A Miracle from the Bishops, and Gibberish from the Machine
Posted on 17 February 2012
Every single Roman Catholic bishop in the United States has condemned in public the Obamacare HHS mandate — all 180 bishops who lead dioceses in the U.S. have spoken.
My comment: I am astounded. I have never known all the Bishops in America to agree on anything. Nothing other than the most brazen attack on the Church would provoke such a response.
And the Dem political machine has issued its talking points, and decided on their plan of counter-attack, which is the same weapon they always use, because they only have one arrow in their quiver, and one weapon in their arsenal. Argumentum ad Hominem.
They are going to call into question the motives of the Bishops, either by saying that this is motivated by the Catholic Church’s love of the Republican Party (I will pause for you to clean the coffee off your monitor left by the Danny Thomas spit-take you no doubt just performed) or by saying this is due to the Catholic Bishops hatred for Obama or for Obamacare. As far as I remember the last election results, Obama was elected by the Catholic swing vote. The Bishops have been in favor of universal health care since roughly 1911.
The Dems have decided to frame this debate in terms of the brave resistance of the bold rebellion of the weak and small Federal government protecting the cringing and scattered womanhood from the ruthless oppression of the jackbooted Catholic Bishops astride a world-trampling Leviathan raiding their homes and bedrooms to rob them of the condoms, pills, and diaphragms on whom their sacred honor, their equality with men, and their very lives depend.
I just heard Lanny Davis, Clinton-era apologist and professional defender of the indefensible, crowing that he welcomes making a campaign issue out of this question, since the alleged compromise with the anti-Church and the anti-Constitution mandate has now altered the terms of the debate. The Administration’s attack on the Free Exercise of Religion has been magically transformed by Liberal Fairy Dust and Happy Thoughts into the Bishops’ Attack on Womanhood and Everything Good and Nice in the Universe.
If the public can be fooled by such a transparent eructation of jabberwocky nonsense-talk as this, we should all forswear our faith in representative government forever on the grounds that we the people are just too stupid and silly to rule our own affairs, and become a Monarchist or an Imperialist. Long live the Queen! Vive l’Empereur!
I jest, but it is a bitter jest, because if the people do prove too stupid or silly to govern themselves, they will elect a Napoleon, or give bit by bit Napoleonic powers to the office once held by Washington.
History is just, therefore the people get the type of government they deserve. Let us pray that God is merciful, and save us from the justice of history.
Alas, I can see it happen. If you saw what I saw on Facebook, you would be astounded at the ability of people to swallow the party line and convince themselves with a smile that white is black. And since the election of Obama was itself an eruption of irrationality, there is nothing surprising about those who voted for him suddenly deciding that everything they knew until then is wrong, or, rather, simply forgetting it ever existed.
Actually, if the Dem propagandists have any sense, they’ll attack not the Bishops, but the current Pope. First, because they have worked hard enough already at making him a figure of hatred and contempt, and, second, because his influence in the sudden development of episcopal spine is unmistakeable.
“And since the election of Obama was itself an eruption of irrationality”
So you don’t think that he was elected simply because he was able to convince people that his party had the best policies, nor because of the fact that at that point you were deep in the throes of a recession, which had occurred (as recessions in America seem to do with almost uncanny precision) with a Republican government in power?
Or is every election of a non-Republican government an eruption of irrationality, since they (the Republicans) have demonstrated that they are so good at governing in the past?
Do not confuse fpb for an American Republican: neither is remotely true.
I am, so I suppose you may disregard what I say on partisan grounds, but: Obama’s election was quite explicitly an emotional rather than a rational choice. It’s not at all impossible that a rational choice would have also led to the Democrat winning, in that year — we don’t know. We do know that what the Obama campaign was actually about, was Hope.
There have been other presidential elections marked by eruptions of emotion: the worst examples are probably in the 19th centurey, and the Republicans used purely emotional appeals frequently in the post-Civil War era. But most Republican victories for the last several decades don’t require it as an explanation.
I am speaking as part of a community that is deeply conservative but that also cares about character of who we elect as well as (or in some cases, more than) the party affiliation. Last election there were people I knew that voted for Obama because he appears to have a good and happy family where as the other guy didn’t. It was enough to cause a 10% drop in what is usually the reddest state in the union, and likely gave Obama the state of Nevada. I have no idea if any other group had a similar view and outside of 4 states that neither party actually campaigns in, and 1 state where they do, we don’t have the votes to influence an election one way or another.
You are right to a large extent, but no campaign can succeed solely on hope. You need good policies as well to ensure that people vote for you.
Obama’s policies, bluntly put, were these:
(1) Not being George W. Bush;
(2) Becoming the first African-American President.
Apart from that, his campaign consisted of a lot of vapid talk about ‘hope and change’. By his own staff’s admission, he made himself a blank canvas on which disaffected Americans could project their own wishes and desires. Everyone hopes for different things; everyone wants different changes.
To be specific about the things HE hoped for, and the changes HE wanted to make, would have cost Obama the nomination in ’08. Very few people wanted a President who, as a professor of constitutional law, expressed the opinion that the Constitution was merely an obstacle that would have to be shoved aside in order to redesign the U.S.A. according to his own wishes. But thanks partly to the criminal complicity of most of the media, few people looked closely at what the candidate was actually peddling.
Let’s not forget the media’s complicity in keeping quiet while Obama did, or continued to do, the very things they screamed at Bush for doing.
Finally! A politician who keeps his promises!
He promised to end the war.
He promised to bail stuff out.
Hope was a big deal.
He did succeed in being our first black President, at the very least.
No, I did not think so. I said so at the time (http://fpb.livejournal.com/2008/11/05/) and I haven’t changed my mind. The fact that Marvel Comics put out a special comic to celebrate Obama, which they had never done for any President, was typical of the atmosphere of intoxication of those days. And, as I found out at my own expense, the intoxication went with a very strong streak of bullying and intolerance.
Mm. It is generally hard to disagree with the majority view. But why did it become so? It’s not that Barack Obama is an inspirational speaker, as Adolf Hitler was, able to stir up thousands to paroxysms of anger. He’s young, yes. But still… I (hypothetically) wouldn’t have voted for him just for that, if the Republicans had decent policies.
What’s your view? How did he become so overwhelmingly popular?
Because he promised to change Washington and the partisan dialog. Since Senator Obama was mostly a blank slate at the time people projected onto that slate what they wanted.
He’s black, and therefore the absolution needed for SWPL guilt.
I agree with Tom Simon, above. I would expand on his point 1 more: the Republicans had undermined themselves for the previous several years, and hadn’t really responded to the comeuppance of 2006. Republicans were demoralized; moderates & independents were disgusted either with the Republicans or with both parties. Democrats, of course, were confident in their own moral and intellectual superiority.
Add that to the basic dynamic that Americans don’t like to leave one party in charge for an extended period, and the White House might well have swung Democratic in 2008 unless the D’s put up a completely unelectable candidate. Then the financial crisis hit, which strengthened the trend: leftists could blame the Republicans; centrists could got that way or blame both parties and thus strengthen the out-of-power candidate.
Obama’s deliberately blank-slate candidacy was well-tuned to that environment. And then, to give him credit, he kept his cool better during the financial crisis than McCain did: temperamentally, he did seem ready for prime time.
If he’d been more specific about his agenda, he might well have lost even so, but Americans were ready — eager — to believe he wasn’t as Left as he actually is. Many of them still don’t want to believe it, despite the evidence of their own eyes.
To sum up: in your opinions, the public was misled by a subtle campaign which allowed them to attach all their wants and desires onto Barack Obama. This, combined with a certain underlying current of racism (word usage correct), brought him to power.
Well, that was clever.
Scuttlebutt is that pretty much what you just wrote, all but verbatim, was as you’ve said precisely the strategy of the Obama campaign. That is scuttlebutt, so as much as I’d like one I don’t have a source, but I can show that Hillary Clinton bemoaned the fact back when she campaigned for the big cookie.
If you want my view, it has to do with a couple of unaccepted and unadmitted things that dominate the American collective unconscious. One is class. Americans like to believe theirs to be a classless and egalitarian society, and in the main it is – but class does exist. Now Obama is easily recognized as an aristocrat. There is a certain instinctive elegance of bearing and ease of behaviour with which those who have seen, for instance, the late Gianni Agnelli (owner of Fiat and uncrowned king of Italy) will be familiar. Understand, those are external things; they don’t make a man any more brilliant, or any more upright, than he would naturally be. But they matter. Barack Hussein Obama is blue-blooded from both sides: his father was of the stock of Muslim merchant princes that dominated the coastline of East Africa (and traded mostly in slaves), and his mother was an American Unitarian of early New England descent, not quite a Winthrop or a Biddle, but certainly of the stock that made America.
In and of itself, this would not matter. Although Americans certainly like their aristocrats, they are not restricted to them, and indeed the greatest American president of all time was the most obviously proletarian – clumsy, ill-bred, funny-accented Abraham Lincoln, whom the English insisted on treating as a dumb yokel till his greatness was evident to the very stones. But an aristocrat – a Washington, a Roosevelt, a Kennedy – certainly makes them feel more at ease. They are particularly welcome in times of transition and change: the touch of an aristocrat makes them feel steadier in the middle of change and turmoil. It is no coincidence that Washington and both the Roosevelts were at the helm at times of great social, political and even constitutional change. The massive presence of Waschington at the head of the table as the delegates discussed the articles of the new Constitution steadied and comforted everyone, and so did the calm, familiar presence of FDR in his weekly “fireside chats”.
What makes it significant in the case of Obama is another and even more significant unadmitted American complex – the terrible, paralyzing knot of guilt and unresolved social pathology that arises ultimately from the experience of slavery. Unlike many of my conservative friends, I would say that the social pathologies that affect America’s black population to this day do indeed have a lot to do with the overhang of slavery, but that is not important here. What is important is that slavery was from the beginning a slap in the face of the very reason for America’s existence. Ever since Tom Paine gave the revolted Colonials an ideology and a reason to fight, the equality of all citizens before the law has been the reason for America’s existence as a state. Slavery was the most radical possible challenge to that principle; and the founders knew it. The greatest of them – Washington, Jefferson, Franklin – all detested slavery and looked forward with varying degrees of hope and fear to its eventual abolition. It is not a coincidence that the war fought on this issue remains by far the bloodiest America ever fought. But the wound was not healed. Every American who sees that blacks, in the mass, remain at the bottom of the social structure, suffers a blow in all his sense of nationhood and right and wrong.
For this reason, a credible black candidate for the Presidency – an office that, above and beyond its sheer power, has the most tremendous symbolic value, that of sitting in the seat of fathers of the nation, heroes and martyrs – was always going to have an absolutely magnetic effect on the electorate. But he has to be credible. The leading black politicians until now have been, to be brutal, race hustlers who carry the sense of a ghetto bitterness and lack of prospects; one could no more imagine them in the White House than a Theodore Bilbo or a Huey Long. What Obama took to the election was not any kind of program or policy: he was clearly, from the beginning, promising everything to everyone. It was his obviously aristocratic presence. Biden’s early statement about a “well-spoken black” was crude and inadequate, but it was on the right track: Barack Obama was a man of a kind American politics had never seen (although I met his likes here in London), a man both of African descent and of obvious breeding, with the smooth and reassuring surface of someone born to power and influence. Wherever he went, whether he had stayed in Indonesia or gone back to his mother’s country, he would have gravitated towards the top of society. Americans instinctively recognized this – and gratefully gave him their votes.
Examining the thinking of this actually reveals one of my “favourite” (in a rather gallows-humour sense of that word) goalpost-shifting techniques, which is simply to count zero-value passive inaction as effectively amounting to active resistance, or to discount it as irrelevant, depending on one’s position and the issue.
Or, more bluntly: Does refusing to help a person accomplish something amount functionally to trying to prevent the person accomplishing it? The more important the desired action, the more likely the person in question is to say “Yes, it is”.
What infuriates me about that response is that it is now coming from precisely the people who decried “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists” as a buffoonish and harmful simplification of a complex moral reality. There are good moral arguments to be made for both allowing or excluding neutrality as a valid position, but switching back and forth based purely on your personal stake in the issue is the worst kind of pragmatism.
“Or, more bluntly: Does refusing to help a person accomplish something amount functionally to trying to prevent the person accomplishing it? The more important the desired action, the more likely the person in question is to say “Yes, it is”.”
Read the astonishing comments left by Dr Andreassen and other radical materialists here on this blog, or comments from like minded materialists elsewhere. If you live in a universe where man is merely a Darwinian animal, or a Marxist by-product of economic forces, or a bundle of helplessly neurotic socially-programmed Freudian reflexes, and his mind nothing but the “Chinese Room” of Searle, why, yes, then there is no difference between failing to aid the victim and preventing the victim.
To the PC, we are all puppets made of soggy meat, as helpless and mindless as Terri Schiavo. To the PC, to have the Bishops refuse to provide free abortifacients is the same as having the Sardaukar Terror-Troops of the Padishah Emperor shining in their shieldbelt-fields knives in hand kick in the doors and crash in through the windows, swarm over and hold down and impregnate the cringing innocent girl with the digger-wasp parasite of the alien from ALIEN.
If you think all humans are helpless, then to fail to help the helpless is (to you) a positive act, the same as Jack the Ripper committing a lurid knife murder.
(These same PC types, of course, did withhold food and water from Terri Schiavo, who actually WAS helpless, and killed her in a far more sadistic way, over days and days of dehydration, than any of Jack the Ripper’s victims ever suffered.)
I appreciate the hyperbole, though fairness requires me to note that there *are* situations in which I will allow that refusing to act constitutes a moral action — if it is in my power to save a drowning man without excessive risk to myself, yet I still refuse to try, I must bear some responsibility for his death even if someone else threw him in, or he fell in by his own foolishness.
That said, there’s a difference between this truth, and the sentimentalist progressive extrapolation therefrom into the principle that permitting suffering at all, of any kind or degree (even the inconvenience of a contraceptive expense), when you have the power to prevent it is tantamount to inflicting that suffering yourself. (It’s things like this that make me continue to regard progressivism as tragically fallen idealism rather than pure nihilism; there really is this almost Miltonian indignation that anybody should have to endure unpleasantness of any variety, at least in the genuinely higher-minded sorts.)
“I appreciate the hyperbole, though fairness requires me to note that there *are* situations in which I will allow that refusing to act constitutes a moral action — if it is in my power to save a drowning man without excessive risk to myself, yet I still refuse to try, I must bear some responsibility for his death even if someone else threw him in, or he fell in by his own foolishness.”
I agree. There are sins of omission. Having a Catholic-run charity unwilling to pay for the contraceptive which one can get from a vending machine, however, is not such a case. Nor is it is case where the omission imperils life or health. Contraception, unlike food for the starving and medicine for the sick, is not a necessity. Albeit the image of a poor but horny woman on the cathedral steps weeping piteously because she is really eager for consequence-free copulation is an amusing one. “I cannot wait for my period! I must have sterile sexual relations with my live-in lover NOW!”
“Albeit the image of a poor but horny woman on the cathedral steps weeping piteously because she is really eager for consequence-free copulation is an amusing one. ‘I cannot wait for my period! I must have sterile sexual relations with my live-in lover NOW!’”
And the tragedy of that image is that the reason so many people react in a fashion which boils down to that cry is that what they want is not sex, but the assurance and proof of love, intimacy and acceptance which, deep down, part of their souls knows that sex constitutes.
The irony of course is that the contraception which makes it possible to disburse that proof so freely is the very thing that makes it no longer such a proof, for either partner.
As attractive as your turn of phrase is rhetorically, I wonder if we shouldn’t be so glib; as Christians, I think it may be ours to return decency to people so obviously intent on destroying the very notion of it.
The women crying at our doors for this “freedom” are drunk and reeling for the absurd; lets not add a drop of chaos to their draught by our clever mockery. Our church must be a warm, dry place for them, and they need us to live our faith. God grant us compassion.
And yet still the thing is absurd, and if we do not mock it, we are less than honest. To let our defense of the Church be portrayed as withholding a necessary good from the poor is an outrage, and an absurdity.
There was no discourtesy nor insult in my jest.
I hesitate to agree, only because I wonder what our contraception-addicted culture would become if we courted her, loved her, married her, and raised our happy children with her.
There’s something to this Hosea thing. It’s easy to point out fallacies, so easy I can scarcely imagine any other response than mockery or stony silence myself.
And, as you say, the very people who argue that Catholic refusal to pay for birth control is an unacceptable imposition of morality had no problem with refusing to pay for Terri Schiavo’s upkeep.
But then, in the former instance, refusing to act imposes an inconvenience; in the latter, it eliminates one. I can’t help but remember Cromwell and Rich in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS.
CROMWELL: No, it’s not like that, it’s much more a matter of convenience, administrative convenience. The normal aim of administration is to keep steady this factor of convenience – and Sir Thomas would agree. Now normally when a man wants to change his woman, you let him if it’s convenient and prevent him if it’s not – normally indeed it’s of so little importance that you leave it to the priests. But the constant factor is this element of convenience.
RICH: Whose convenience?
CROMWELL: Oh, ours. But everybody’s too. However, in the present instance the man who wants to change his woman is our Sovereign Lord, Harry, by the Grace of God, the Eighth of that name. Which is a quaint way of saying that if he wants to change his woman he will. So that becomes the constant factor. And our job as administrators is to make it as convenient as we can.
“And, as you say, the very people who argue that Catholic refusal to pay for birth control is an unacceptable imposition of morality had no problem with refusing to pay for Terri Schiavo’s upkeep.”
If you recall, her parents were willing to pay for her upkeep, and were denied permission to feed her.
“I will pause for you to clean the coffee off your monitor…”
The only discourse from Obama I read was his address in Cairo at the beginning of his mandate. My jaw dropped at the first declaration and I read at least half of the text gaping like that. I don’t remember a word of it, I was so appalled that I must have unconsciously wiped my memory and I didn’t read a line from him since. So, no I wouldn’t spit my coffee this time, just smile with commiseration. I share Mr Barbieri’s concerns that political correctness has a very strong hold on people. If they could elect such a man, they are probably stupid enough to follow him in hell and the Church and faithful will have much to suffer, except by miracle. One miracle already happened, let us pray for more because we need them.
At least where y’alls bishops, and religious people in general, are concerned, the President is a uniter, not a divider.
LOL and ROTFLM(ahem)O.
You win the Internet! Go to Al Gore’s mansion and claim your prize!
What is a “yalls” Bishop? My “yalls” Bishop is the The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt. And were the Bishops 0-180 the other way, the Mighty Kenyan and Her Lickspittleness Kathaleen would still be wrong.
Point of order! Y’all is the singular, all y’all is the plural, thankyouverymuch. Now before Mr. Wright bans me —
I have +Ochoa.
In addition to the ad hominems you mention, I would add that sooner or later- probably sooner, if not already- someone will claim the bishops have no moral authority in any matter following their handling of the sex abuse crisis.
I have read at least one accusation that the bishops are only criticizing Obama because they are afraid he is going to launch a federal investigation of them, and they want him out in favor of a president who will overlook their crimes.
True story.
I wish my theory that Leftism is not a political philosophy, merely an excuse for narcissistic nihilists to make accusations after accusations in a weird and neverending psychological malfaunction would encounter SOME contrary evidence.
I know there are some Leftists who are men of good will and sound character. I just never hear of them.
Even the decent, God-fearing Leftists I know never argue except in the endless, senseless accusation mode. They can be rational and even wise, as long as the topic does not cast doubt on their foundational beliefs. I wonder if they cannot detach their emotions from the truth-value of the opinions and theories they believe, so that any honest question put to them seems not merely a personal attack to them, but an outrageous, senseless and unexpected personal attack. On some level, they do not seem to be aware that conservatives exist, or that reality has rules.
I wonder if the accuser of whom you speak can account for the uniformity of resistance among the Bishops, not to mention non-Bishops like EWTN, and non-Catholics outraged at the administrative trampling of Constitutional law. There was not even a vote on the issue. An unelected bureaucrat made this decision with the swipe of a pen.
That makes me long for the sanity and cool-headed clear thinking of the likes of David Icke‘s Reptiloids:
“According to British writer David Icke, 5 to 12-foot (1.5 – 3.7 m) tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, now hiding in underground bases, are the force behind a worldwide conspiracy directed at humanity. He contends that most of the world’s leaders are related to these reptilians. Icke’s conspiracy theories now have supporters in 47 countries and he frequently gives lectures to crowds of 2,500 or more. American writer Vicki Santillano ranked the notion that “Reptilian humanoids control all of us” as one of the 10 most popular conspiracy theories.”
I join you with the spilled liquid of choice and Dany Kaye double-take on the bishops being sympathetic to the GOP talking point.
Guess they never heard the term “the democratic party at prayer” as a description of the USCCB and what came before it. The ignorance of history in regards to Catholics and the Democratic Party while not surprising is quite ignorant. Though if you need to talk down this unprecedented reaction by the bishops and trampling of the First Amendment I guess any lie will do.
No, I think Danny Kaye is the Court Jester. Danny Thomas was the comedian famous for perfecting the spit take.
With contraception and the Church’s teaching on it in the public eye, I can only hope that it might spark more teaching on it. I can hope that Catholics who have just swept the teaching aside might be inspired to read up on it and discover WHY contraception is so wrong that the bishops will not pay for it. And when I’m being REALLY optimistic, I can hope that some of the dangerous side effects of hormonal contraception might get more national coverage, too.
Of course, even to myself, I sound like a Pollyanna.
In favor of aristocracy and monarchy:
http://www.thecedarroom.org/archives/004171.html
Sign me up for both please!
Looks like this is shaping up to be an interesting fight; Catholic Charities has issued a clarification that it has not endorsed the “compromise” form of the mandate, despite a mention on an official White House blog that they were one of a number of groups that had reacted favourably to it.
What has really surprised me has been the number of left-wing/liberal/progressive Catholics who have stood with the bishops on this. Truly, as Mrmandias says, the President is indeed a uniter!
And as for the notion that this is all about women’s health (vide Nancy Pelosi’s weekly press briefing where she said ““I firmly believe — I want to remove all doubt in anyone’s mind where I am on this subject,” Pelosi said. “This is an issue about women’s health, and I believe that women’s health should be covered in all of the insurance plans that are there”), let me give credit to the indefatigable Mike Flynn, who dug up the original survery on which the Guttmacher Institute report was based; this was a national survey of a sampling of women of all races, educational attainments and financial circumstances between 2006-2008, and there’s a very interesting table included in it: Table 15, which gives the reasons women stopped using four methods of contraception (the Pill, injectable contraceptive, patch and condoms).
Seeing as how the Pill is (with female and male sterilisation) the most widely used contraceptive method, let me quote you why women stopped using it (figures rounded out by myself for ease of comparison):
Too expensive – around 3%
Insurance did not cover it – something over 2%
You had side effects – averaging 64%
So the single greatest reason women stopped using the Pill was not because they couldn’t afford it or didn’t have access to it, it was because of the adverse effects on their health (and the survey-makers were even kind enough to list “changes in menstrual cycle” and “decreased sexual pleasure” separately, so the effects were noticeable or deterimental enough that women stopped taking it, even without direct medical advice to do so – that’s around 5% were told by their doctors to come off it, by the way).
So if we’re talking about women’s health being affected, the bishops refusing to pay for coverage may be said to be working for women’s health!
Absolutely! Just listen to the side effects of a hormonal contraceptive in an advertisement sometime: increased risk of stroke and heart disease, among others. It also causes weight gain and mood swings, which all women need, and which I know all men want for the women in their lives.
Leaving my personal beliefs aside, and I ask admitting ignorance – theologically. Do you think he would? Do you think he should? Do you think we should have exemption from the operation of the moral law? You could, and I would understand, pray that the price not be too high. But do you wish not to pay a price for sins, do you wish to escape from guilt? Since you are still a “new” convert and spent many years on the opposite side (at least on the libertarian side of the sexual arguments) would you not yourself have a price to pay assuming justice were metered with such a precision (which I believe in some way it is).
I can understand the wish to avoid the sweeping hand of justice. But how else does man learn from his folly, or, at least, have a chance to learn since he is proving to be a very slow learner? Must not the moral law, the justice of history, roll forth unheeded by pleas? I would think in justice it must.
You know, an Objectivist convert would be a real harsh person! Although, like I said, I spoke without knowledge. But I put a question mark after nearly everything so I’m off the hook!
Good for the Bishops. However, if they elected Obama, or helped, they were beyond short-sighted on this. Blind.
You might also find the following link to be informative to the general discussion
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&src=se
If you going to ask theologically, one point behind the Redemption is that sins against an infinite God are ipso facto infinite sins. These are the sort of thing we can’t repay on our own, and so the Incarnation and Crucifixion are the means by which God makes it possible we meet Him in Heaven.
That said, while God delivered Israel out of Egypt, he also delivered them into Babylon. I do not know if these means, since the Resurrection, are still necessary, but, “the blood of the martyrs are the seed of the Church,” &c.
I am beginning to seriously wonder whether this is really a case of the bishops fighting for religious liberty or whether they are just fighting for more respect and power within their political group, namely the Left. After all, they aren’t fighting for the religious freedom of your average small-business owner who has moral objections to contraception and doesn’t want to pay for it. The bishops are only fighting for religious freedom for religious institutions –as though lay people have no need for freedom of conscience.
What about those who believe that most psychological therapy (which is often mandated coverage) is anti-Christian or that many forms of mandated “alternative medicine” are a form of witchcraft? Don’t they deserve to opt out? What about those religions that oppose surgery? After all, their employees can always get the coverage elsewhere. I haven’t seen any sign that the bishops care about any of this, which brings into question their actual commitment to religious liberty.
And the truth is, the Catholic bishops have always been big players on the Left. They helped to get Obamacare passed and they arguably helped to get Obama elected because they did not come down hard on him for his pro-abortion views, and the Catholic crossover vote was a big factor in Obama’s victory, yet they have been disrespected in numerous ways by this presidency. Maybe they feel that they need to put a stake in the ground here, not for religious liberty, but for their place in the Movement.
Are conservatives being played for suckers to support one group of leftists against another in what is essentially an intramural fight? If the bishops win this fight, it will be a trivial concession from big government: “OK, if you are a directly religious institution the we won’t force you to support certain particular kinds of health coverage that really isn’t about health anyway.” Will that make it harder to get real reform on insurance mandates because everyone thinks we made a compromise?
“:After all, they aren’t fighting for the religious freedom of your average small-business owner who has moral objections to contraception and doesn’t want to pay for it. The bishops are only fighting for religious freedom for religious institutions –as though lay people have no need for freedom of conscience.”
Can you quote me where a bishop has said this? Because, frankly, it sounds as if you are letting the paintbrush of your imagination fill in pictures of what you think in going on in the minds of strangers, and you, who can read the hearts of men, see only disreputable motives there.
For myself, I have heard the public statements of bishops and Catholics who were careful to mention that a business owner of ANY SIZE business who wish to follow the church teachings cannot in good conscience pay for abortifacients, contraception, sterilization.
The so called compromise has been rejected with scorn by the Bishops, and, I assume by all faithful Catholics. The rather narrow exception allowing Church employees out of the mandate was never at issue, and was always rejected as being too narrow.
That’s what the article said (the one I linked to in the post). The author of that article (a Catholic, BTW) said that there was never contemplated an exception for businesses that were not specifically religion-associated and that the Bishops were fine with that until the Obama administration decided that even religious business were not exempt unless virtually all of their employees and the people that they served shared the religion –ie.: pretty much just churches.
And your point is? If we were concerned about the absolute purity of the motives of everyone fighting a just fight, Napoleon and Hitler would have walked it. Besides, what would really have happened then would have been that a few bishops would in fact have opposed the forcing of lay consciences, and the rest would have fallen into an embarrassed silence. It would not have been a matter, as you seem to imply, of the whole bench of bishops villainously supporting the imposition so long as it did not touch them. Whereas right now it is indeed a matter of every last bishop in office (though I dread what Thomas Gumbleton might do) coming out swinging: a sight such as the United States of America have literally never seen.
My point is that conservatives and libertarians should not assume that the bishops have suddenly seen the light and imbibed a new respect for personal liberty. My concern is that by letting the bishops lead a movement against Obamacare when they have only the most minimal imaginable disagreement with it and otherwise support it enthusiastically, the right is in danger of getting suckered and making it look like there was a compromise when there wasn’t.
The right needs to emphatically make it clear that the bishops’s concerns with Obamacare are not the full set of concerns and make sure that everyone knows that the bishops actually support most of the parts of Obamacare which the right finds odious, so although we support them in this intramural squabble, they do not speak for us and can’t make deals for us.
Also, conservative Catholic lay people should consider trying to use this for a teaching moment to remind the bishops that the Left which the bishops have politically allied with, by and large, have nothing but contempt for morality and nothing but loathing for Christ, and that as the state grows ever more powerful, the bishops’s ability to ward off the consequences of this contempt and loathing will become ever weaker. And that maybe they should consider the consequences of their ill-chosen alliances.
Also, to be clear, I did not ascribe villainy to the bishops, merely a fondness for left-wing politics. If you see that as villainy, that is from you.
Part of the trouble is that the Church herself is neither left or right. I think if there were ever a political party which could potentially be unapologetically Catholic, it would be a Subsidiarity Party, which is to say a party that recognizes the value of a central government to keep the peace, but also sees the import that the state intervene only when necessary. It would be, in short, Federalist. The approach to the Constitution would be neither strict nor loose but just right.
Something tells me this is a wistful dream, and a Goldilocks dream at that, but it would be a proper application of Catholic principles to government.
You remind me of libertarians who like to pretend that they are in the pragmatic middle because their extreme views don’t fall into the usual sets. Libertarians (like the Catholic bishops) have extremists views on sexual morality and extremist views on public policy, just like the extreme bases of the two major parties. But since neither of the two major parties is extremist on the same thing in the same direction, they think that makes them a moderate. It’s really kind of funny when you think about it.
Democrats are extremist to the South and West, Republicans are extremist to the North and East, but libertarians are extremist to the South and East and the bishops are extremist to the North and West. That doesn’t put them in the middle of the compass.
I didn’t understand your point about the mandate, but I will say that my complaint is not that the bishops are “left leaning”; it is that they actively work to subvert freedom. I don’t care what you call this position. They may not be genuine leftists but they have deliberately allied themselves with the Left, with a movement that hates truth, justice, morality, and Jesus. The Left is a Beast in the process of devouring the Church along with all mankind, and the bishops have deliberately chosen to join forces with the Beast against those who love truth, justice, morality, and Jesus, but deny the authority of the bishops.
I am trying to be careful to refer to the bishops only, to avoid the misconception that I attribute these failings to Catholics in general. Many Catholics are great allies in the Christian battle against the Beast. But the leadership of their church? Not so much.
While I will not defend the Bishops as such in the scandalous favoritism for the Left, you will note that my point was that the Church, not the Bishops, transcends the dialectic. She is not the middle. Honestly taken, she is above. I do not, and she does not, and neither of us should endorse a reasonable middle. If really put to the test, she is extreme and radical in all things, as much passion in love and tenderness as she has in opposing the Beast.
There is a Beast as you say in the ideology of the left, but there is also a Beast in the ideology of the right. This is because the Beast is an idol, which is to say it is an ideology.
“I love the game, but I hate the referees. They always get in the way.”
… I hope you weren’t trying to insinuate that the Bishops are opposed to those non-Catholics because they were non-Catholics. That wasn’t my first impression, but it looks that way.
Really, I hope that’s not what you meant. Because that would be silly. Whatever their graces, they aren’t organized enough to do that kind of persecution for that deliberate a reason.
I don’t mean that the bishops joined with the Left out of personal pique because Protestants do not acknowledge their authority, but Catholics at one time did support the Democratic party in large part because the Republican party was the party of the Protestants and because there was religious discrimination by Protestants against Catholics –or at least Catholics perceived it that way.
The situation on the ground changed in the 60s and 70s. A Catholic was elected president, which lessened the feeling that Catholics were a suppressed minority, and the Democrat party began to defend grotesquely brutal Communist dictators and to embrace fornication, divorce, and abortion as human rights on the same order as the freedom of speech and religion. At the same time, there was a sea change in Protestant thought as Protestants began to realize that with the rise of religious freedom as an accepted human right, Catholicism was no longer the danger that it had been, and that the more urgent threat to civilization was Marxism and libertinism, so Protestants decided to tone down their criticism of Rome in hopes of winning allies against Moscow and Hollywood.
As a result of these developments, many Catholics gave up their reflexive support of the Democratic party, but generally not the Catholic leadership. So what I meant by my veiled allusion is that the Protestant/Catholic divide did historically influence the bishops to ally with anti-Christians against Christians.
I’ll take that as meaning the Bishops moved slower than the laity. But so moves the Ents of Rome.
Again, though, if we were participating ideally, it isn’t that we’d be allied with one side sometimes but that we’d be allied with both at times and neither always.
“I haven’t seen any sign that the bishops care about any of this,”
Are you saying that as you have not seen “any sign”, none therefore exist? To say what one has not seen constitutes proof or evidence, without reference either to statements in support or condemnation carries no water.
My argument is a bit more complex than merely “I have not seen that X therefore not X”. It’s more like “historically not X and I have not seen evidence that anything has changed, so it seems likely that still not X.”
I take this as the first datapoint of a change. Should there be others, you’d have enough for a line.
Dear sir, I will only point out that to the left, the Church is too right-wing, and to the right, the Church is too left-wing. Just when businessmen were murmurring appreciatively that She proclaimed the rights of private property, She (through Peter’s successor) spoke up to remind them that labourers too have their rights. When the revolutionaries were sure She was fighting and dying with them for paradise on earth, She told them that Her gaze was fixed forever on the life to come with Her Bridegroom and that no earthly liberation, no matter how just, could ever dislodge Her primary mission from Her heart.
Thank God, we will always be falling out with someone for being too much this and insufficiently that!
Now, as to the small and/or private businessman, please note that the first action of this mandate (and the preliminary skirmish in the Supreme Court, regarding the Lutheran school employment case) was to define in a narrow way exactly what a religious institution was. If only a church is a religious institution, and not a hospital, a university, or a pregnancy centre, then the State can impose and enforce laws binding conscience.
Contrariwise, if a monastery or a convent supports itself by selling soap or coffee or cheese or honey, then it is a commercial institution and so liable to tax and all the other regulations of a business.
Dear sir, regardles of whether you think the bishops are too left-leaning or not, if Caesar manages to erect his standards within the very walls of the temple, there will be no conscience protection clause left for anyone, nor any voice left to speak up for it. That is the hope of those pushing for this victory (and I don’t necessarily think it is President Obama, but rather a network of linked-in advisors and interest groups influencing and threatening him to push this) – that once they gag the bishops, they will have no independent body standing up to them.
It may make the end being fought for more palatable for the media and the general public if the debate is couched in the language of politics instead of religious freedom, but the Orthodox, Protestants and Jews have spoken up in solidarity with the Catholic bishops, because they recognise the threat beneath the covering of “rights” and “women’s health”.
Hear hear!
deiseach: For what it’s worth, I left an 800-word ramble for you over at Unequally Yoked. It’s regarding a history of Protestants and their school system in the Land of the Free, and the related topic of religion taught badly over in the Land that I Love.
I am curious, too, where there’s overlap in Ireland regarding education, and where our countries are distinct. (Reply there, please. It’s one thing to be ubiquitous and another to be off-topic.)
Well, to you and Ubiquitous, I’d like to point out that what I’m hearing is “sometimes we ally with fellow Christians against those who hate God and all things good, and sometimes we ally with those who hates God and all things good against fellow Christians. We pick whichever side seems right at the time.”
I think that when worded in this way, you can see why I find this a not very effective defense of the Catholic leadership.
Stopped clocks are right twice a day, and Jesus doesn’t toe the party line. If a thing is true and right on its own merits, we shouldn’t shout it down because The Wrong Sort is doing it.
Look at it a different way, the Democrats with pride bear their two sins that cry against heaven, and the Republicans with indifference do nothing or actively foster the festering of the other two. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of your Christian Party.
Besides, do you really think that any less than half of the GOP sees this HHS mandate as an opportunity before it sees this issue as an injustice? I expect them to make hay while the snow is falling — typical scuttlebutt has it that this is probably why they haven’t done anything about abortion. It’s too great an issue for mining votes out of the saps in flyover country, or so goes what against some Republicans may be calumny.
… and, again, I do not speak of the Bishops but of the Church. She and her social teaching rightly transcend partisan ties, while Bishops have been called the Democratic Party at Prayer, and it is a fair jab. But now, when the Bishops are finally waking up, when we have the first proof in ages that the Ents of Rome may be seeing Isengard — now you yet complain?
I assume that what you mean by this is “oppression of the poor, and defrauding workers of their just wages” in which case I accuse you of slander and calumny. The Republican party has never been indifferent to the plight of the poor nor to fraud of any kind. I don’t think you can point to any time in history when the poor were being oppressed or workers defrauded and the Democrats wanted to help them while the Republicans opposed helping them or even stood by doing nothing (while I can give examples of the opposite involving slavery and civil rights).
Every time that I know of when Democrats were on the side of the “poor” or the “defrauded workers”, either the poor weren’t really poor and the Democrats were just using tax money to bribe a political constituency or the workers hadn’t really been defrauded and the Democrats were just using the power of the government to chose winners and losers in a private dispute, or the Republicans agreed that the poor needed to be helped but thought that having the government take money from people at gunpoint to help them was the wrong way to do it. There are good Christian reasons to oppose government “charity”.
Well, first, the GOP doesn’t consist of church leaders who I hold to a higher standard, and second, what does it matter if they think of strategic issues? How does that invalidate their views?
Well, yes, since my whole complaint revolves around that fact that people assume that this is a sign that the bishops are waking up and I don’t see any reason to take it as such a sign. As I said, this could just be intramural squabbling.
Contemporary union relations. Despite what you might think, while most folks in the SEIU have a desk job, they sure don’t work for the big bucks, and not even for the medium bucks. Most rank-and-file in the SEIU have a high school education and would otherwise be working in fast food or some other punchcard wage. They make more than fast food, fersure, and the benefits are handy, and the work is better. But they do not make much more than fast food and the work is not just better but harder and more deserving of a higher wage.
If you can prove this characterization wrong, I will retract oppression of the poor. If you can prove that receiving a salary, perhaps handsome in 1988, is a just wage in 2012 for, say, working at the DMV, I will retract defrauding a worker of a just wage. I do not say this smugly.
(For what it’s worth, I make these charges knowing of the proud history of trustbusting and food regulation the Republicans had back in the day, and I do not mean to disparage the whole history of the GOP, just GOP-as-we-have-it, where Santorum is the cra-ha-hazy outlier Ann Coulter calls right on only 60 percent of the issues. This example is perhaps circular, considering the sort of program Santorum supported.)
Fair, but holding the GOP to the same standard as the Democrats does not makes them smell any better. Albeit with a broad brush, regarding all the issues where they are morally right, or say to be, they speak in vain repetition, like the pagans. The same old issues come up again and again, and yet barely anything gets done. They are lukewarm and the Democrats at least have the indecency to run cold.
The man who slices the neck of our children at an alarming rate and the man who does not do his utmost to prevent it are equally complicit. Feeling convicted, I think I’d better go outside a Planned Parenthood.
It doesn’t, but it, “isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.” Remember, too, that the substance of my counterclaim is that the Left and Right both serve the Beast, who is the idol of public approval, and what they say are merely the accidents rather than the substance of what their political parties respectively are. As the Niven-Pournelle Inferno pointed out, you’ll be damned to Hell just as much for being a health-food nut as for being Mr Caruso; it is the turning away from God that really matters.
In short, they’re all crooks. Should their fruit be tasty, we must expect the bottom feeders have scavenged it from some lucky dumpster and not that it represents an authentic Christian worldview. As you’ve seemed to stipulate that this comes from a genuine Christian concern, you have not shown that this is true on a wide scale, and I doubt very much it can be shown.
Which itself is not insane, and I may yet agree. But my point is that when we meet back in a year to discuss the matter, you should not have expected to side completely with the Republicans, either.
On the normative level, the Church should sides with each, both and neither simultaneously, because the Church sides with Truth. Insofar as a thing has truth behind it, it has the Church behind it. Insofar as it is of the enemy, we must place the ban on it.
To summarize: While I agree that the Democrats generally happen to side with the Beast more directly, and that the Bishops move slowly away from old alliances, I have no faith that them siding with the Republicans in a similar way as they have with the Democrats will produce Christian fruit any more than a sewer will produce corn. The ultimate fealty of the political hack is to Mammon and the Beast and not to God; it is not just folly but damned folly to presume otherwise.
You should retract your accusation on the basis that this characterization right, not that it is wrong. As you say yourself, members of the SEIU are making more money with more benefits in an easier job than they could be making in the private sector. That means that they are being paid more than their contribution to the economy warrants. It is not the wager earners who are being defrauded here, but the taxpayers.
And none of these wage earners is poor. They all have cars, cell phones, X-boxes, laptop computers with internet access, refrigerators, excellent medical coverage, more food than they can possibly eat, designer clothes, warm or air-conditioned houses, extensive education for their children, extensive free time, financial security for their old age, and enough extra money to travel and see foreign wonders if they so chose. They do not suffer from lack in any objective sense of the word. They live lives of immense wealth by the standards of Jesus’s time. It is only envy that makes them poor, and I should think Catholics would be less supportive of envy and grasping after things of this world.
So the Republicans are as bad as the Democrats because although the Democrats actively support evil, the Republicans have not been able so successfully overcome them?
If Republicans repeat themselves, maybe it is because they persist in the face of failure. Would you prefer that they give up on stopping abortion just because they have failed so far? And if their repetitions are vain, maybe it is because they have not been able to gather enough support from people like the Catholic church. So essentially you are saying that Republicans do not deserve the full support of the Catholic church because they have not been able to win without that support.
On this we can agree. On the other hand, the Republican party has a good history of casting out politicians once they have been shown to be corrupt, while the Democrat party tends to gather around and defend them. A few years ago, the Democrats had in national office a man who committed manslaughter as consequence of a drunken sex party, a former leader of the KKK, and three men who were known to have taken or solicited bribes. And all of these men had been elected at least once after their crimes came to light. Three of those five have since died, but the situation is little better given all of the new corruption that has come to light recently. There have been corrupt and immoral Republicans, but they seldom get re-elected. The point being that Republican voters at least, unlike Democrat voters, genuinely seem to care about virtue.
If Catholics were to join the other Christians in the Republican party, they could help to make the party more virtuous and the combined political force might be able to roll back some of the evils perpetrated by the Leftist/Catholic coalition.
And that issue-by-issue strategy that you claim for the Catholic church has severe limits. In the voting booth you don’t have the power to vote Democrat on this issue and Republican on that. You have to vote for a Democrat or a Republican. And granted that the Republican is not perfect according to your political principles. He may may want to cut welfare for people who live like kings according to any historical standard and may want to reduce the amount of money that the government takes from one group and transfers to another that you may think more deserving. But he’s not going to support the killing of babies (typically). He won’t risk his political career to continue funding of Planned Parenthood and he won’t support federal mandates that require anyone to pay for someone else to have birth control. I really don’t see why there is even a question for Catholics about who to vote for. I really don’t.
I emphasize:
This is the nut of it.
As for your comment regarding the Republicans:
Locally maybe; nationally, no. I do not trust that the party has its full effort behind this. They are complicit in the failure because they do not persist so much as remember to put on a show every now and then. Repetitions are made vain not because of a lack of success but because of a failure in intent or effort.
The Bishops, as prominent citizens, do have this luxury, which is the point of discussion.
In order for me to respond, you will have to explain to me in what sense sitting at a desk and typing on a keyboard is harder than cleaning toilets, standing all day, and working with hot stoves and boiling grease. And I know someone who had one of those “easier” low paying jobs who was incapacitated for several weeks due to burns from a deep-fryer, so you might want to include how risk is accounted for in this judgment that government work is harder.
More importantly, you will have to explain in what sense the person with the better, higher-paying job with better benefits is more deserving than the person with the worse, lower-paying job with almost no benefits. Frankly, I find the suggestion a bit offensive on its face. In my view, what makes people more deserving has nothing to do with what their job is. It is about how faithfully they attend their duties (both work-related and not), how generous they are with what they have, and how they treat their neighbors.
On the other hand, I also don’t think the government should be in the business of rewarding these more deserving people because the process will inevitably become corrupt and will end up being just another way for politicians to move money to their friends and supporters. I’ll leave it up to generous individuals and to God to make sure that they get their rewards. Cesar is a poor substitute for God.
To take a side discussion where it may nest more.
Trust in princes?
Which presumes the evils — another point, since you’ve brought it up, which is at issue.
I oppose the inward sense of entitlement, but the characters I see in my life are not as of the people you’d meet through Theodore Dalrymple. I support work-for-welfare programs and sensible unemployment programs and I oppose the hammock; I have yet to meet anyone really in the hammock. Who I’ve met who has been on welfare was not someone who described it as such a cakewalk. If that she is no longer on welfare does not speak to how enjoyable she found it, then I can only hope to convey her gratitude that such a program existed that she not end up in the gutter in a time of crisis.
Surely you can respect that I have no reasonable data other than the dream of men — whose fealty is to the Beast, we both admit — that in our country our policies have such effects more than the alternative, that they do more harm than the good is worth. As a Christian, I see that the good is potentially very great.
I may yet be persuaded on this point, and I do not write as an ideologue. All comers are welcome, as my primary interest is truth.
I ran into this today, it is how the other side sees the issue:
http://wearewomanmarch.blogspot.com/p/about.html