Integrity

In∙teg∙ri∙ty  n.  1. The quality or state of being complete; unbroken condition; wholeness; entirety  2. The quality or state of being unimpaired; perfect condition; soundness   3. The quality or state of being of sound moral principle; uprightness, honesty, and sincerity—SYN. See HONESTY

Integrity is a good thing. A virtue. Something we value if we want thriving civilization.

So it’s something we want—need—in our leaders.

That’s why I was concerned a couple of evenings ago when I first saw the story that the Ted Cruz campaign had sent out a false story that Carson was dropping out of the race in order to persuade Carson caucus goers Monday night to change to Cruz. At the first moment I felt a sort of kick in the gut. But since I’ve done quite a lot of vetting of Senator Cruz—for years, since I vetted him when he ran for the Senate from Texas—I thought there must be something more to the story. And there was.

Much more detail came out yesterday. I didn’t do the original research on this; you probably heard it from several sources already. (Jennifer Burke at Politistick, Mark Levin on his radio show, Dana Loesch on The Blaze,[i] for example). I’m not a news outlet. So after we summarize the story, we’ll get to the commentary.

Here’s the order of events.

Tweet, image from Politistick

CNN reporter Chris Moody heard from as-yet unidentified person in the Carson campaign that, instead of heading to New Hampshire and South Carolina, Carson was heading home to Florida for some R&R before Thursday's National Prayer Breakfast. He took this news and tweeted it. CNN then reported this on TV at 6:45 PM (Iowa time, so shortly before the Iowa caucuses began)—Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, during their Iowa Caucus coverage. The banner over their report said, “Campaign: Carson to take break after Iowa.” They noted that this was unprecedented for a presidential campaign—unless they were planning to drop out, they implied. So that was the natural speculation.

The Cruz campaign tweet, image from here

Five minutes later the Carson campaign began trying to clarify: they were heading to Florida to avoid a storm and to pick up some fresh clothes. Getting that clarification to spread took some time.

By 7:00 the Cruz campaign put out the news to precinct captions in Iowa, saying, specifically:

Breaking news. The press is reporting that Dr. Ben Carson is taking time off from the campaign trail after Iowa and making a big announcement next week. Please inform and Carson caucus goers of this news and urge them to caucus for Ted Cruz.

It was signed by Spence Rogers. Shortly afterward Iowa’s Steve King tweeted the same message, as did the Ted Cruz campaign, including a screen shot of the CNN story in the tweet.

The Rubio campaign also pushed the story. The evidence is a tweet by Rubio proponent Conrad Close.

Tweet, image from Politistick

This was posted at 7:29 Iowa time, Monday, as the caucuses started. Almost twenty-four hours later Rubio was on Fox News with Megyn Kelly, decrying the unfair dirty tricks of the Cruz campaign, righteously indignant, saying his campaign was above such things. The above tweet still existed at 7:29 PM Tuesday, during that interview, but disappeared at 7:30, which wouldn’t have been known if the Politistick writer hadn’t taken a screen shot.

Backing up to the Iowa caucuses. Going in, Carson was polling fourth; he came in fourth—with a higher percentage than predicted. There are no stories of visible scrambling and discussing the story among Iowa caucusgoers of Carson leaving. There was no visible exodus of Carson voters. Nor are there, to date, any anecdotal stories of individuals who changed because of the news story (or Cruz's campaign's passing it on, or Rubio's either) about Carson’s plans.

Following the outcome Monday, Trump even sounded somewhat subdued and humbled—honored to have come in second, which was more than originally expected. When asked about that low-key attitude change, he said he was trying to be a bit dialed back, and presidential sounding, because some people like that, he was told. The point is, Monday night he congratulated Cruz and was unaware of anything amiss in the caucuses.

The Cruz campaign didn’t lie. They didn’t stretch the truth. They repeated what was being told on the news, which is fair game. That is what we think the Rubio campaign was doing as well.

On Tuesday, after the Cruz campaign note came to the attention of Carson, he called it dirty tricks, and what you expect from politicians, and why we need a non-politician, etc. In other words, he took political advantage of the situation to advance his own campaign narrative.

Ted Cruz did what you would expect of someone with integrity. He apologized for the misunderstanding. Some people took this to be an admission of guilt. Later he clarified that there had been a misunderstanding based on the CNN news report (it wasn’t, by the way, the Cruz campaign’s misinterpretation, but the CNN reporter’s wording and subsequent speculation, which the Cruz campaign merely passed along as newsworthy), and his apology specifically was that, once they became aware of Carson’s clarification (which came to them during the heat of the ongoing caucuses), they didn’t send out a follow-up correction. They hadn’t said Carson was ending his campaign, but they were apologizing for not following up to say directly that Carson wasn’t dropping out.

Carson invokes his Christianity, and Cruz’s, and refuses to accept the apology.

Rubio, as noted above, decides Cruz’s note was purposefully deceptive, and fails to mention the use of the same information by his own campaign.

Trump opportunistically decides that a huge injustice has been done to his dear friend and fellow candidate, Ben Carson. So this is, in his opinion, a monumental bad deed done by Cruz personally, because he’s an evil person. And then it becomes about him. He decides to claim that a huge portion of Cruz voters resulted from this dirty fraud, and if it hadn’t been for this huge shift of voters from Carson to Cruz, Cruz wouldn’t have had a high enough percentage to beat Trump. So he calls for a redo of the entire caucus, or at least a negation of Cruz’s win—depriving him of his delegates, leaving Trump the winner. How convenient.

Back up to November, when Carson was leading in national polls. Trump trashed him daily in his ubiquitous media, going so far as saying he’s pathologically violent—incurable, like a pathological sex offender. Mark Levin catalogued those attacks on his radio show (particularly at 12 minutes in). That was what Trump calls fair. But what Cruz did was so costly to Carson that he should be disqualified entirely?

So, what we see is pretty much what we expect from all the characters, if we’ve been paying attention:

Cruz is gracious and meticulously scrupled. He has integrity, which we had supposed all along.

Carson is overly sensitive and politically inexperienced. A bad thing happened to him—apparently because of his own behavior, which had meaning that he did not anticipate. He’s angry at Ted Cruz in the moment and unwilling to forgive—for now. But I think, as things play out, and Cruz becomes the nominee, Carson will get over the immediate anger and disappointment and see things more clearly. He won’t remain unforgiving. I’m guessing that. Maybe he is just using this as an opportunity to get sympathy and invoke his “non-politicians are better” message. That is happening. But I think he really is a decent person who hasn’t yet grasped his own role in this kerfuffle. He doesn't appear to be fully in integrity at the moment, but I expect he will get there again.

Rubio may or may not be aware that his own campaign was doing precisely what he calls underhanded from the Cruz campaign. If he knows, he’s simply a slick liar when it comes to politics. If he didn’t know, he’s using this opportunity to attack an opponent in the race—because that is what politicians do. Lying about it is completely out of integrity. Taking advantage of it in a campaign is what politicians do, but I don’t like it. But it doesn’t make him worse than whoever our Democrat opponent will be. I’m giving the benefit of the doubt and guessing it's a political opportunity rather than outright lie, based on what we’ve seen of him in the past. So I don’t completely write him off, even though he’s not my choice. I’m hoping that years of experience will lead him to greater integrity.

Donald Trump is what we have come to expect: self-centered, opportunistic, lying, manipulative, a bully and a sore loser. He clearly doesn’t care about Ben Carson; we know that from his own voluminous words. He doesn’t know what fraud is in legal terms. But he’s willing to use his money to try to buy, through lawsuits or other means, the outcome he wants for his own advantage. Integrity is not a word we apply to Donald Trump. “The quality or state of being of sound moral principle; uprightness, honesty, and sincerity” is a definition that rarely intersects with him even tangentially.

One more mention about integrity: Rand Paul. He bowed out Tuesday (Santorum and Huckabee also bowed out). This presidential race wasn’t the right time for Rand Paul, as it was never the right time for his father. But he served a purpose in the conversation. The debate connects with the Constitution much more than it would have without Ron and Rand Paul input. Rand Paul and I don’t agree on everything. He’s libertarian, and I am not quite. But I believe the conversation needs to be between conservatives and libertarians talking about the Constitution. I think Paul has been honorable. He hasn’t been altering his message in a misguided attempt to get more mainstream voters. I appreciate his integrity in this campaign. It would have been a better political season if his message had been magnified in place of Trump’s. It is my hope that his followers will recognize Cruz as the closest to their cause.

Integrity is something we want and need in a leader, but it’s a rarity in politicians. Ted Cruz is a rarity. I’m glad the truth came out quickly this week, when his integrity was impugned. If it had been true—or unrefuted—it would have done more damage to Ted Cruz than anything said about Carson's going home after Iowa.

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Living Core Values

A new issue of my alumni magazine arrived a week or so ago, and I’ve been reading the articles. One featured piece is a reprint of a speech given there by Mitt Romney in April 1999, at the business school convocation. Brigham Young University is also my alma mater: Romney graduated with a BA in English in 1971; I graduated with a BA in English in 1980. English, at least back then, was a major often used as a base for going on to law school. It trained a student in thinking and communicating.

Romney family
photo from here

After BYU, Romney went on to earn law and MBA degrees from Harvard. By the time he gave this speech, he had experienced quite a lot of success in the business world—even though it was before he rescued the Winter Olympics, and rescued Massachusetts from overwhelming debt as their governor, and before either run for president.

For those who didn’t know who Romney was while he was running (or came to know him late in the process), I thought this was worth sharing. He talks about success in life, and how you measure it. I offer a few excerpts:

How will it seem to you 20 and 30 and 40 years on? What bases will you have chosen to conquer? What games will you have played? Will your life have been a success?

To be honest, these questions were very troubling to me as I sat where you are sitting today. Virtually every speaker said something to the effect that life’s success was in my control. They quoted authors like Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich. Success, they said, was up to me—how I prepared and worked, how I thought, how I created and followed a mission statement, or how I put it all together would ensure the success they knew I wanted.

Now, 30 years on, I have come to a very different conclusion. The worldly success stories I have seen result from a blend of factors: yes, the choices you make and control but also the mental equipment you were born with, more than a fair measure of serendipity, and, where He does choose to intervene, the will of our loving Father. I am not convinced that it’s all up to you. Nor do I believe that if you live righteously, your stock will rise in value, you’ll get a promotion, you’ll win an election, or you’ll get your research published.

He tells the story of a cousin who trained for the Olympics but got the flu during the Olympic trials and thus failed to qualify. And another story is of a friend who bounced around from business to business and ended up at eBay with holdings over $1 Billion, which may, looking back, appear to be a planned path. He goes on to say,

There’s an element of unpredictability, of uncertainty, of lottery, if you will, in the world that has been created for us. If you judge your life’s success by the world’s standards, you may be elated or you may be gravely disappointed.

So what standards does this inarguably successful man use for his life? Love, family, service, and devotion. 

A consultant once helped Bain principals identify their core values. He asked them each to think of five or six people they most admired and respected, whether living or historical. Romney listed these:

I chose the Master, Joseph Smith [founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830, Romney’s religion, and mine], Abraham Lincoln, and my mother, father, and wife.

They then had to write down five or six attributes they thought of connected to each person. And the result was to show that, whatever they listed most frequently would identify their core values.

If they did not live in integrity with their core values, they would experience stress, ill health, and regret. But if they did live in harmony with these identified values, they would experience what they would eventually identify as success and fulfillment. The Bain leaders, it turned out, shared core values already, but had not all identified them. So they went from seeming to work at odds to working in a united direction—which incidentally led to company success.

But the good thing was that success in living according to these values did not depend on others—others’ opinions, others’ votes, others’ willingness to offer opportunities. Romney says it’s more about successful living, rather than financial or worldly determined success. Examples:

On my father’s 80^th birthday, I asked him what had brought him the most satisfaction in his life, what his greatest accomplishment was. He had been a three-term governor, United States Cabinet member, presidential candidate, CEO, multimillionaire, and prominent Church leader. His answer was immediate: “My relationship with your mother and with my children and grandchildren is my greatest accomplishment and satisfaction.”

Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel, voiced the same truth in an interview on the Today Show. She explained that being a mother was her life’s greatest accomplishment.

Both lived a life of fulfillment and success, not because of their worldly endeavors but in spite of them. They lived in harmony with values unaffected by the vagaries of markets or elections or praise.

He warns that living with integrity to your core values will be challenging. The world will seem at cross purposes.

Unless you purposefully hold fast to living first by your innermost values, … you will read too much into your worldly successes and, perhaps just as dangerously, read too much into your worldly setbacks.

Romney suggests that if you focus on the right things, you can actually control your success:

It is empowering, invigorating, and emancipating to live for the success you can control yourself, to live for your most deeply seated values and convictions.

This next anecdote about his father, told, remember, in 1999, is interesting to read at this point in history:

young Mitt Romney with his father, George Romney
photo from here

I remember my father’s reaction in 1964 when running for governor. [Romney didn’t actually run for President until 1968, briefly, but in 1964 he worked in the primaries against Goldwater, whose views on civil rights were a point of friction, among others.] President Johnson had swamped Goldwater, and my dad’s pollsters confidently predicted that he’d be pulled under [in his gubernatorial campaign] by the Democratic landslide. I was devastated. What would my friends at school think? My dad would be a loser. I looked at him. He looked calm—even relieved. Winning or losing wasn’t what was important, he told me. He had done what he felt was right by running in the first place and by speaking out on issues he cared about. The people’s votes didn’t affect that. [He was reelected as governor in a Democrat state, against the odds.]

If there is one thing verified by everyone who has known Mitt Romney over time, it is that he lives his values. He loves his wife and family. He serves whenever and wherever he sees the need—not just the easy way by donating money, but by giving his personal time and attention. And he seems to gain energy the more he serves. And tied with that is his devotion to God, which is evidenced in how he lives his religion.

The presidential run was not a personal failure. He did what he believed God was asking him to do; that was what he had control of. That was what he cared about. And what next? Enjoying his family. Serving where he sees the need. Offering help to our nation where it can be given.

It is my opinion that we have not had such a good man—brilliant, well prepared for the challenges we face, but also generous, giving, and devoted to God—run for US President since possibly George Washington.

Rush Limbaugh gave a similar opinion last week, and then pointed out that the media managed to take this sterling character and portray him as uncaring, out of touch with regular Americans, and lacking in the basic values most of us share. It took lies, repeated lies, and exclusion of truth to create that negative image. Discussion of this media malpractice can come another day, but let me repeat this verse:

Wo unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!—Isaiah 5:20

And then let me point out that valuing love within family, generously offering service, and turning to God for direction are civilizing principles. We have very little control over what the world (or even other voters in our own nation) will do. But we can control what we personally do. As Joshua of old said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

 

Defending the Boy Scouts, Part I

Last week the national leaders of Boy Scouts of America considered whether to alter their long-standing position to exclude those involved in homosexual behavior from leadership and membership. The decision was put off until a future meeting in May.

When it came up, I was a little surprised. The fight against the Scouts has been quiet for some years, since a 2000 Supreme Court ruling in their favor, that a private organization is allowed to exclude a person from membership when “the presence of that person affects in a significant way the group’s ability to advocate public or private viewpoints,” a right validated through the Constitution’s First Amendment freedom of assembly clause.

I wasn’t aware of the most recent pressure—which is purportedly to eliminate discrimination but in reality is intended to destroy the organization. I’m a little late for writing about last Wednesday’s vote, but I’m ahead of time for the May vote.

The method of pressure is to remove a large percentage of business donations, which have helped the organization function as a non-profit for over a century. The discrimination argument, while it may appeal to surface-thinkers, means that an organization—any organization—must be what outsiders, rather than members, say it must be. This may be better understood with a comparison. 

T-shirt from Rudy's Barbecue in Houston, TX

A favorite restaurant feature here in Texas is the barbecue place. I don’t know what this means elsewhere, but here it means slow-cooked smoked brisket and pulled pork, sliced up and weighed in front of you, and handed to you in paper dishes that you carry to seat-yourself trestle tables, where you lay it out on sheets of paper you tore off as your own personal tablecloth. There are no plates. Plastic forks and knives are optional. Typically you put the meat of choice on slices of bread and pour on some secret recipe barbecue sauce. Our family’s favorite such place is Rudy’s, which is set up like a truck-stop gas station with the restaurant instead of a mini-mart. The sauce (regular Rudy’s Sause and Sissy Sause varieties) are so good that extended family members request that we ship it to them as Christmas gifts. Rudy’s sells T-shirts that say, “I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables.”

In other words, this is a place with a certain belief and lifestyle.

Suppose someone comes in and sees the success of Rudy’s and wants to expand. It’s a chain, so it’s conceivable someone could want to have the opportunity to manage a new franchise. But suppose this potential new manager has a different philosophy: “I like everything you do here at Rudy’s; it really works. And clearly it’s profitable. I want all that. But I’m really troubled by all this death to animals. I think we need a kinder, gentler Rudy’s that caters to the vegetarian Texan.”

I expect the head honchos at Rudy’s would laugh in the guy's face and say "No; that isn’t possible. You can’t successfully feed people Texas barbecue without meat."

Suppose, in our hypothetical, there’s some pressure put on the organization by PETA; protesters come and picket in front of the restaurants and harass customers, discouraging the usual customers from going inside and spending their money on the meat they want. What should Rudy’s do?

Well, for one thing, stay in Texas, where meat eaters are likely to scoff at the protesters and go get their meat anyway. So loss of funding doesn’t translate as well to this metaphor. But let’s take a look at the motives of the change agents. They claim to admire the success of the original organization. They want to continue the success—but they want to take away the main reason for the success: really good meat served up pure and simple.

That’s what’s happening with the Boy Scouts. People outside the organization say they admire the outcome, the building of boys into men of strong morals and integrity. They want to keep getting that result—except that, instead of all that emphasis on morality and integrity, they want to emphasize “tolerance,” particularly tolerance of sexual immorality, instead.

You can’t have a successful barbecued meat restaurant by insisting that the eating of meat is immoral. You can’t have a successful organization to help parents raise boys to moral men by insisting that having a standard of sexual morality is immoral.

You know that if Rudy’s were to give in to the vegetarian potential manager, the business would fail. That is a given. Also know that, if the Boy Scouts were to cave and accept homosexual behavior as equivalent to married heterosexual behavior, the Boy Scouts would fail in their mission. That is also a given.

The simple question for the change pushers is this: why don’t you form your own organization that appeals to those who share your beliefs? Why walk into an organization you don’t share beliefs with and insist they adjust to your beliefs?

The real answer to that is that they do not simply want to slightly adjust an existing organization, which they believe would be an improvement for all the world; they want to destroy that organization. Not everyone has that ultimate goal. Some are simply listening to the talking points and following along with the crowd. But if you look at the requirements for civilization, and you look at the adherence to those civilizing principles within the organization, you can identify where BSA lands on the Spherical Model. People who dwell only in the southern hemisphere of the spherical model choose control of others, and they choose savagery. They do no love civilization, so there is no reason to assume their motives are pure.

In Part II we’ll look at the evidence that leads to this conclusion.

Words on Civilization

I’m still gathering the data for the final part of the piece on devaluing marriage—on what happens nearer to home in the US when families no longer serve their purpose for civilization. 

For today, just a few civilization related quotes. 

"Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence."— President Thomas Jefferson

"There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship,
communion, or company than a good marriage."— Martin Luther

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same—Ronald Reagan

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."—John Adams

"One man with integrity is a majority."— Thomas Jefferson

We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.—Calvin Coolidge