Baking cakes in the shadow of moral absolutism

Dan Balz reports in his Washington Post blog that Huckabee’s “closing speech [in Iowa] . . . was long on values” and “filled . . . with stories about himself and his family [that] conveyed an underlying message of morality and responsibility . . .”

While Huckabee issued no “calls for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion,” he “used story-telling to remind the audience that none of them are free agents in deciding right from wrong.” (Emphasis added.) With this odd turn of phrase, Balz segues into an equally odd story about

one of [Huckbee's] sons, who was apparently difficult at a young age and who was left behind at home one day while the rest of the family went out. When Huckabee returned, his son presented him with a cake he had just baked — a cake that turned out be inedible.

His son, attempting to interpret unfamiliar phrases in the recipe, decided that “a dash of salt” meant a cup of salt — and in doing so, ruined the cake. The audience was in stitches as Huckabee described the result, a cake no human could eat, but as he said, if you set it outside, the cows would lick it for a week.

This story, to me, doesn’t seem that funny. I guess maybe you had to be there to see the humor. How old do you have to be to know that a “dash” isn’t a cup? Whatever.

Then came the message. “My son did not set out to do anything that turned out so horrible,” he said. “His motives were pure. His actions were admirable. He was dedicated to the task. And he intended in every way to do something good. But he made one colossal mistake. My son had made his own definition of what a dash meant…. When we start defining right and wrong with our own definitions…no matter how well intentioned we are, no matter how sincere, the result is a disaster.”

Looking past the revealing awkwardness and circularity of the rhetoric (”made his own definition,” instead of simply “defined dash for himself,” and “defining right and wrong with our own definitions” instead of “defining” ), Huckabee’s simplistic moral absolutism is striking. Many have speculated about how Mitt Romney’s religion might affect his conduct in office. What about Mike Huckabee’s?

Who is to define right and wrong in a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” if not each of us who is, individually, “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [including] Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Can such a nation — whose very essence is wrapped up in cultural, political and religious pluralism — survive a chief executive who so boldly denies the agency of man? Could such a simpleton-executive effectively represent the interests of the United States in negotiations with leaders of nations who do not share his personal interpretation of right and wrong?

Juxtapose Huckabee’s absolutism with this:

11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so . . . righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. . .

13 And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.

In other words, we owe our very existence to the duality in nature and eternity. Without the dark we could never recognize or appreciate light. No cold, no hot; no bad cakes, no good cakes; no war, no peace, and so forth. In this sense, Fogarty’s “Don’t You Wish it Was True” is a nihilistic fantasy. Thank God it’s not true.

14 . . . [T]there is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.

15 And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter.

16 Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other. . .

27 Wherefore, men [and women] are . . . free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death . . . (emphasis added)

These insights are courtesy of the Book of Mormon, translated by the first Mormon presidential candidate, Joseph Smith. How does all of this relate to the choice of a U.S. President in 2008? Wearing my law professor hat, I’ll answer the question with a question:

How should Americans expect a president — whose interaction with others and the world around him is informed by the doctrines set forth above — to behave differently from one who, in contrast, is utterly convinced that the only possible “right and wrong” in the world is his and that men are, ultimately, creatures without agency sent to Earth not to act but only to be acted upon? Whose recipe is most likely to produce a palatable political cake — Romney’s or Huckabee’s?