Politics: Profile: Dr James Skillen, USA's leading Christian-democratic thinker/practioner

Reprise from one of yesterday's posts: Dr James Skillen, with whom I have disagreed on many issues and who in an important post yesterday which I have granted permission to republish digitally, has taken a personal strong line on the prospects of aid to Africa that far outpaces the offerings of Geldofians with Christian Aid and the Street Summiteers. Not in that post the official policy of his organization (Center for Public Justice, Annapolis, Maryland, for which Dr Skillen serves as executive director), the views expresses are at least parallel in major respects to the multi-genre writer online RoomThinker (blog: Thinker's Room) and from a very different world, Dr. Mihisa Kituyi, both Kenyans, the latter Minister of Trade and Industry in the Kenyan Government...as well as to my own, as I slowly began to collect my wits on the issues of Debt Relief (especially for Africa), Trade Liberalization, and the end of Subsidies in Europe and North America for African produced foodstuffs and cotton (the latter especially impinging on the USA where taxpayers have to bail out the plantation owners to artificially undercut the poor farmers of Africa on European and North American markets.

Now today, I want to review quickly some of the things regarding which I strongly disagree with Dr Skillen: On matters outstanding Christian-intellectually between Jim and my non-virtual self Albert Gedraitis, I am strongly neo-Constantinian whereas Jim, in my characterization, is negotiate-negotiate-negotiate. Yet, we have seen so much of that already coming to a disastrous result in recent times, especially for its last activist practioner Presdient, Bill Clinton. Many, many peopole in the intelligence communty of Clintons's look-the-other-way talk-talk-talk regime, we no know themselves knew of Osama bin Laden's intentions before Bush ever was even campaigning in his first round. Clinton would not absorb the lessons of his own appointed intelligence community, and indeed many of them could not absorbe the Agency's own findings. This comes out in a new book just published by James Coll of the Washington Post, which Jim reads most every day.

Jim and I are both Christian-democratic in political ideology (one scholar very close to Jim's thinking would not want to acknowledge that Christian politics needs its varying ideologies, the latter term also allowing us to discriminate among good and bad ideologies, whether Chritian or not). Which brings us to the term that is used rather much as a stand-alone designation, "Christian-democratic" which is a good start alson in my view (but in praxis includes some very bad apples poliitically speaking), whereas I would have to take on another word in the Canadian context, Christian-democratic-republican. That needs a special remark: I respect Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, but can't swear allegiance to any earthly Monarch. Nor do I hold the same respect for her apparent heirs that I hold for her. God bless Regina EII!

On the second issue outstanding between Jim and I, there is his reproductivist definition of marriage which is counter-factual, in my analysis; and there is his absurd characterization of matrimonial sexuality as "intercourse" where homos don't/can't have "intercourse," a word which is made a technical term and reserved by him exclusively to penis/vagina pentrational relations. Also, in Jim's ideology of sexuality, only matrimonials "work" to make babies during their coitus, whereas homos only "play." I find this binomialist logic both tendentious ideologically and insulting to homos; it is also counter-factual.

In other respects as to legislation, we agree on the uniqueness of 1woman1man relations, and the privileging of it in law, while I argue that it can also be in the interest of the state/s and in Canada the Feds/provinces to recognize the defacto existence of other intimate unions in the society than those of 1woman1man - both 2 women, and in a third category of intimate union that exists and could be recognized if the state found it to be in its interest to do so, 2men intimate unions. My problem with the now-discarded Harper Alternative by amendment is that it is reductive of the irreducibles of 2woman intimate unions in comparison to 2 men intimate unions, hence the language of "same-sex," "civil union," or "Gay marriage" or even "homosexual marriage," or now under the new law the generic that reduces all three and thus recognizes none in the specificities and outstanding differences we get what I call "Gmarriage." All the terms used in the unfortunate enactment in Canada indicate the reductive and generic thinking behind this intellectually and philosophically absurd legislation in the name of an "equality" that doesn't recognize difference between the three kinds of intimate union. Jim has yet to catch on to this analysis which is more in keeping with reformational philosophy, to which we both adhere, rather than his reproductivist view.

Jim and his colleagues, principally Dr Stanley Carlson-Thies, are an inspiration to me in regard to developing and supporting the Faith- and Community-Based Initiatives now transforming the US Welfare System, a hallmark of President Bush's "compassionate conservatism," a distinct form of conservatism not known in Canada (unless you count in Tory leader, Steven Harper's, proposed amendments to the Gmarriage Law now passed by Parliament, which is seriously flawed and went no where). But in Canada, this term is usually designative of what's called "soc con" (social conservatism in contrast to fiscal conservtism; there's a least one other option called Burkean conservatism which seems to the closest to Bush's "compassionate conservatism" and Jim Skillen's view, tho he trips all over himself trying to distance himself from any form of conservatism whatsoever. My impression is that Jim undervalues "compassionate conservatism" as a distinct stream in the American political broadstream of conservatism generally. Perhaps it has been under-ideated by its adherents - but it is far different from the "consistent ethics of life" which follows the rigid absolutism of the Catholic Magisterium, different from Libertarian Conservatism, diffferent from so-called "social conservativism" (soc con, in Canadian jargon), different from neo-conservatism, altho like the latter it shares features of the neo-Wilsonian heritage in American foreign policy which is often mis-identified by Liberals as a kind of Napoleonism or anthropological transgression.

I have yet to see Jim praise systematically the opening up to further democratic possiblities the situations in several MidEast countries including the dictators with which the US has strong connections but in regard to the polity of whose countries the US is using non-miitary techniques of leadership and pressure. For the moment I cite in this connection, Egypt. A particular non-MidEast case may be important to mention before closing this profile of Jim's political outlook in comparison to mine - I refer again to Bush, this time in regard to his work to open Central Asia in like manner but using both diplomatic pressure toward greater democracy, aid, and treaties establishing military bases - against which China, Russia, and their repressive allies there have now developed a program of US exclusion from the whole region. That will be a tuff one for Bush, as the US has military bases in two of the Central Asian countries, where the US has pushed diplomatically for more democracy, more democracy. Jim has yet to take notice of this and of China's repressive, jingoistic, and trade fraud practices generally. But look for more from this topnotch scholar, and refWrite's taking note, both appreciative and critical, of his work in future. - Owlb

Skillen: brief bio