diminishes Truvada’s effectiveness: “The best protection against HIV is not to engage in risky practices.”

Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more

5/21/14 4:01 PM

HILTON FLORES/Staten Island Advance/Landov

>>

Federal health officials made a tacit admission May 14: Relying on condoms to prevent the spread of HIV isn’t working.

That day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines recommending the prescription of a once-a-day drug for anyone at risk of becoming infected with HIV, including homosexual men who don’t use condoms, men and women with sex partners who might have the virus, and intravenous drug users. The United States saw an estimated 47,500 new HIV cases in 2010 alone, twothirds of them among homosexual men.

Taken consistently, the drug, called Truvada, can protect a person from acquiring HIV. But it’s expensive, and some believe it may ultimately be ineffective at lowering ­disease rates. It could embolden some users toward promiscuous and risky behavior.

Notebook > Houses of God The Free Magyar Reformed Church

TRUVADA: JOEL SAGET/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • JUPITER: NASA/ESA/A. SIMON/GSFC

HILTON FLORES/STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE/LANDOV

in Staten Island, N.Y., was built in  as St. Peter’s German Evangelical Church. Hungarian immigrants bought the building and gave it its current name in . A grant from The New York Landmarks Conservancy helped the church’s eight members last year repair damage caused

by Hurricane Sandy.

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD

12 SCIENCE and HOG.indd 81



5/27/14 10:46 AM

Notebook > Sports

The missing part

 

Champion golfer BERNHARD LANGER isn’t shy about his Christianity BY ANDREW BRANCH

>>

Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus: “You will not enter the kingdom of God unless you’re born again.”

“And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Born again? What is that?’” Langer said. “I hadn’t heard that in all the churches I had been to. … At first I thought, ‘Well, he’s using a different Bible than we use.’” But a few months after that Bible study, he “knew exactly” what he needed. “The Bible says nobody is so good that they can earn their way there,” he said, “but no one is so bad that God couldn’t forgive them their sins.”

Langer’s priorities changed, and they remained so even as he won the  Masters on Easter Sunday, participated in  Ryder Cups, and found himself in the World Golf Hall of Fame in . He’s still not bad at golf today. He has two wins on the Champions Tour this year, plus a top- finish back at the Masters in April. He’s not shy about his story, whether it be with a statewide audience on North Carolina’s David Glenn Show, other media engagements, or his autobiography. Where he once had emptiness, now he has “a personal relationship” with Jesus.

“That was the missing part.”

Friday night blight

School administrators in Allen, Texas, have closed a  million high-school football stadium for the year. The taxpayer-funded palace opened in , but the district shuttered the ,-seat stadium in February after cracks appeared in the concourse.

Now an outside firm has found further building code violations, including some stadium supports that essentially weren’t built to hold the weight of fans in the seats. Officials insist the architectural and construction firms must fund repairs. —A.B.



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

12 SPORTS.indd 82

LANGER: PAUL SANCYA/AP • WNBA: HANDOUT • ALLEN HIGH SCHOOL STADIUM: LM OTERO/AP

A  , Bernhard Langer is a two-time Masters Champion and Hall of Famer. But that isn’t what he wants you to know most about him, he revealed to a North Carolina sports radio audience last year.

A young Langer earned pocket money as a caddie growing up in West Germany, left school to pursue a golf career, and joined the European Tour in . His prowess grew rapidly until as a rich and famous -year-old he won the Masters Championship in .

But like a more recent example of Tiger Woods, what he had wasn’t enough to satisfy. “The next morning, I had this emptiness inside of me—even though I was World No. ,” Langer said. “I had just won a Masters, I had money, I had fame, I had cars, houses, and a beautiful young wife.”

The feeling stuck with him as he drove to Hilton Head Island, S.C., to prepare for his next tournament. During a practice round, fellow golfer Bobby Clampett invited him to a Bible study. “Bible study?

What exactly is that?” he asked. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was an altar boy. But at the study, the chaplain shared from

The WNBA has become the first professional sports league actively to promote the LGBT lifestyle. Some teams have had their own events for years, including booths at gay pride parades.

League research has found that a quarter of selfdescribed lesbians watch games on TV or in the stands.

But this new league-wide initiative, announced May , says it is “celebrating inclusion and equality, while combating anti-LGBT bias.”

The wide-reaching objective includes a nationally televised “WNBA Pride” game June  on ESPN, and players throughout the league will have to wear LGBT-promoting gear during certain June games.

Franchises will also have “team participation” in LGBT Pride parades and festivals.

How and if Christian athletes will be compelled to participate isn’t clear. League officials have not returned calls and emails. —A.B.

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Notebook > Religion

Famous last words

BY DAVE SWAVELY

>>

F  speakers make graduations extra special and bring notoriety to schools— but secular colleges are becoming infamous for changing speakers at the last minute because of protests from leftist students. This year former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew from Rutgers’ graduation ceremony following student protests, and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde did the same after being verbally attacked by Smith College students.

Students at Christian colleges and universities haven’t been part of that commencement trend, but some made themselves heard during the spring semester. In April Azusa Pacific University “postponed” a scheduled visit by conservative sociologist Charles Murray: The university’s president, Jon Wallace, wrote, “Given the lateness of the semester and the full record of Dr. Murray’s scholarship, I realized we needed more time to prepare for a visit and postponed Wednesday’s conversation.”

Murray responded, in an open letter to Azusa students, that his visit had “been planned for months. … Ask yourself if I’m anything more dangerous than an earnest and nerdy old guy.

Azusa Pacific’s administration wants to protect you from earnest and nerdy old



WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

12 RELIGION.indd 84

Bush

Murray

Rice

Larsen

Lagarde

guys who have opinions that some of your faculty do not share. Ask if this is why you’re getting a college education.”

Azusa had Sacramento megachurch pastor Ray Johnston as its commencement speaker, while other administrations chose political orators. Liberty University followed up an April speech

by Mormon Glenn Beck with a May commencement address by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a convert from Hinduism to Catholicism. Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. said prior to Jindal’s speech, “We believe that you our graduates will be better equipped to defend your faith and your values because you have heard firsthand from leaders who have different theological and political beliefs.”

Jeb Bush, who has moved from Episcopalianism to Catholicism, spoke at Grove City College’s commencement.

The college did not disclose his fee, but the website for the company that handles his engagements says it is at least , for each time he speaks.

Victoria Morra, a  graduate, told me, “Grove City’s reputation for conservatism makes Jeb Bush (and Laura Bush a few years ago) a reasonable fit for headlining the graduation ceremony.”

The most famous commencement speaker at other Christian colleges was probably Ben Carson (a conservative

Seventh Day Adventist) at Regent University. Eastern University invited Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The speaker at California Baptist University was E. Bruce Heilman, an -year-old World War II veteran and motorcyclist who is chancellor at the University of Richmond. Geneva College welcomed Greg Baylor, the Christian attorney currently representing the college in an Obamacare lawsuit. Wheaton College chose alumnus and parent David Iglesias, a former U.S. district attorney whose dismissal in  by the Bush administration was highly controversial.

How do Christian colleges choose commencement speakers? Some set up committees and seek the famous, but Trinity Christian College near Chicago chose Dave Larsen, an alumnus who directs the Bright Promise Fund for Urban Christian Education in Chicago. Trinity President Steve Timmermans told me he makes the selection and does not look for fame: “Commencement should be a time to celebrate student accomplishments in a way that honors God. … I try to find an excellent speaker already connected to the college in some way, and avoid political figures and other speakers whose presence would be a distraction from our purpose.” A —Dave Swavely is a Pennsylvania pastor and novelist

RICE: MARK DUNCAN/AP • BUSH: WILFREDO LEE/AP • LAGARDE: JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • MURRAY: MICHAEL TEMCHINE FOR WORLD • LARSEN: PETER CLEVERING, COURTESY OF TRINITY CHRISTIAN COLLEGE

In a season of commencement controversy, some Christian colleges look close to home for speakers

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RICE: MARK DUNCAN/AP • BUSH: WILFREDO LEE/AP • LAGARDE: JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • MURRAY: MICHAEL TEMCHINE FOR WORLD • LARSEN: PETER CLEVERING, COURTESY OF TRINITY CHRISTIAN COLLEGE

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Mailbag ‘Salt and light on campus’

May  As a professional academic, I’ve found that faculty on Christian campuses are typically far more liberal than their students. As your reporters show, the scandal of evangelical campuses is that the power players now are often more interested in accommodation than faithfulness. We might be better off if several schools did disappear. Families might ponder such a state of affairs before shelling out large tuition checks.

—J M, Hampton, Va.

‘To train up a Pharisee’ May  The feature on Michael and Debi Pearl seems unfair. I’ve read many of their writings, and they seem to be proponents of common sense and biblical discipline. The Pearls’ methods prepare the child’s heart for the gospel.

—M W, Bitely, Mich.

I’m disappointed that you didn’t also mention the Pearls’ book on marriage and its extreme views that I would say are soft on physical abuse and ungodly behavior by the husband. The Pearls advocate an extreme, patriarchal view of family life and emphasize “top down” family dynamics. It’s unwise to take parenting advice from a tree that has over and over again produced bad fruit.

—K H, Galt, Calif.

This article really bothered me. I thought that your story was fair, but the headline and tone implied that readers should steer clear of this parenting philosophy. I disagree about many things with Michael Pearl. He is KJV only and too dogmatic on oddball points of theology, but I dearly love his refreshing honesty and downright

Send photos and letters to: mailbag@wng.org

12 MAILBAG.indd 95

fearlessness in proclaiming true religious living.

—J K, Lynchburg, Va.

After decades of studying child-raising advice, I’m used to hearing the Pearls called Pharisee-trainers. But the article itself doesn’t demonstrate this caustic charge, only that some folks accuse them of it and others have abused their advice. The most useful insight was Kirstie Benke’s observation that Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp “helped fill in some gaps.” No one’s advice is complete, but in combination Tripp’s and the Pearls’ suggestions are very thorough.

encouragement to “cultivate fellowship” with their children, families are torn apart by the parents’ own hands.

—D B, Barnesville, Ga.

‘Silent submission’ May  I agree with Joel Belz that many Christians are scared to speak up about creationism. Often we either withdraw our children from public schools or silently disagree but submit to popular opinion. As an alternative, in my children’s school district we rent out the high school auditorium and hold an annual “Creation Night,” featuring a procreation video or speaker. The first two events were well-attended and -received.

—D MV, Kennett Square, Pa.

This column stirred me. Mention God and instantly, with many folks, a great gulf opens that we don’t know how to cross. Yet we are commanded to bridge it, and I am ashamed to admit how often I don’t. It’s OK to be a little fuzzy, or even plain wrong, on how the world got started, but we have to be crystalclear on the gospel.

—M E. O, Denver, Pa.

—K J, Charlotte, N.C.

You mentioned that pro-Pearl sources declined to be interviewed, but I would have been more than happy to speak on their behalf. The Pearls’ book was instrumental in teaching me consistency as a parent.

Thank you for a much-needed admonishment to the body of Christ.

Christians should make every effort to, as the psalmist says, “bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.”

—S B, Redding, Calif.

—G A. D, Farmers Branch, Texas

I read To Train Up a Child when I was pregnant with our first child. When parents focus on methods of discipline while ignoring the Pearls’ continual

‘Sexual propaganda’ May  I am taking a college counseling class that promotes under the guise of “multiculturalism” teachings similar

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD



5/27/14 10:01 PM

Mailbag

BEIRA, MOZAMBIQUE submitted by Mark Logan

to those Andrée Seu Peterson described. Our textbook says that those who decline to be more “accepting” of homosexual and transsexual people are biased and discriminatory, that the Quran is equivalent to the Bible, and Islam is not violent. Amazing! Parents need to know what their kids are being taught.

—R B, Mesa, Ariz.

‘Rebels from the right’ May  Your puff piece on three tea party Senate candidates didn’t mention recent controversies about, for example, whether Matt Bevin’s LinkedIn profile was misleading or that on his radio program some years ago Chris McDaniel made insulting remarks about Mexico. Let’s have a little balance, please.

—K J. K, Haslett, Mich.

‘Holy alliance’ May  This one struck a chord with me. I especially appreciate how Janie B. Cheaney noted the subtlety of the “gender fluidity” of neo-Gnosticism.

Only in Jesus Christ do the material and spiritual finally and forever come (or return) together. He was the

12 MAILBAG.indd 96

perfect integration of body and soul.

—D A, Huntington, N.Y.

‘Afterlife on screen’ May  Having read Heaven Is for Real and seen the movie, I don’t recall a single allusion to worship in Colton’s heaven. That’s a glaring omission. I don’t question sweet Colton’s experience, but question its source, and that’s just one of the problems with near-death experiences.

—B T, Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico

‘A pox on Mother’s Day?’ May  If I hadn’t been reading WORLD for nearly  years I wouldn’t have believed what I read. Amanda Marcotte’s thinking is appalling and so very sad. Her rant reminded me of when President Obama was asked about access to birth control in .

He replied that he wouldn’t want one of his daughters “punished with a baby.” Oh my, horror of horrors, not a baby!

—D T, Tacoma, Wash.

‘Going with the flow’ May  As an -year member of Bible Study Fellowship and a current

5/27/14 10:01 PM

leader, I too had questions when BSF made the switch to the  NIV Bible, especially since I love the  NIV. But the reasons the leadership gave to us made sense; in particular, the  NIV version is the most widely available, which is important for a ministry that has classes on six continents.

There’s still health care for people of Biblical faith!

—T K, Alexandria, Va.

Dispatches April  Why is the burning of aborted babies’ bodies so abominable that it warranted investigative reporting and that the British department of health mandated an end to the practice, while the killing of the same babies by their mothers and doctors just a few moments earlier is accepted without a peep?

—K H, Conyers, Ga.

‘Do you believe in magic?’

March  Marvin Olasky’s column on prison ministry captured the essence of our chaplaincy programs.

His observations that it’s “more like communion than magic” and that the gospel calls to all but some reject it reminded me of the many inmates I’ve served who didn’t come back through the system.

They were genuinely interested in God renovating their heart and mind, not just collecting another “atta boy” to get them out early. I’m sharing this with the jail administrators. Thanks for putting it into a context I can use to continue our positive working relationship.

—M C. W, Grafton, Wis.

As a long-time reader of the print version of WORLD I only recently visited your website, wng.org. One word: Wow! Why did it take me so long to see what I was missing?

—M K, Edina, Minn.

If you are a committed Christian, you can live consistently with your beliefs by sharing medical needs directly with fellow believers through Samaritan Ministries’ non-insurance approach. You do not have to violate your faith by purchasing health insurance that pays for abortions, abortifacient drugs, and other unbiblical practices. Health care sharing satisfies the individual mandate in the recent Federal health care law (United States Code 26, Section 5000A, (d), (2), (B)).

Every month the more than 33,000* households of Samaritan Ministries (over 110,000* persons) share more than $8 million* in medical needs directly—one household to another. They also pray for one another and send notes of encouragement. The monthly share for a family membership of any size has never exceeded $370*.

For more information call us toll-free at 1-888-268-4377, or visit us online at: www.samaritanministries.org.

Follow us on Twitter (@samaritanmin) and Facebook (SamaritanMinistries). * As of March 2014

Correction The photo is of the chapel at the University of the Ozarks in Arkansas (“Salt and light on campus,” May , p. ).

Send photos and letters to: mailbag@wng.org

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Biblical faith applied to health care www.samaritanministries.org

5/28/14 9:42 AM

Headlines from Ukraine:

Violence. Bloodshed. Fear.

Men, women, and children are asking, “What does the future hold?”

Ukraine: A Nation in Crisis!

Beyond the political crisis, it’s a spiritual crisis of huge proportion. Faithful Ukrainian churches— made up of Ukrainian and Russian Christians—are reaching out with Christ’s love to needy families and refugees from violence-torn regions. You can help through Slavic Gospel Association’s new Crisis Evangelism Fund!

Most of all, distressed families and individuals will receive hope from the Gospel . . . the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16)— the only true hope for peace. To find out more or make a gift, visit our special web page at www.sga.org/world04.

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JOAN MARCUS/BRYAN-BROWN/BONEAU/AP

Your gifts will help crisis response teams from the churches reach these needy, heartbroken people in many ways. $15 can help provide a food pack with items such as flour, pasta, and other staples. Larger gifts will help reach out to refugees with aid and the Gospel, plus Bibles, Christian literature, and support for missionary pastors in the conflict zones.

SGA u 6151 Commonwealth Drive Loves Park, Illinois 61111 u 800-BIBLE-50 info@sga.org

5/27/14 10:44 AM

Andrée Seu Peterson

Repeated exposure

The simple formula that can transform and desensitize an entire culture

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JOAN MARCUS/BRYAN-BROWN/BONEAU/AP

T  D: A P (it was also a highly rated movie in ) both expresses disapproval of pedophilia, and floats it out there as a possibility. This, if you are vying for overturning cultural taboos, is all you need do at first: desensitization through repeated exposure.

The little old lady next door who is starting to “come around” to accepting homosexuals as ordinary decent citizens did not shed her youthful revulsion toward sodomy through Socratic introspection. She just got used to the idea by a barrage of television, radio, magazine, and billboard ads—and plays.

Doubt, which I viewed at a local community playhouse with a few girls from church, concerns a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx where a disagreeable principal suspects the parish priest of having an inappropriate relationship with the school’s only African-American student. The play ends inconclusively, and on the way home we argued about whether the priest “did it” or not.

Later it occurred to me: While the ladies and I were focused on the who-done-it question, the author was engaged in shadier business—like a pickpocket working the crowd at a public hanging. I rewound my memory tapes to the scene where the mother of the boy makes a visit to the principal’s office: Mrs. Muller, in a -minute performance, surprises the audience (but we will be less surprised the next time, and even less the next) by not being shaken by the principal’s suggestion of priestly transgression. She doesn’t disbelieve it; she does not really mind. Her son is “that way” anyway, and at least the boy is getting attention from a male figure that he doesn’t get at home.

I told my son the plot, and he shrugged, “Well, the screenwriter is not saying he approves of pedophilia.” He doesn’t have to. No more than Ang Lee has to say he

Parish priest and Mrs. Muller in Doubt: A Parable

Email: aseupeterson@wng.org

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approves of homosexuality in Brokeback Mountain.

He just has to put Heath Ledger out there in a saddle and let him steal our hearts. If not right away, then one movie at a time.

National Public Radio called Mrs. Muller’s scene in the  movie “the film’s most wrenching performance …; Davis speaks plainly and quietly, and leaves no doubt that the moral high ground is a treacherous place to occupy in the real world.”

And what is this “moral high ground”? It is the strong, motherly affirmation of love in all its strange forms, over the hidebound, loveless legalism of the Sister Aloysius. We are presented with a false choice here, but nobody wants to be on the side of a “hater.”

Mrs. Muller thinks she has come to this receptiveness toward man-boy love as her own original idea, but it’s the fruit of decades of patient product placement. While pedophilia is (for now) still an outlier to the morphing mores of America, homosexuality has moved safely inside the frame of the Overton Window and made good speed through the stages of “radical” to “acceptable” to “sensible” to “popular” to “policy.” (Two decades ago Joe Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy observed that on any question politicians consider only a relatively narrow “window” of policies to be politically worth their personal risk.)

All of us know the experience of having our minds changed about people by nothing more than exposure. As a hitchhiker through Europe in the early ’s, I pronounced whole countries friendly or unfriendly on the basis of one or two natives I was exposed to. How much more consequential our daily subtle immersion in unwholesome philosophies served up by culture? No wonder God warned Jeremiah of the potential danger when dispatching him as an ambassador: “Do not be afraid of them [literally, ‘do not fear their faces’]” (Jeremiah :).

He added: “They shall turn to you, but you shall not turn to them” (:).

This is always the danger—us turning to them rather than them turning to us; us coming to appreciate homosexuality rather than them coming to appreciate the radical holiness of Jesus Christ. Desensitizing is subtle. A woman of prominent position in my church recently told me that her two best friends in the neighborhood are lesbians. They are actually very moral people, she said: “One helped me set boundaries on my son’s video game habits.” A

JUNE 14, 2014 • WORLD



5/27/14 9:41 PM

Marvin Olasky

Honoring Dad Don’t go inside when he drops the ball

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

WORLD • JUNE 14, 2014

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weekly, but he didn’t strike back either physically or verbally—and they didn’t get divorced.

What I don’t have from my father is much of a theological legacy—or maybe I do, in a negative sense.

He was an anthropology major in college from  to , a time when not only Nazis emphasized the centrality of ethnicity and race. Many professors stressed being a member of your clan because it’s your clan: Stay within it. Follow its customs, regardless of your own ideas.

The clan teaching struck home for my father, who stayed within Jewish culture although he apparently had no belief in the God of the Bible. I’m thankful that he introduced me to Adam, Noah, and Abraham: Judging from his senior thesis, he did not think they existed, but he never told me that, and my childhood faith valuably left me with unanswered questions.

Those questions propelled me into atheism but made a difference in my mid-s when I learned the answers are in the New Testament.

My father died of cancer three decades ago. He was  and I was . Three months before he died he didn’t respond to my questions about what he believed, but I should have persevered in asking and did not: Once he dropped the ball, I went inside. So one way to honor fathers still living, even those who seem distant, is to try doubly hard to draw them out while there’s still time. I wish mine were still around. I have no confidence that I’ll see him again, but the Judge of all the earth will do what’s right, and maybe someday, somehow, my father will throw me another ground ball, on grass. A

OLASKY FAMILY

M M’ D  last year—the May  one about honoring an ornery mom—must have struck a nerve, judging by the many letters I received. Some readers asked, What about your dad? It looks as if lots of guys on Father’s Day have a hard time obeying God’s command to honor our fathers.

One reason is that many of us retain grievances.

The quirky  baseball movie Field of Dreams gets to me because my dad and I never played catch, nor did he ever come to one of my Little League games. Once, at age , I asked him to throw me some ground balls on the street—we had no backyard or green space nearby. He reluctantly obliged, but his first throw went under my glove and kept rolling and rolling. I fetched it, waddled back, and tried to cover up my error by saying, Throw one I can reach. That was a bigger error. He walked inside. We never played again.

I can’t lose that bad memory but can push myself to trump it with a good one. At age  I wrote a school report on Israel’s  war with Egypt. I was proIsrael but had picked up from TV Westerns that firing the first shot was wrong. When I read an account of the war that said Israel had launched a pre-emptive strike, I discounted that and wrote in my draft that Egypt in  invaded Israel. My father was also pro-Israel, but he corrected me. I’ve never forgotten the importance of factual accuracy.

Part of honoring a dad is to let memories of his strengths outweigh the grievances. My father knew calligraphy. He knew the odds against a hand in bridge having no card higher than a nine are more than , to . He knew the frequency distribution of English letters: “e” most often, but folks who think the other vowels follow immediately are wrong. (“T,” “a,” “o,” and “n” come next.) He loved magic squares, arrays of numbers in a box on paper so that their sum in any horizontal, vertical, or main diagonal line is the same.

If we can’t forget our dads’ limitations, at least we can push ourselves to consider them as suffering human beings and not as icons (our childhood reaction) or icons to be shattered (often our teenage reaction). My father was extremely introverted and uncommunicative—once he totaled the car yet neglected to tell my mother—but through his consistent work I always had food, clothing, and a roof over my head. I’ve never had the experience of a wife screaming at me as my mother screamed at him

Email: molasky@wng.org

5/21/14 3:52 PM

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