It's Monday, December 16, 2013. I'm Albert Moeller and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. One day before the one-year anniversary of the killing of 26 people in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a young man, an 18-year-old, entered the high school in which he was a student in the area of Denver on Friday and shot two students before killing himself. One of those students, Claire Davis, a 17-year-old senior, is now in very critical condition, described by USA Today this morning as clinging to life. The story is shocking on its face for any number of reasons. As Carol Pesky of USA Today reports, the gunman who entered a Denver area school on Friday and shot and critically wounded a student intended to harm a large number of individuals. Carl Pearson, age 18, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot, entered the north side of the high school armed with a shotgun he bought legally, multiple rounds of ammunition strapped across his body, a machete and a backpack filled with three Molotov cocktails. Pesky goes on to describe in less than two minutes he fired five shots and ignited one of the Molotov cocktails before running to the back of the library and killing himself. This is a story that simply defies the imagination when we ask a couple of very simple questions. The most direct question is, why did this young man do this? It appears that it might be the simplest of human emotions, resentment and revenge. The student had targeted a teacher, a teacher who had been working with him on the school's debate team. The student was known to have been a very angry debater at times, but nonetheless was described as having his temper under control, at least until Friday. He entered the school calling out the teacher's name, and yet he entered the school carrying a shotgun he had bought legally as an 18-year-old in Colorado on the 6th of December. That raises another immediate question. How in the world, given the contemporary concerns about school security, could an 18-year-old student enter a high school in the Denver area carrying and not even trying to conceal a shotgun, with multiple rounds of ammunition strapped across his body, with a backpack filled with three Molotov cocktails, and also carrying a machete? He detonated one of the Molotov cocktails to little effect, but he shot two students, one of them with only a superficial wound and the other one, young Claire Davis, shot in the head. Again, as of this morning, she is clinging to life. This is a sad account in every dimension, but it drives us right back to the same basic questions as Columbine, as Aurora, as Newtown, Connecticut. The big question of why, as we discussed just on Friday, with the one-year anniversary of Newtown very much in view, that's a question that can't fully be answered. And one of the things that has immediately come to the surface in terms of the account of Carl Pearson is the inability, even of his closest friends, to describe what in the world happened. between the relatively hot-headed but under control young man they knew and the young man who entered the high school on Friday intending to commit murder, setting off a Molotov cocktail and shooting one student for no apparent reason whatsoever before taking his own life. This transformation of the Carl Pearson who entered that school with murderous intent on Friday, as compared with the Carl Pearson that had been known for the previous 18 years, this raises one of the most basic questions that frustrates all human beings. How in the world can we understand someone like this? But then, of course, that drives us back, as we've said so many times, to an even more basic question. How can we understand anyone? How can we get into the human heart and try to plumb its depths and uncomplicate its cobwebs? The reality is that we can't, even when it comes to our own heart. And yet we have to, to some extent, we have to try. We have to try, and that's why it raises all the questions as to why in the world there wasn't some screening process, even in terms of the entrance to the school, that would have prevented someone walking in with an unconcealed shotgun. The directness of that question is raised by Jack Healy in the New York Times when he writes, the student did not try to hide the shotgun he carried into Arapahoe High School at 12.30 p.m. Friday. He sought to confront a teacher, law enforcement officials said, and ask his classmates where he could find him. The teacher slipped away from the building, but officials said the gunman shot two students, seriously wounding one of them, and then died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Then, Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado said that the episode was, quote, an all too familiar sequence in a state that has already endured two of the country's worst mass shootings. No doubt, Governor Hickenlooper now faces the same question as does every one of the citizens of his state and everyone who sees this story. How and why? But there's another issue that inevitably comes right behind this kind of news story, and that is the gun control debate. And there were a good number of opinion pieces written on Sunday, and indeed some on Saturday, in which columnists tried to say, this proves that we have learned nothing. But I would suggest that the thing that proves that we've learned nothing more than anything is the fact that a young man was able to enter a school with an unconcealed shotgun. This was not an AK-47. It wasn't an automatic weapon. It wasn't a concealed handgun. It was a shotgun. And an 18-year-old in Colorado can buy a shotgun. It's hard to envision even the most radical gun control ordinance that could be considered by Congress that wouldn't allow an 18-year-old to buy a shotgun. And when you look at so many of the editorial pieces written over the weekend, so many people seem to assume that there's an obvious answer to how to prevent this. The truly vexing thing. From the Christian worldview, the most troubling thing is that there is no way to prevent this. Not fully, not adequately, not comprehensively. We fool ourselves if we think we can. On the other hand, we're irresponsible if we do not try. Meanwhile, also on Friday, a major federal court decision. In this case, a decision that had seemed for some time as almost inevitable until it happened. And now it's here in all of its shocking reality. On Friday in Utah, U.S. District Court Judge Clark Waddups ruled that part of that state's law prohibiting cohabitation, and by the way, that's the part of the law that had prevented polygamy, was unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion as well as the Constitution's guarantee of due process. As the New York Times reporter John Schwartz reports, a federal judge has struck down parts of Utah's anti-polygamy law as unconstitutional in a case brought by a polygamous star of a reality television series. Months after the Supreme Court bolstered rights of same-sex couples, the Utah case could open a new frontier in the nation's recognition of once-prohibited relationships, end quote. As I said, we've been saying this for some time. We've been saying that this is coming. And we weren't offering that warning merely on the basis of a hunch. We were warned. We have been consistently warned that these other decisions are coming along. The rationale for that is quite simple to understand. Once marriage can be redefined away from the union of one man and one woman to be one man and another man, one woman and another woman, it can simply be reordered in terms of number as well. Plural marriage is the inevitability of the logic of same-sex marriage. But as Judge Waddup's decision makes very clear, there are deeper consistencies in this trajectory as well. For instance, Judge Waddup's found in his 90-plus page decision that the law in Utah was unconstitutional on two specific grounds. First of all, on religious liberty grounds. But what he's actually doing there is suggesting, much like what you saw in Anthony Kennedy's majority decision in the Windsor case on same-sex marriage back in June, what he's arguing is that the only reason why people might be opposed to polygamy amongst consenting adults is religious animus. It was Justice Kennedy who offered that very opinion back in 2003 in the Lawrence decision, now in 2013 in the Windsor decision, and Judge Waddups picked up that very same language. And also the matter of due process, Judge Waddups argues that consensual sexual relationships between adults should simply be privileged within a zone of privacy. That would include same-sex relationships, as Justice Kennedy argued in Lawrence. Now it should also include polygamous cohabitation, argues Judge Waddups in Utah. Polygamy has been illegal in the United States since the late 19th century, and now a moral revolution is taking place. Judge Waddups referred to it when he said, quote, to state the obvious, the intervening years have witnessed a significant strengthening of numerous provisions of the Bill of Rights, end quote. Very interesting. Here again, you have a progressivist understanding of the law and the Constitution. Judge Waddups wasn't saying, in any sense, that those who framed the Constitution believed that polygamy was legally constitutional. They certainly didn't believe that a law outlawing polygamy would be unconstitutional. But he says now the Bill of Rights has been expanded in terms of its interpretation. Again, one of the basic worldview conflicts we have in this country. is between those who believe that the Constitution says what the words mean and what the framers of those words intended, and others who see it as an instrument for a progressive expansion of rights far beyond what the framers and founders of this country would ever have envisioned. Specifically, Judge Waddup cited the Supreme Court's posture, quote, that is less inclined to allow majoritarian coercion of unpopular or disliked minority groups, especially, as the New York Times points out, he said, quote, religious prejudice, racism, or some other constitutionally suspect motivation. And that's, of course, back to the religious issue, where Judge Waddups is arguing, as Anthony Kennedy argued in the Windsor case, that the only real opposition to the consensual adult participation in polygamy, cohabitation amongst multiple people of multiple sexes or of any sexes in a multiple romantic relationship, would be a religious animus, a theological objection. And that, said Judge Waddups, is unconstitutional, citing the very precedent established by the U.S. Supreme Court back this June. This is a really bizarre case, and reality television is at the center of it. Cody Brown, along with his four wives and 17 children, stars in a program known as Sister Wives, described You've heard it before as a reality television show. As we've said often, the one thing a reality television show is not is reality. Nonetheless, the polygamy in this case is altogether real. Four wives, 17 children, one husband. As the New York Times explains, the Browns are members of the Apostolic United Brethren Church, a fundamentalist offshoot of the Mormon Church, which gave up polygamy around 1890 as Utah was seeking statehood. The judge in this case, Judge Wattops, went back and cited the Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003, the Windsor decision of 2013, and as Schwartz observed, quote, as same-sex marriage has gained popular approval and legal status in recent years, some have hoped and some feared that other forms of cohabitation might follow, end quote. Well, it is to be noted that there have been arguments all along that this was inevitable. I have made those arguments. Many others have made those arguments. And it is not merely what's called a slippery slope argument. It's merely a progression of idea argument. If a logic takes hold, that logic isn't restricted to the case that brings it. If the courts accept the logic that all consensual adult sexual activity is constitutional, it can't stop with same-sex private consensual adult activity, but it has to spread to virtually everything else. And everything else in this case now includes polygamy. But mark my word, this will not be the end of it. It's because the end of this logic is nowhere near in sight. We can simply imagine a parade of different things that could quickly be included within this kind of legal logic. A major legal figure is behind this. His name is Jonathan Turley. You may have seen him because he's often quoted in the national media and often appears on television news reports. He's a law professor at George Washington University and he very eagerly represented the Browns in this case. He said the case, quote, is about privacy rather than polygamy. He went on to say, quote, homosexuals and polygamists do have a common interest, the right to be left alone as consenting adults. There is no spectrum of private consensual relations. There is just a right of privacy that protects all people so long as they do not harm others, end quote. Now that goes all the way back to Judge Vaughn Walker in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco when he dealt with the Proposition 8 case and said that harm to others could not be generalized to the society at large. It would have to be scientifically verified with some proven, demonstrated harm to a particular individual. And, of course, there are many people, certainly law enforcement officials in the western states, who would point to the fact that women are often mistreated in polygamous relationships and children are often neglected. And, of course, there's the larger issue of the integrity of marriage. But we're now living in a society that has decided to declare moral rebellion against the very notion of a normative marriage. And we need to note it didn't start with same-sex marriage. It didn't even start with no-fault divorce. It started with the decoupling of sex from heterosexual marriage. It went on to the separation of sex and morality, marriage and morality, and marriage and sex, reproduction and sex, sex and reproduction, and goes right to the issue now of same-sex marriage and polygamy. The course from the sexual revolution that certainly came to public life in the 1960s to the courtroom in Utah on Friday is direct, not indirect, and it's demonstrable. In an article published at his own website, Professor Turley celebrated this and made the point that this isn't going to be the end of the progression. He wrote, In other words, buckle your seatbelts. We haven't seen the end of this ride by a long shot. Finally, on Saturday night, Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston was awarded the 79th Heisman Trophy. As CNN reports, it is an honor that comes amid lingering questions about a rape allegation that has cast a pall over his claim to the coveted bronze statue. As we shall see, this is a very important story. Winston became only the second redshirt freshman to win the Heisman. He won by a huge margin, the seventh largest margin. He becomes one of the youngest, perhaps even the youngest, ever to win the award. And, as this news story makes very clear, he won it under considerable controversy. Days before the formal announcement on Saturday night, Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated wrote this. Jameis Winston deserves the Heisman Trophy, unless he really, really doesn't. He cited his numbers. 194.5 passer efficiency rating, 69.6 completion percentage, 32 touchdowns, 7 interceptions, and then he concludes, and one allegation of sexual assault. Then follows this paragraph. Winston was accused of raping a fellow student last December. The case remains open, and once the story became public two weeks ago, it was open season for speculation. A report claimed that his DNA was found on the garments of the accuser, leading to murmurs that he is guilty. Winston's lawyer responded by saying Winston had consensual sex with a woman, leading some to conclude he's not guilty. Then Rosenberg continues. According to the Heisman Trust, the award is supposed to honor the outstanding college football player whose performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity. Winston has been outstanding all season, but Rosenberg asked, how can we judge his integrity? A very interesting question and unavoidable question. And as a matter of fact, this gets to one of the most interesting public debates going on in America right now. The whole issue of date rape, the sexual issues going on on campuses, this has led to a number of massive reports. a massive article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal not this past weekend, but the weekend before, rooted in Auburn University, and a flurry of articles making the very legitimate point that date rape is one of the most underrated crimes in America. But what do we do with this? From a Christian worldview perspective, how do we consider all these issues? First of all, the issue of character. When it comes to the Heisman Trophy, it's clear the trust that administers the award isn't sure what character means, and they don't even use character in their definition. They use the word integrity twice, but it isn't defined. You might say that the trust and its directors and those who are voting for the award, especially sports reporters, are making their own statement, offering their own very awkward definition of what character does or doesn't mean, or to use the words of the trust, what integrity does or does not mean. Rosenberg gets to one of the key issues when he writes about the fallacy of conflating athletic achievement with personal character. He writes, we'd like to be able to separate a man's football skills from his personal conduct. But if we could do that, the allegation against Winston probably would not have hung in legal limbo for almost a year. End quote. Rosenberg, by the end of his article, however, basically surrenders to the inability to answer his own question. He writes, the pursuit of excellence with integrity, quoting the Heisman Award, is an alluring standard, but it's a mythical one. Writing for the Washington Informer, an African-American newspaper in Washington, D.C., columnist Charles Sutton observed, quote, though he ultimately won the award Saturday night, it certainly put the Heisman voters in a tough spot. And despite his win, the question remains, should the Heisman be awarded based solely on performance or should off-field issues be included in the evaluation formula? Sutton then points to Jameis Winston's performance on the field and said that on that basis he certainly did deserve the award. But then he ends with this very strange sentence. He says, But then we have to ask the question, why would they? Jameis Winston got the award, regardless of the allegations that have been made against him. According to Newsday, Jameis Winston said, quote, I knew I did nothing wrong. That's why I knew I could respect the process and I eventually would be vindicated. He went on to say everything I do and every way I carry myself is a point of character. My parents brought me up right. So everything I do, I'm going to be myself no matter what's going on, no matter what's happening. End quote. That kind of moral statement is virtually impossible to decipher. What in the world was he saying other than that he believes in himself? And let's remember that the player's own attorney had admitted that he had had sex with a girl, just claiming that it was consensual. Meanwhile, what about those who are offering votes for the award? Mark Weidmer, writing for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, wrote this. Turns out I helped Winston win by the fifth largest margin in modern history. Yippee! So why do I feel like I need a shower just thinking about his victory? Weidner goes on to write, especially since the Heisman's guidelines mention integrity but fail to reference character, decency, or respect for the opposite sex. He goes on, and perhaps these noble traits shouldn't be considered. We aren't the morality police. As voters were simply and succinctly asked to choose the college football player whose performance, in the words of the trust, quote, best exhibits the pursuit of excellence and integrity. Winners epitomize great ability combined with diligence, perseverance, and hard work, end quote. Then Weidmer says, given those parameters and the not so little fact that most experts believe Winston is the biggest reason the undefeated Seminoles are in the BCS title game opposite Auburn, he probably deserved to win college athletics most famous individual prize over the rest of the field. He then can't stop. Like anyone else dealing with this story, this columnist who says he felt like he needed to take a shower after this vote can't stop talking about it. He went on to say, still something disturbing happened between those two young adults inside Winston's dorm room that early December night, a little more than a year ago. Something they couldn't more strongly disagree on if they tried, end quote. The Christian worldview does not allow us to make the distinction between the person and character that many of these voters said they simply tried to do in making this vote. The Christian worldview also reminds us that the word integrity lacks all content if it isn't specifically tied to worldview convictions. And it looks like the Heisman Trophy Trust is doing its very best not to tie it to any specific content, meaning that the word integrity, like is so often the case in our society, hangs out there as some kind of lofty ideal, but not one that has any content. In other words, it never gets to character. Of course, this story also points to the Bachnallian riot that is going on on so many campuses when it comes to sexual activity. Let's go back to the judge in Utah. Is this merely about consenting adults? Well, it's interesting that the only issue of moral concern that seems to be on the table when it comes to Jameis Winston is the consent or lack of consent in the situation of his relationship and actions with this young woman. That tells us something about our culture. In other words, we can't even talk about the pressing issue of sex outside of marriage here. We can't talk about the rampant sexual immorality on the college campus. Instead, we just have to talk about the issue of consent. Judge Wattis back in Utah said that's all that's left among adults. And I guess these young adults, classified legally as adults on this college campus, fit in his category. We'll continue to follow all three of these stories as the week progresses. In the meantime, thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com forward slash albertmohler. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.