Justice is right: Capital punishment teaches the value of life

Attorney General, William Barr

Daniel Lee Lewis was involved in his first murder when he was 17 years old. It was July 24, 1990. Enraged by a teenage party prank, he beat Joseph Wavra unconscious. Then ran to get knife and helped the murderer hide the crime. This was only the beginning of Lewis' seven-year crime spree that included burglary, bombings, public shootouts and murder.

Daniel Lee Lewis

The crime that landed him on death row happened on January 11, 1996. He and his partner, Chevie Kehoe, kidnapped a Tilly, Arkansas gun dealer with his wife and stepdaughter. Lewis had burglarized William Mueller’s home a year earlier, and came back believing that that gold and other valuables were still hidden. He tortured and killed William, then his wife Nancy and, finally, her eight-year old daughter in an attempt to force them to reveal the location of hidden treasure.

He was convicted of all three murders by a jury of his peers on May 4, 1999. While Kehoe was sentenced to life without parole, prosecutors successfully argued that Lee’s lack of remorse and long history of violence--even while incarcerated and awaiting trial—demonstrated that he was a candidate for the death penalty.

On May 14, the jury returned a verdict of death. Then, Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder was asked to withdraw the death notice, but he declined. Nancy Mueller’s mother, Earlene Branch, said, “It’s hard to be a Christian and think of killing somebody. But I don’t see any other answer. I don’t want them out influencing anyone else.”

In the 20 years since, Lewis has exhausted every possible appeal to his death sentence. On Thursday, July 25, Attorney General William Barr announced that his execution is now scheduled for December 9, 2019. This announcement also noted the scheduling of four others, the first federal executions since 2003.

It is gut-wrenching to read about the crimes of Lewis, even though I have omitted some of the details too terrible for print. And his are the least heinous of the five men scheduled for execution last Friday. It is important that these histories be kept in mind when talking of capital punishment. Too often, debates about the death penalty remain in the realm of abstractions without confronting the actual reality of evil.


Murray Federal Building, April 19, 1995

Know, first, that capital punishment is an extremely rare sentence in the history of federal law. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, there have been only 34 executions carried out between 1927 and 1963. The next three decades saw none. Then, there were three between 2001 and 2003, including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 people on April 19, 1995.

The death penalty is typically reserved for extraordinary cases. The 62 people on death row in federal prisons today have been convicted, not only of murder, but of multiple murders, murder of children and the vulnerable, murder of law enforcement officers, or murder accompanied by torture.

For instance, Dylan Roof is on death row for killing nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. So also is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of killing three and injuring 260 by a bomb at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Any rational discussion of capital punishment must begin with facts such as these.

Victims of Dylan Roof in Emanuel AME Church

It is also important to accurately report the timing of Barr’s announcement. Mainstream media outlets reported it as though he were unilaterally lifting some federal “moratorium” on the death penalty. There was no such thing.

Calling it a “de facto moratorium” may leave the impression that federal law ended the death penalty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, pharmaceutical corporations conspired to embargo the anesthetic that was administered before executions. This hampered both state and federal abilities to implement the law.

Later, under the eight years of President Obama, AG Holder simply failed to schedule any of the executions that were entrusted to him by the legislative and judicial branches. Then, in 2014, he instituted a review of all death penalty procedures and protocols.

This review was ongoing when the Trump administration took office and continued while Jeff Sessions served as Attorney General. Last Thursday’s announcement by AG William Barr accompanied word that the five-year review is now complete.

Presumably as a result of that review, the three-drug procedure used at the last execution in 2003 has been replaced by the single drug, Pentobarbital. This is the same drug that Big Pharma is selling in states that have legalized physician-assisted killing.

Having clarified the historical record, we can now turn to ethics. It should be noted at the outset that Western Civilization has always had a place for the just application of capital punishment.

The difference between pagan Roman civilization and the Christian ethos that held sway after Constantine is this: under paganism the government had authority to execute whomever it pleased, regardless of innocence. Under the Christian ethos, capital punishment is reserved for only the most heinous crimes.

This principle is founded on the teaching of the Apostle Paul that God Himself gives governments the “sword” to “execute wrath on him who practices evil” (Romans 13:4 NKJV). This, in turn, is based on the charge given after the Noah’s Flood, “whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6).

Note well that the death penalty rests upon the assertion that “evil” is not defined by the government, but by God. The government, as God’s “minister,” must recognize it as evil and punish it accordingly. Perhaps this explains why those who were first to oppose the death penalty were avowed atheists.

Robespierre, the henchman of the French Revolution, sought to repeal of the death penalty. He wrote a pamphlet against it in 1791 before guillotining 40,000 countrymen in 1793 and 1794.

Likewise, in February of 1917, the provisional government of the Bolshevik Revolution banned the death penalty. In the century prior to this, approximately 6 people had been executed by the Tsar. In the seven decades following the Revolution tens of millions of citizens were killed by hard labor, starvation, exposure and the firing squad.

Governments are established by God and chartered to discern between objective good and objective evil as His representative. When a nation forgets or denies this fact, it does not become more just. It fails in its primary task and colludes in evil.


C. S. Lewis

Modern arguments against the death penalty deny the very definition of penalty. In his classic essay, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, C. S. Lewis points out that progressive ideology replaces justice and penalty with criminal reform and effective deterrence. A jury of peers is perfectly suited to decide matters of justice. But the same jury is unqualified to act as experts on effective reform and deterrence.

Lacking straightforward penalties and a common sense of justice, the penal system relies on “experts” to prescribe open-ended sentences and psychological manipulation to effect re-education. In a government that has already discarded the idea that justice is objective and commonly known, re-education inevitably gets employed against anyone who resists the latest orthodoxy.

To abolish the death penalty is to make a statement. It teaches not that life is too valuable to take, but that the lives of the victims are not worthy of justice.

It is also a statement about the source and authority of government. Ultimately every law from jaywalking to grand larceny are enforced by officers with guns. If government does not have the legitimate, God-given authority to take life, it has no legitimate authority at all. It has no authority to wage just wars. It has no authority to enforce just laws.

Talk of government’s basis in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” triggers progressive sensibilities. It raises fears of a theocracy dependent upon some private revelation. Such fear is unfounded. Precisely because godly governments are established to rule believer and unbeliever alike, just laws rest on the laws written into nature and not upon the revelation of the Gospel.

Nor should we ever forget that the very notion of a limited government derives from an understanding that government is “under God.” If a government is not limited by God, what else is capable of limiting it? Take God out of the equation and governments tend toward totalitarianism. We have seen this principle in both the French and Bolshevik Revolutions of the past and currently in communist China. How many more examples are needed to prove the point?

Capital punishment acknowledges both the existence of objective evil and human government’s responsibility to execute justice. To conflate it with the killing of the innocent is reprehensible. For this reason, every check and balance must be followed scrupulously to ensure that innocents are not mistakenly put to death. The Innocence Project deserves our support. But it is precisely for the protection of innocent life that some crimes require capital punishment.

The pending execution of five human beings is a terrible thing. The only thing more terrible would be if their heinous crimes were not punished justly.

WTE: Impossible yet abundant: Pondering the marvel of life

Milepost 12 on I-80 westbound has long been one of my favorite vistas. There my hometown of Evanston comes into view. In a single glance, my eye takes in miles of the beautiful Bear River Valley. The valley is alive.

It only recently struck me that in this single valley, there are millions, perhaps billions, of discrete plants. Each one is an absolute stunning marvel of engineering and unique expression of its species. And that’s just the flora.

The fauna ranges from big game to tiny rodents, from centipedes to slugs. Then, there are the microorganisms. On average, one ton of earth’s soil contains 100 quadrillion microbes. A single glance from Milepost 12 scans 100 times more living organisms than there are stars in the universe.

This stands in stark contrast to another fact. After 60 years of scouring the universe for other signs of life, we’ve come up empty. Neither a bug or fungus or amoeba has ever been found. We haven’t even found a planet that could theoretically support life. Planet Earth is teeming with life in an otherwise sterile universe.

For the last century and a half, preachers of the enlightenment have been trying to account for life by theorizing that undirected, random mutations are selected through an ongoing battle for survival. Natural selection is more popularly known as evolution.

This theory holds that all life began with a single-cell organism that has been transformed into the amazing diversity of life on earth. Whether you find macro-evolution plausible or not, the entire theory hangs on an imaginary protoorganism that somehow came to be alive.

Our children are steeped in the language of evolution from children’s books through graduate school. But if no one has ever explained to you how that original protozoa came to be, it’s because, there is no single, generally accepted explanation for abiogenesis.

Life moves toward self-preservation, self-repair and reproduction. But in a purely chemical world, these life forces do not exist. Rather, purely external factors determine when atoms combine into molecules and when they fall apart. In a world without life, how did the first life occur? That’s the question of abiogenesis.

A living cell is an astounding assembly of molecular machines, each machine performing specific functions necessary for the survival of the cell. Each is made of multiple, interlocking parts that are useless to the cell unless they are all assembled in exactly the right way. This is called “irreducible complexity,” and it’s found everywhere.

Besides that, many machines only work in combination. For instance, molecular machines designed to transport material can only “walk” on a molecular road built for the task. Either without the other is useless. The complexities only increase from there.

For life to happen, it’s not enough for the perfect combination of irreducibly complex machines somehow to have come together. There must also be machines to make more machines. In a living being, molecular machines are constantly being assembled, wearing out, breaking down and being replaced.

All this activity must be coordinated by gigabytes of information written in a special DNA code. This code can only be read by another set of machines built for that task. It’s so detailed that the DNA in a single Amoeba dubia contains 670 gigabytes of information.

Finally, all of these machines and all of this information must be protected by a cell membrane. Without it, the earth’s oxidizing atmosphere would destroy everything instantly. But the membrane cannot be just a simple barrier. It must have dozens of different gates that let in specific chemicals at specific times while letting other chemicals out before they destroy the cell from within.

If all of this can come together in a random way, you have a living cell—but only for a few seconds. Unless it knows how to make other machines that duplicate the DNA and produce another cell before it dies, it can pass none of this information on to another life. Abiogenesis must start over again from nothing.

Life is an amazing thing. This brief outline only begins to scratch the surface. Abiogenesis is far more improbable than I can hope to describe in a few words. Before we even start the discussion of evolution, consider that life itself is infinitely more unlikely.

Despite its impossibility, we are utterly surrounded by life. Ponder that fact. While you are considering how these two things can be true simultaneously, you have good reason to laugh out loud. You are alive.

You are an impossibly complex and wonderful organism planted in the middle of a world filled with equally impossible life forms. And you, above every other living creature, have this additional gift: you can read these words and think on these facts.

Life is good.

Impossible yet abundant: Pondering the marvel of life

Photo by Tyrel Johnson on Unsplash

We were westbound on I-80 just past the inlet of Echo reservoir. My eyes were lazily scanning the hills when it hit me. Here, in one of the most arid of the western states, we were nevertheless surrounded by living things. If I could catalogue every distinct life that fit into a single glance, it would be unimaginable in both number and variety.

In a single frame of vision, there were untold varieties of grasses. There were millions, perhaps billions, of discrete plants of sage and mushrooms, grain and weeds, flowers and trees. Each one an absolute stunning marvel of engineering and unique expression of its species.

There were deer and horses, antelope and rabbits, field mice, muskrats and toads. How many varieties of worms, slugs, insects, spiders and flies played in the tapestry only God knows, and I mean that sincerely and reverently.


Photo by Pree Bissessur on Unsplash

Consider, also, the microscopic organisms. On average, one ton of earth’s soil contains 100 quadrillion of these microbes. At six feet deep, there are about 7.5 million tons of soil every square mile. And I was taking in dozens of square miles in a single glance.

What dawned on me that day is the simple fact that all this life was packed into a single moment of a single day of a single citizen on a planet with 7 billion people. There were 100-times more living organisms before my eyes in that moment than there are stars in the universe.

All that life, and yet, when you step off our planet and scour the universe—as we have been doing for 60 years—we have yet to find even one single instance of life anywhere. Not a bug or a weed, neither algae nor an amoeba has ever been found. We haven’t even found a planet that could theoretically support life.

I make no claims about what we might find in the future. I know of no scientific or theological reason why biological life could not be found somewhere else in the universe. But the stubborn fact remains. Even the most optimistic probability models find it practically impossible.

All of which underscores how astoundingly special is our living world.

For the last century and a half, preachers of the enlightenment have been working on a project to explain all this life by means of undirected, random changes vetted through an ongoing battle for survival. The technical term is “Natural Selection.” More popularly, it is known as the Theory of Evolution.

I have been critical of this theory in past articles, but I am not going to talk about it today. Today’s topic considers a prior question. It’s about a world before evolution was even a possibility—a world without life. After all, before the fittest can survive, it must be alive in the first place.

While almost everyone has been taught that every living thing evolved from a single cell being, no one can tell you how that imaginary one-celled creature came to be. Most do not even know the scientific name for how it might have come to be. That name is abiogenesis.

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

Abiogenesis discusses how life happened in first place. Every form of life carries information and moves toward self-preservation, repair and reproduction. But in a purely chemical world, there is nothing but randomness. How did matter ever arrange itself to become alive in the first place? What would it take for a random stew of chemicals to form the first living cell? After a century of theorizing, there is no single, generally accepted model for the origin of life.

The famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1952 created a highly controlled laboratory environment to synthesize a few of the amino acids necessary for making the proteins necessary for life. Scientists thought they were well on their way. Now, 67 years later, they have progressed no further. To this day, nobody knows how to link these amino acids together to make a protein in nature. Much less can they build an impossibly complex cell.

A living cell is an astounding assembly of molecular machines. Each machine performs amazingly complex and specific functions that contribute to the total life and well-being of the organism. The more we learn about the intricacies of the cell, the more marvelous it is.

Part of what we have learned is the interlocking nature of these molecular machines. They are made of multiple parts—none of which could possibly benefit the organism unless they are all assembled in exactly the right way. Scientists have dubbed this phenomenon, “irreducible complexity.” Examples are found everywhere.

On top of that, the machines themselves only work in combination. Molecular machines designed to transport material only work if there are cells that build a thread-like road on which the transporter can “walk.” Either without the other is useless. The complexities only increase from there.

For life to happen, it’s not enough for a few of these irreducibly complex machines and machine-systems somehow to have come together. At the same time they came together, the living cell also needed other machines to make replacement parts. In a living being, molecular machines are constantly being assembled, wearing out, breaking down and being replaced.

The constant manufacture of replacement cell parts is itself directed by an entire system of code and code readers. We call the code, “DNA.” A single Amoeba dubia has 670 gigabytes of information coded in its DNA. But this cannot be read and translated to the rest of its molecular machines without the proper reading and communicating machines.

Finally, all of these machines and all of this information must be protected by a cell membrane. Without it, the earth’s oxidizing atmosphere would destroy everything instantly. But the membrane cannot be just a simple barrier. It must have dozens of different gates that let in specific chemicals at specific times while letting other chemicals out before they destroy the cell from within.

If all of this can come together in a random way, you have a living cell—but only for a few seconds. Unless that cell knows how to make machines that duplicate the DNA and divide into another cell before it dies, all this information and complexity would be lost in a single generation.

Life is an amazing thing. This brief outline only begins to scratch the surface. Abiogenesis is far more complex and interconnected than I can hope to describe in a single article. In fact, it probably exceeds all the powers of your imagination as well. Before we even start the discussion of evolution, life itself is a thousand times more unlikely.

Yet, despite the impossibility of life arising by random processes, we are utterly surrounded by it. These two facts are worth pondering together.

While you are pondering how these two things can simultaneously be true, you have good reason to laugh out loud. You are alive. You are an impossibly complex and wonderful organism planted in the middle of a world filled with equally impossible life forms. And you, above every other living creature, have this additional gift: you can read these words and ponder these facts.

Life is good.

WTE: ICE is not the problem but can be part of the solution

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released a report titled: “Management Alert – DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley.” It’s an excellent source of real information to cut through much huffing and puffing.

Notice, first, that the problems are limited to the Rio Grande Valley, a stretch of America’s southern border beginning in El Paso, Texas and following the river eastward. The area in question includes five holding facilities and two border crossings operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

These facilities are not intended for extended stay. They are only processing points for people who have been apprehended crossing the border illegally. At the facility, agents are charged to examine each situation and send the individual or the family to the appropriate longer-term facility.

Adults are transferred within the DHS to facilities operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Unaccompanied minors are transferred out of DHS to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Family units are vetted to catch any adult sex traffickers posing as parents.

CBP has developed a set of internal standards that call for people to be transferred out of holding facilities within 72 hours. These standards are not being met. In addition, local fire marshals have assigned occupancy limits to the facilities, limits that are being exceeded. The OIG report identifies two causes for these twin failures.

First, there has been an explosion of illegal border crossings in the Rio Grande valley. From October 2017 to May 2018 there were just shy of 100,000 arrests for illegal crossings. The same period a year later catalogued over 223,000.

The situation becomes even more dire when the numbers are broken down. Of the 124-percent increase in total arrests, single adults illegally crossing the border only increased by 32 percent while unaccompanied children increased by 62 percent--from 14,822 to 23,944. But the real explosion came in family units. It went from 36,773 in 2018 to 135, 812 in 2019—nearly a fourfold increase.

While these numbers alone are enough to overwhelm the system, CBP is also hampered by a second problem. Even if it is ready to transfer people out of its facilities within the 72-hour time frame, “both ICE and HHS are operating at or above capacity …[causing] increasing instances of prolonged detention in [CBP] facilities,” according to the memo.

Nationwide, ICE is funded to supply 42,000 beds for people who are in various stages of the enforcement process. In actuality, ICE is providing 54,000 beds (28 percent over capacity). Still there are simply not enough available beds to relieve the pressure on the CBP facilities in the Rio Grande valley.

Until Congress acts to change the law, there are only two legal options to address the humanitarian crisis at our southern border. Either the flood of illegal crossings needs to be slowed, or ICE must build more facilities to house people who enter the system. Realistically, the solution will likely involve both.

Since CBP is flying people to ICE facilities around the nation, a proposed ICE facility near Evanston may relieve some of the overcrowding. But unless the explosion of illegal crossings also is slowed, the problem would likely return.

Before the OIG made its report public, the DHS wrote a formal response that outlined its impossible situation. Noting the emergency measures it is taking to expand housing capacity, it informed the Inspector General of an “acute and worsening crisis” at the southern border.

Despite this information, the OIG’s final report only fulfilled half of its appointed duty. The OIG is charged to “conduct inspections and recommend policies.” The memo detailed the problem but offered no policy recommendations.

Not only is the OIG derelict in this duty, practically everyone else is, as well. Anyone who stands in the way of building barriers to illegal immigration while simultaneously opposing the construction of new ICE facilities is contributing to the unacceptable conditions in the Rio Grande Valley. They are putting real people in a vise.

CBP is not the villain. Neither is ICE or the HHS. All three agencies are being scapegoated by the people who are deliberately causing the humanitarian crisis at our southern border. This is reprehensible.

Many innocent people from Central and South America are being lured to the border by false promises and then squeezed in a vise by bad actors on both sides of the border.

It’s time for people of good will to demand that congress solve the problem. Representatives who grandstand while blocking every solution should be sent packing. American citizens deserve better; so do those who aspire to be.

ICE is not the problem but can be part of the solution

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently released a document regarding the overcrowded conditions on the southern border. The OIG is a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its job is to “conduct inspections and recommend policies to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in DHS programs and operations.”

The subject line of this July 2 memorandum reads, “Management Alert – DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley.” While the memo has fanned into flame the ongoing national conversation over illegal immigration, its actual contents have been underreported.

Notice, first, that this memo deals with a very specific location. The Rio Grande Valley is a stretch of America’s southern border beginning in El Paso, Texas and following the Rio Grande River eastward toward the Gulf of Mexico. In this area the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency operates several holding facilities. The overcrowding and prolonged detention is taking place in these facilities and only in these facilities.

There are seven facilities in question, two are border crossings, and five are processing facilities. They are not designed or equipped for extended stay. When Border Patrol agents encounter people who have crossed the border illegally, they have the duty to take them to one of these facilities. At the facility, agents are charged to examine each situation and send the individual or the family to the appropriate longer-term facility.

Adult lawbreakers are transferred within the DHS to longer-term facilities operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Unaccompanied minors are transferred out of DHS to care facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Those that identify as family units need to be vetted to catch any adult sex traffickers posing as parents.

CBP has developed a set of internal standards of treatment for these people called “Transport, Escort, Detention and Search” (TEDS). These standards are not being met, mostly in two areas. First, some facilities are exceeding the occupancy set by the fire marshal. Second, the facilities are not meeting their goals of getting people to the proper location within 72 hours of their detention.

Two general factors have combined to create these conditions. First, there has been an explosion of illegal border crossings in and around El Paso. Second, housing facilities at America’s ICE facilities have reached full capacity. The memo addresses each of these factors specifically.

The explosion of illegal border crossings in the Rio Grande valley is remarkable. From October 2017 to May 2018 there were just shy of 100,000 arrests for illegal crossings. In that same time period of 2018-2019, there were over 223,000. For comparison, if seven facilities were able to handle the situation in 2018, it would take 15 facilities to keep up in 2019.

The situation becomes even more dire when the numbers are broken down. Of the 124-percent increase in total arrests, single adults illegally crossing the border only increased by 32 percent—from 48,240 to 63,507. Unaccompanied children increased by 62 percent--from 14,822 to 23,944. But the real explosion came in family units. This number nearly quadrupled. It went from 36,773 in 2018 to 135, 812 in 2019--a 269-percent increase.

These numbers alone are enough to overwhelm the system. But not only are workers at the processing facilities pressured on the receiving end, they are also being hampered by a lack of places to send people once they have determined the proper course of action.

A complex tangle of laws, policies and court rulings makes it very difficult for the average citizen to understand what CBP workers are up against. For instance, when an unaccompanied minor crosses the border, CBP agents must determine her country of origin. This alone, can be challenging in the absence of documentation. Once determined, the CBP is required by law to do one of two things. If a child’s country of origin is Mexico, she must be returned there, if it is any other country in the world, the CBP must locate the child’s nearest relative living in the U.S. and deliver her to that person’s custody.

Both of these things must take place within 72 hours, according to TEDS standards. If that cannot happen, the child is to be cared for by the HHS until a proper custodian can be located.

In the case of apprehended adults, CBP agents are responsible to hand them over to an ICE facility within the same 72-hour window. The ICE is then charged to work through the process of enforcing whatever immigration laws apply to each situation and, meanwhile, to house each detainee properly.

But here’s the problem. “[B]oth ICE and HHS are operating at or above capacity …[causing] increasing instances of prolonged detention in [CBP] facilities,” according to the memo. Thus, not only has the intake at seven border facilities been more than doubled, their ability to transfer those who have been processed is greatly restricted.

Nationwide, ICE is funded to supply 42,000 beds for people who are in various stages of the enforcement process. In actuality, ICE is providing 54,000 beds (28 percent over capacity). The ICE facility nearest the bottleneck is currently operating at nearly double its capacity. Other detainees are being flown to ICE facilities around the country. Still, there are not enough available beds to relieve the pressure on the CBP facilities in the Rio Grande valley.

Given these realities, there are only two legal ways to address the humanitarian crisis at our southern border. Either the growing stream of illegal crossings needs to be slowed, or ICE must build more facilities to house people who are in the enforcement process. Realistically, the solution will likely involve both.

Evanston may have a role to play in this solution through the construction of additional space for people currently crowded into facilities at the Rio Grande. Even that would address only one aspect of the problem. More must be done.

Before the OIG made its report available to the public, the DHS wrote a formal response that outlined its impossible situation. It noted the emergency measures it is taking to expand housing facilities and informed the Inspector General of the “acute and worsening crisis” at the southern border.

Despite this information, the OIG’s final report only fulfilled half of its appointed duty. The OIG is to “conduct inspections and recommend policies.” The inspection revealed the problem of which the DHS is acutely aware. Now it is time for the OIG to step up and recommend some realistic policies.

For that matter, it’s not only the OIG that is derelict in this duty. Practically everyone else is, as well. Anyone who stands in the way of barriers to illegal immigration while simultaneously opposing the construction of new ICE facilities is part of the problem.

These self-contradictory political positions put real people in a vise. Customs and Border Protection is not the villain. Neither is it fair to lay the blame on ICE or the HHS.

The humanitarian crisis at our southern border is deliberately manufactured for partisan reasons. This is reprehensible. Our neighbors from Central and South America are being squeezed in a vise by bad actors on both sides of the border. It’s time for people of good will to join together and offer real solutions.

WTE: Rwanda Genocide part III: Cause and Cure

America and Rwanda have a special bond. We share a national holiday on July 4. America celebrates it as Independence Day, Rwanda, as the end of a genocide that ravaged the country a quarter century ago.

On July 4, 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took the capital city, Kigali and effectively ended the 100-day slaughter. The dead have never been counted, only estimated. The UN puts the number at 800,000. Others, at over one million.

But even these numbers do not account for the 250,000 to 500,000 women who were unspeakably brutalized, or the two million Rwandans displaced. In a country of 7.1 million people, 40 percent of all Rwandans and 70 percent of the Tutsis became casualties of war.

In this third, and final, commemorative column, I want to look at the cause and the cure of this unspeakable evil of recent history.

Histories that trace the rise of tensions between the Hutus and the Tutsis through the 20th century are myopic, at best. But those that trace the tensions to pre-historic times are no better. Both narratives assume a falsehood. They believe in the existence of two races.

The real tragedy is that, prior to the imposition of toxic Darwinist ideas, the Hutus and Tutsis were different cultures, but not different races. For centuries, Rwanda had ranchers (Tutsis) and farmers (Hutus). Ranchers tended to marry other ranchers and farmers tended to marry other farmers. But this was only custom, not law. Over centuries of coexistence, physical characteristics of ancestry were increasingly muted.

However, when German colonists arrived in 1885, they carried something deadlier than smallpox. Their minds were infected with the new ideology of Darwinism. Reading the evolutionary tea leaves, they came to believe that the Tutsis were of Ethiopian descent and hence, racially superior to the Hutus.

Acting on this blind faith, the Germans regularly appointed Tutsis to positions of power over Hutus. Later, when the Belgians took Rwanda as a war-prize after the Treaty of Versailles, the discrimination only got worse until they set their racism in stone. In 1933 the Belgian government imposed identity cards that pigeonholed each Rwandan into one of four racial categories.

Intermarriage that had once integrated families, did so no longer. The indelible mark of a “Tutsi” or “Hutu” could not be erased by marriage. Likewise, changes in economic fortune that once gave opportunity for mobility from working class to ruling class did so no longer. The caste system created by European colonists was now irrevocable.

These are the ugly results of Darwinism and the identity ideology that it spawns. It is a reminder that the racism of National Socialism was not quarantined to Germany. It infected the minds and skewed the policies of all prewar Europe, and it was imposed on unsuspecting tribes that had lived in relative harmony for centuries.

War did not come immediately but resentment did. It grew like a cancer until it broke out in civil war in late 1959. Since then, Rwanda experienced three and a half decades of on-again, off-again, civil war.

Some foreign powers sided with the Hutus as victims of Tutsi oppression. Others supported the Tutsis as victims of Hutu aggression. The truth is that both were victims. They were attacked by a toxic Darwinism imported from Europe.

When the genocide began, the government ID cards became a death sentence for Tutsis and forced conscription into execution squads for Hutus. On the third day of the slaughter, 1,000 heavily armed French troops came to escort foreign nationals out of the country. Rwandan spouses and children were not evacuated. A mark on the ID card made all the difference.

The cure for this venom is not to exact reparations for sins of the past. It is to reject the racial ideology at the root of the injustices. Even as this toxic stew was boiling over, both Rwandans and some foreigners rejected the Darwinist division. Numerous Hutus died at the hands of fellow tribesmen when they refused to kill their Tutsi neighbors.

Some foreigners, like Father Vjeko Curic, refused evacuation. He chose to stay and give sanctuary to fleeing Tutsis. After the genocide he reached out to Hutus and worked to rebuild a community shattered by neighbor murdering neighbor. Tirelessly, he lived out his love for all Rwandans until, on January 28, 1998 he was assassinated in Kigali. His story is only one of many.

Today the Rwandan people carry on the work of those who rejected the artificial division between Tutsi and Hutu. Official Rwandan policy no longer identifies people by race or seeks reparations for past atrocities. There is still much healing to be done. But the healing truth is clear. In Rwanda, there can be no races, only humans.

Rwandan Genocide Part III: True Cause and True Cure

America and Rwanda have a special bond. We share a national holiday on July 4. While America was celebrating Independence from England, Rwanda celebrated the end of a genocide that ravaged the country a quarter century ago.

The 100-day killing spree that began on April 7, 1994 came to an official end when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) drove the genocidal government out of power on July 15, 1994. But on July 4th the RPF retook the capital city, Kigali and effectively won the war.

The Rwandan genocidaires, unlike Cambodia or Germany, made no attempt to catalog their extermination of the Tutsis. We only have estimates. The UN estimates 800,000 dead. Two more-exacting estimates put the number over one million. But even this is a slight accounting.

Survivors of sexual warfare

Neither considers the 250,000 to 500,000 women who were unspeakably brutalized or the two million Rwandans who were displaced into refugee camps. In a country of 7.1 million people, that means 40 percent of all Rwandans and 70 percent of the Tutsis became casualties of war.

In this third, and final, commemorative column (here are the first and second), I want to look at the cause and the cure of this unspeakable evil of recent history.

Histories that trace the rise of tensions between the Hutus and the Tutsis through the 20th century are myopic, at best. But those that trace the tensions to pre-historic times are no better. Both narratives assume a falsehood. They believe in the existence of two races.

To tell the story of how tensions arose between Tutsis and Hutus omits the most important part of the story. It fails to consider the genesis of the racial division in the first place. In fact, prior to the imposition of toxic Darwinist ideas, the Hutus and Tutsis were different cultures, but not different races.

For centuries, Rwanda had ranchers (Tutsis) and farmers (Hutus). Ranchers tended to marry other ranchers and farmers tended to marry other farmers. But these tendencies were not set in stone. The characteristics of facial structure and physique that marked two distinct ancestries had been largely effaced over centuries of coexistence.

"Scientific racism" ca. 1933

This is what the colonists from Europe encountered when Rwanda and Burundi were assigned to Germany in 1885. But these colonists were carriers of something deadlier than smallpox. Their minds were infected with the new ideology of Darwinism. Reading the evolutionary tea leaves, they came to believe that the Tutsis were of Ethiopian descent and hence, racially superior to the Hutus.

Acting on this blind faith, the Germans discriminated against the majority Hutu tribes in favor of the Tutsi. Later, when the Belgians took Rwanda as a war-prize after the Treaty of Versailles, matters only got worse. The Tutsis were made the ruling class, while Hutus were disenfranchised.

Even these injustices might have been weathered and corrected over time. Then, the Belgian rulers made even that virtually impossible. In 1933 they introduced government identity cards that pigeonholed each Rwandan into one of four racial categories.

Intermarriage that had once integrated families, did so no longer. The indelible mark of a “Tutsi” or “Hutu” could not be erased by marriage. Likewise, changes in economic fortune that once gave opportunity for mobility from working class to ruling class did so no longer. The caste system created by European colonists was now irrevocable, forever documented on an ID card.

These are the ugly results of Darwinism and the identity ideology that it spawns. It is a reminder that the racism of National Socialism was not quarantined to Germany. It infected the minds and skewed the policies of all prewar Europe, and it was imposed on unsuspecting tribes that had lived in relative harmony for centuries.

War did not come immediately but resentment did. It grew like a cancer until it broke out in civil war in late 1959. Since then, Rwanda experienced three and a half decades of on-again, off-again, civil war.

Some foreign powers sided with the Hutus as victims of Tutsi oppression. Others supported the Tutsis as victims of Hutu aggression. The truth is that both were victims. They were attacked by a toxic Darwinism imported from Europe.

When the genocide began, the government ID cards became a death sentence for Tutsis and forced conscription into execution squads for Hutus.

The cure for this venom is not to exact reparations for sins of the past. It is to reject the racial ideology at the root of the injustices.

Even as this toxic stew was boiling over in the first days of the 1994 genocide, there were both Hutus and Tutsis who rejected the Darwinist division. Numerous Hutus died at the hands of fellow tribesmen when they refused to kill their Tutsi neighbors.

Tutsi heroism mostly took place after the genocide by those who sought to rebuild trust with Hutu countrymen. Other acts of heroism were done by expatriates who weathered the genocide, refusing every opportunity to flee the maelstrom.

Father Vjeko Curic was one of these. He was a 37-year-old priest from Yugoslavia who had been in Rwanda for 11 years prior to the genocide. On the third day of the slaughter, the same day that 110 Tutsis were slaughtered in the sanctuary of a church in Kigali, 1,000 heavily armed French troops came to escort foreign nationals out of the country.

Curic refused to go with the rest of the priests at his parish. He stayed and opened the parish to refugees that were streaming out of Kigali. He hired people to help him feed the crowds. He smuggled people past check points and into safety.


Fr. Vjeko Curic - Kivumu, Rwanda

When genocide squads threatened to storm the parish, he met them at the gate, and talk turned them away. Once, at least, he fired a gun into the air that scattered a mob intent on killing his guests.

Then, the unthinkable happened. A killing squad broke into the primary school and slaughtered everyone hiding there. Even then he did not leave, but gathered the bodies for burial and transported the wounded to safety. For 100 days his parish held out.

Through it all he taught his flock not to join in the violence. And when it ended, Curic immediately began to reach out to Hutus to rebuild a community shattered by neighbor murdering neighbor. He raised money to rebuild homes and hospitals.

Tirelessly, he lived out his love for all Rwandans. Then, on January 28, 1998 he was assassinated in Kigali. To this day, his murderers have not been identified. In death, he stands as an example of one who treated people according to their humanity and not according to their identity card. He is not the only one. I have briefly told his story as an example of many others who understood the truth.

Rwanda is still rebuilding relationships and trust. It is not always smooth, and armed conflicts continue to occur. But one thing the new regime understands: the artificial division between Tutsi and Hutu must be erased.

President Paul Kagame has worked to pass various laws designed to undo the ideology that led to genocide. Official Rwandan policy no longer identifies people by race or seeks reparations for past atrocities. They have made much progress, but there is still a long way to go.

Even as America shares a national holiday with Rwanda, we should also share this noble goal.

WTE: Renewing freedom’s foundation

Independence Day (July 4) is our annual celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Cookouts and fireworks are great. But how should we remember the Declaration itself?

Here is a modest proposal; read it. It’s not long—less than twice the length of this column. After 244 years, it speaks in timeless voice: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”

Notice from the outset that independence from Britain is not cast as a choice, but as a duty. Nor is it about individuals. It involves everyone. It became “necessary for one people,” the colonists, to act.

This concept of freedom is profoundly different from popular notions today. Although much public discourse wraps itself in the flag of “freedom,” moderns fail to notice the two mutually exclusive ideas in competition.

The framers of the Declaration recognized a principle transcending individual ideas and desires. Freedom to follow it is not a private matter but is the moral obligation of every individual.

Even governments are subject to it. Kings and nation-states do not have absolute sovereignty to legislate as they like. They, like we, are limited by an unchangeable and unchanging principle that Jefferson calls, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

This foundation of freedom is written into the very first sentence of the Declaration. If this principle is lost, freedom itself is lost.

A newer notion of freedom turns this on its head. It wars against “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” and speaks of liberty as the unbounded choice of isolated individuals.

This idea even found its way into a Supreme Court opinion. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justice Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life….”

Nonsense. This is not the heart of liberty. On the contrary, atomized individuals defining laws for themselves, drive a stake through liberty’s heart. The loss of freedom comes directly from the attempt to use the power of government to create rights and freedoms that are contrary to nature.

Just governments recognize that the realities of human life and the structure of the universe are the unalterable grounding for just laws. Any citizen claiming the right to murder or steal, must be restrained by just laws. Laws that encourage evil or punish good are both unjust and destructive of the legitimate rights of people around them.

Justice and harmony require citizens to understand the true nature of human freedom and its proper bounds. Transgressing the boundaries of “Nature’s God” does not advance humanity but demonizes it.

Human freedom exists as a result of being human. Thus, freedom exists only insofar as we remain human. Any attempt to redefine human existence necessarily crushes human freedom.

What, then, are the natural boundaries of human existence? Jefferson sketches it out in the next—and most famous—passage of the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created…” Before the Declaration says, “equal,” it first says, “created.”

America is founded on this single truth. Equality is a result of being created.

In the middle of the 19th century, some replaced creation with an evolutionary randomness that made some races better than others. More recently, the power to self-identify has come to be regarded as a higher form of humanity. Both ways of denying “Nature’s God,” lead to fundamental inequality.

The founders were not so deluded. They were so sure that equality depends on our createdness that they called it “self-evident,” needing no defense or detailed proof.

Tragically, our createdness is not self-evident to everyone today. That is not a failure of theology. It is a failure of philosophy. The Declaration’s talk of “Nature’s God” is not a careless confusion of church and state. Recognition of a transcendent principle that applies to all people needs no special revelation. It is commonly known by sense and logic.

Modern claims to the contrary depend on a religious dogmatism that denies all evidence to the contrary. The framers of the Declaration were not burdened with this religion. They were free to assert that being created implies a Creator.

So, Jefferson continues, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” “Unalienable,” means inseparable. Created rights are as much a part of your humanity as is your body and soul, your sex and your personality.

Only after Jefferson has taken us to this observation does he begin to talk about the government. It is there not to create rights, but to secure what all people have by nature.

This Independence Day, let us all renew our resolve to live together by these self-evident truths.

Renewing freedom’s foundation

Photo by Spenser Sembrat on Unsplash

Independence Day (July 4) is our annual chance to remember the Declaration of Independence. Family cookouts bring people together. Fireworks remind us of the war that secured our independence. But what do you do that remembers the Declaration itself?

Here is a modest proposal; read it. It’s not very long—only about the length of this column. It is 243 years old and largely about King George III, but it remains timeless and relevant to our government today.

It begins, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Notice from the outset that independence from Britain is not cast as a desire, or as willful belligerence against authority. They did not see it as a choice at all, but as a necessary duty. More than that, it is not a private matter. It involves whole societies. It became “necessary for one people,” the colonists, to act.

The concept of freedom found here is profoundly different from popular notions today. It is striking how far we have wandered from the understanding of freedom that the Declaration holds. Much of our public discourse today wraps itself in the flag of “freedom,” but fails to notice that there are two mutually exclusive understandings at work.

The framers of the Declaration saw clearly that there exists a principle transcending individual ideas and desires. It doesn’t belong to any one person. On the contrary, it lays a moral obligation on every individual.

Photo by Dan Russo on Unsplash

In fact, this truth even transcends governments. Kings and nation-states do not have absolute sovereignty to do anything they like and institute any law that they can shove through congress (or through an activist court). All of us, together, are limited by an unchangeable and unchanging principle that Jefferson calls, “the Laws of Nature and [the laws] of Nature’s God.”

This is at the very foundation of freedom. It is written into the very first sentence of the Declaration. If this principle is lost, freedom itself is lost.

In recent decades, too many have forgotten this principle. In some quarters it has not only been forgotten but turned on its head. Those who are intent on a war against the laws of nature and nature’s God, speak of liberty as the unbounded choice of an isolated individual.

This perverse idea is even ensconced in a landmark opinion of the Supreme Court. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (p. 851), Anthony Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life….”

I beg to differ. Atomized individuals, attempting to create themselves, are not the heart of liberty. Rather, such individualism drives a stake through the heart of liberty. The rapid erosion of freedom and the ballooning of the regulatory state arise directly from the attempt to use the power of government to create rights and freedoms that are contrary to nature.

If a person claims the right to murder or steal, just laws prevent him from acting on such nonsense. Any laws designed to create such “rights” are both unjust and destructive of the legitimate rights of people around them.

A just and harmonious society requires each person to understand the true nature of human freedom and its proper bounds. Transgressing those boundaries does not make for a more advanced humanity. Rather, any claim to the power of a god unleashes demonic power.


Governments that understand the laws of nature do not try to change them. Just governments recognize that the realities of human life and the structure of the universe are the unalterable data for making just laws. The state does not create rights. It can only recognize what already exists.

Human freedom exists. It exists as a result of being human. Therefore, true freedom only exists as long as we remain within the boundaries of our common humanity.

The authors of the Declaration understood that any universal claim to human freedom came from a universal understanding of human nature. They understood that any attempt to redefine human existence would, necessarily crush human freedom.

What, then, are the natural boundaries of human existence? How shall we live together as human beings? Jefferson sketches that out in the next—and most famous—passage of the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created…”

I know you were expecting to hear “created equal.” We’ll get to that soon enough. But the Declaration cannot be understood by glossing over the word, “created.” America is founded on a single, self-evident truth. We are all created.

Photo by Jeff Burak on Unsplash

Human beings are neither self-made, nor the products of randomness. Equality is a result of being created. If we are random conglomerations of cells, who is to say that some combinations are not superior to others? If each person is self-made, how could you deny the claim of some to have made themselves better?

In the middle of the 19th century, Darwinists began arguing that evolutionary randomness made some races better than others. In more recent decades, the philosophical winds have shifted. Now individuals who claim the ability to define reality for themselves believe themselves to be a superior version of humanity.

Both the random and the self-made way of denying “Nature’s God,” lead to fundamental inequalities. The founders were not so deluded. They understood that equality depends on our createdness. This truth is so plain that it needs no defense, no detailed discussion. It is “self-evident.”

It is a sad fact that our createdness is not self-evident to everyone today. Truly that is a tragedy. The failure, here, is not a failure of theology, it is a failure of philosophy. The mention of “Nature’s God” in the Declaration was never a careless confusion of church and state. The signers of the Declaration were operating as philosophers, not theologians.

Recognition of a transcendent principle that applies to all people needs no special revelation. It can be discovered by anyone with common sense and the willingness to think it through. In fact, the modern claim that nature has no God is a denial of all evidence and the adoption of a religion in its own right.

Since the framers of the Declaration were not burdened with this religion, they were free to assert that every creature necessarily implies a Creator. It is this Creator who is the author and source of human equality.

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

Thus, Jefferson continues, “they [human beings] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” “Unalienable,” means that they cannot be separated from a person. These rights are as much a part of your humanity as is your body, your soul, your sex and your personality.

These are not created by governments. They are created by God. Only after Jefferson has taken us to this observation does he begin to talk about the government. The government is there to secure the rights that all people have by nature.

Nature’s God comes first. Human beings are his direct creations—together with their bodies, souls and unalienable rights. Government comes last. It is duty-bound both to recognize and to uphold humanity’s unalienable rights.

This Independence Day, let us all renew our resolve to live together by these self-evident truths.