What’s Wrong with the World

Via the eccentric and interesting blogger Reihan, of The American Scene, comes this fascinating piece of Wikipediana related to Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the so-called Church of Satan:

Blanche Barton, author of an autobiography of Satanist Anton LaVey, not speaking disparagingly, has suggested that the Neo-Tech "system of thought...offers Satanism in a grey flannel suit, promises overnight wealth, and never mentions the dreaded `S' word."

Mark Steyn has been banging on for many months now about the demographic decline of the great liberal welfare states of the West (and East), especially compared to the enviable fecundity of the Islamic world. Now James C. Capretta, in an interesting piece for The Weekly Standard underlines the point that this decline has everything to do with the (apparently unchallengeable) ascendancy of government-run pension systems like Social Security.

As Capretta points out, "a primary motivation for having children in earlier times was economic security in old age. As parents became frail and less productive, it was expected that one or more of their adult children would take care of them, oftentimes by bringing them into their homes. Married couples thus 'invested' in numerous children, in part, to ensure there would be family members to care for them in their twilight years. With state-run Social Security, the government has largely assumed this family responsibility. Married couples have a greatly diminished economic incentive to have children, because now they are counting on--and paying for--government-based old age support."

Take away that "primary motivation," and the consequences are (or should have been) predictable: "a government-run pension system equal to 10 percent of a country's economy correlates with a reduction in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR)--which measures the average number of births per woman during her lifetime--of between 0.7 and 1.6 children, after controlling for other variables...This is extraordinary given that most industrialized countries now have TFRs well below 2.0...The bigger the Social Security scheme, the steeper the fertility decline."

To which I would add that "government-based old age support" (which, in the US, includes Medicare as well as Social Security) not only reduces the natural incentives for having babies, but also the incentives for raising them rightly.

Which is to say: it reduces the incentives for bringing up one's children - for training them - in the traditional middle-class virtues: i.e., in industry. In prudence. In temperance. In fidelity. Etc. Instead, as Pavel Kohout has pointed out, people in the modern welfare state can increasingly afford to treat their children as "pets" - indulged, and flattered, and encouraged to "follow their bliss," as the phrase goes.

Can you say "disaster in the making?" For although programs like Social Security and Medicare make it less important from the individual point of view to have lots of kids and to bring them up conservatively (so to speak), the long-term solvency of such programs precisely depends on people going on doing just that. Over to Mr. Capretta:

"Gunnar Myrdal, the eminent Swedish socialist economist, observed in the 1940s that state-run, pay-as-you-go pension systems are built on a fundamental 'contradiction': They reduce the economic incentive within a family to have children, even as they remain ever dependent on a new generation of productive workers."

Capretta's whole piece is well worth a read. But there is one point where I part company with him. And that point concerns the essential nature of the disaster that is in the making here. For him, the worry is that the welfare state might prove unsustainable, unless we can get people to have more babies. But he seems not to be at all bothered by the collapse of traditional expectations about what family members owe to one another. He writes:

"Acknowledgment of Social Security's role in fertility decline is not an argument for abandoning government-sponsored old age support. The elderly--and their adult children--far prefer financial independence to dependence..."

To which I'm inclined to reply: well, yeah, sure. Old folks don't want to be reduced to dependency on their children. And young folks don't want to get stuck with the burden of looking after their parents. So if you're looking to maximize (short-term) preference-satisfaction, such programs are the way to go.

But is that any way to make people better people?

Correct me if I'm wrong - but I might have thought that the mutual and unbreakable ties of obligation that bind parent to child and child to parent are among the essential features of our humanity, and that anything that weakens - or promises to replace - those ties, however superficially attractive to both parties to that relationship, is the devil's own brew. Why should I welcome a world in which parents pamper their children, and where children abandon their parents, with an easy conscience, so long as the whole system is enonomically sustainable?

I was recently involved in a discussion about a sperm donor (or his estate, if I recall correctly, but it isn't important) being sued by a lesbian couple to whom he had donated his sperm. A child was born, the child was adopted by the lesbian couple, the male donor's estate was sued for money.

The knee-jerk reaction to this kind of case seems to be that it is wrong to view the natural parent as having any obligation to support the child once the child has been adopted by another. But that knee-jerk reaction is, in my view, wrong.

One fact of nature and development that decisively separates America from her ancestors in Europe is that “wild unknown country” out West. At one time in our history it was only as far west as the Appalachians, then it shifted to the west bank of the Mississippi; and even when parts of the farther West were settled, whole huge swaths of its interior remained wilderness. Some are almost so to this day. When the last region of Europe to be settled was settled can only be conjectured, I think, but it was before the first was settled in North America. Columbus sought a western route to the East, not because Europeans did not know the East, but because a great martial Eastern Power blocked access to it. So Columbus found North America, and Americans have been finding more of it ever since (or least they had been, until relatively recently.)

Though I have been a resident of Southern states for over a decade now, and even tentatively consider myself an adopted son of the South, I was in fact born and raised in Denver, Colorado. My ancestors were the first Italians in that fair city.

Those of you who take a little torture with your TV dinner might be experiencing a bit of post-game letdown now that the final episode of this season's 24 has come and gone.

Paul Cella has long wanted one of us here to savage the show, believing that it perpetrates much mischief in the American moral imagination, or what's left of it. He is apalled that millions of his fellow citizens watch it weekly, unrepelled by certain of Jack's interrogation techniques, which this season included snipping off a Russian diplomat's finger with a pair of wirecutters.

A professor at Washington and Lee University by the name of Eduardo Velázquez, in his recent book A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse — in my incomplete reading, a rip-roaring adventure in polemics and philosophy, bombast and humor, caricature and insight — dedicates a chapter to a careful analysis of the music and lyrics of Dave Matthews. Now for those readers over 40, Dave Matthews is the songwriter and frontman for an exceedingly successful rock band, whose albumic strategy, if you will, has largely consisted of a couple very catchy tunes supported by a mass of more complex and enterprising material, much of which is uneven but the great peaks of which have formed the soundtrack for a generation of young men and women.

Lawrence Auster, the prolific blogger over at View From the Right, has posted an enlightening letter from a reader, who has summarized the atheism-inspired philosophical declension of John Derbyshire, National Reviews' resident curmudgeon.

I should state, for the record, that neither "peak oil" nor "global warming" impress me as being inherently "liberal", though certain policy responses to either would assuredly be "liberal". And while I'm more in the "how you take your Darwin" camp than the "whether you take your Darwin" camp, the role of untethered Darwinian speculation in the Derb's evolution merits reflection. Were we a people given to myth and legend, Darwinian thought would surely figure in myth as one of those benefactions that can destroy, or as a basis of civilization that also alienates us from ourselves. But enough of my thoughts. Read the letter.

Scholars and theorists thrashing about in the waters of postmodernism sooner or later encounter a bizarre and stupefying fact: Michel Foucault had a thing for the Islamic revolution, had, in fact, a rather unnatural affection for it. To what can we attribute this shattering aporia?

David Frum, in a brief blog review of a recent scholarly interrogation of this theme, Foucaut and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, writes:

...of all the absurd infatuations ever to sweep literary Paris, none has ever matched the absolute incongruity of Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling, a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene, decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation.

How could Foucault – for all his absurdities, obviously no idiot – have talked himself into believing anything so manifestly absurd?

Speaking of keeping the wolves away from the cattle, The New Atlantis brings us this eye-opening book review by Cheryl Miller.

She asks too whether feminists’ commitment to equality and “social justice” is compatible with the eugenic possibilities of ART [assisted reproductive technologies - ed.], particularly the way clinics divide women into the different “categories” of donors and surrogates. “Most surrogates I come across are not typical donor caliber as far as looks, physical features, or education,” one doctor explains. “Most egg donors are smart young girls doing it for the money to pay for college. Most surrogates are—you know, they need the money; they’re at home with four kids—of a lower socioeconomic class.” Or as another physician more succinctly explains the value of this “breeder class” of women: “Moo.”

“[I]t is insufficient to consider only the welfare of the child, which cannot, in any case, be isolated from that of the parent. Thus the primary concern should be for the welfare of the family as a whole.”

... what he means is ...

"The most important thing is fulfilling the narcissistic desires of adults. If we have to feed a few untermensch children-accessories, sperm donors, and breeder-women into a meat grinder in order to carry out the will of the free and equal superman, so be it."

What follows is a discussion of an issue with many empirical aspects to it. Because pro-lifers have been urged to get on board with the proposal in question, I think it's important for us to have an informed opinion. The empirical statements in what follows all have evidence for them, but I am interested in and open to corrections of any of them, the more so as I am not an embryologist and have studied these matters only as an amateur.

The procedure in question is called ANT-OAR: Altered nuclear transfer oocyte assisted reproduction. My position is that ANT-OAR is wrong, not primarily because the entities it would produce would be human embryos (in one current versions of the proposal, I'm presently inclined to think that they would not be), but even if the entities it produces are not human embryos. My position against ANT-OAR is thus, as far as I know, original in the debate.

Via Rod Dreher, members of the Animal Liberation Front wishing an excruciating death upon a ten-year-old boy suffering from terminal cancer:

I can only hope the boy's death was a painful one. If you think about it though, this story has a somewhat happy ending. A young boy dying; therefore he can not grow up, spawn some other mutant losers and teach them how to hunt. I wonder how satan is treating him???(Note: the ALF site requires registration, a procedure to which I will not submit; hence, my quotation of the fool Dreher cites, Dreher having his ways.)

I don't have any third thoughts, any reconsiderations, beyond the observation that, if this is the face of environmentalism and conservationism, it is no wonder that most Americans simply roll their eyes and continue to live as though the modern, suburban lifestyle could be perpetuated indefinitely, which it cannot. These things are all rolled together in the American consciousness. I'm much more sympathetic to conservation concerns that most conservatives, so far as I can determine, but given the choice between folks like the ALF on the one hand, and shooting bears and guzzling gas on the other, well, I'd like to drive my Yukon to every last state and national park and shoot a bear in each one.

...Just as pointless as the New Fusionism:

What Lindsay, who enthusiastically supported the Iraq war, doesn’t say—or isn’t quoted as saying—is that he hates Paul’s old right and quintessentially libertarian opposition to our foreign policy of global interventionism. Senor Lindsay and his fellow ”modern" libertarians have made their peace with the Empire. As long as they can take drugs, abort fetuses, and sodomize each other to their hearts’ content, he and his Beltway buddies have no problem with the US rampaging over half the earth, regime-changing and taking out “rogue” states at will. As long as it’s a “free market” empire, they’re all in favor of it. (Justin Raimondo, at Taki's Top Drawer.)

Update: It is worth noting that the Other New Fusionism has the advantage of coherence, which the New Fusionism simply lacks, inasmuch as the former combines a utilitarian/hedonist social ethic with a foreign policy utterly utilitarian in essence, wanting as it is for a moral warrant, while the latter attempts, vainly, to combine a substantive social ethic with that same foreign policy. At the meta-level, this is one reason why the social conservatives are not only dupes and suckers, often enough, but almost destined to witness the defeat of their ostensibly highest aspirations: their functional non-negotiables accept all the premises of their substantive adversaries. They have conceded 90% of the debate already.

As a pro-choicer, that is.

Well, sort of. He still calls himself "pro-life." I don't know how that makes him compare to Rudy Giuliani. Does that make Giuliani more honest, or what?

Some of us have had real questions about Thompson on this score already because of the statements he made in 1994. (Please note that the guy whose blog this is was evidently the founder of the libertarian organization that gave Thompson the interview in 1994 in which he said that "government should stay out of" the abortion decision.)

But anyway, the 1994 remarks are more or less moot now, given this recent interview with Tim Russert. Thompson is unequivocal there that abortion should not be illegal, though he still says definitely that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.

He casts the question of legality in typically pro-choice terms: throwing "very young girls, their parents, and their family doctors" in prison. Has the man never heard of Planned Parenthood? Doesn't he know that abortion clinics exist? Does he really believe that pro-lifers want to throw thirteen-year-old girls into prison for obtaining abortions?

And I wouldn't care if a doctor as homey and paternal-looking as C. Everett Koop performed an abortion. An abortionist is an abortionist, whether he is a "family doctor" or not. This is all typical pro-choice claptrap. It is hard to believe that Thompson either believes it himself or thinks he can get away with spouting it and also being considered pro-life. But if Rudy is wooing social conservative voters without calling for the overturn of Roe, merely by mouthing a mantra about judicial appointments, why shouldn't Thompson try to get one up on him, grabbing the "pro-life" label by advocating overturning Roe, while advocating legal abortion?

Sadly enough, we've come far enough down in our political process that that is, pragmatically speaking, a good question.

Peter Suderman, writing at The American Scene, apparently wishes to analogize radical life extension to ordinary health care:

One of the biggest political debates in the country right now is over health care and health insurance. Read books like Jonathan Cohn’s Sick and you’ll be inundated with stories purporting to show situations in which people died for lack of care. The underlying reasoning here — reasoning that I suspect is shared by the majority of the population — is that no one should die when the technology exists to keep them alive. So why does technology-driven radical life extension spook so many people? I’m honestly baffled by this, and have yet to read anything that amounts to much more than someone’s account of having a vague moral instinct that living that long would be a perversion of human existence.

...a transfer of resources away from two kinds of people: (a) some who are already alive and don’t have the potential or wherewithal to buy into the methuselocracy and (b) a possibly very large number of people who will have to not be born.

Human rights will be fundamentally rejiggered in the methuselocracy, for no more grandiose reason than that people who are alive have a selfish interest in generally not dying for as long as their resources and ingenuity permit.

One October 21, op-ed writer for the Waco Tribune-Herald, John Young, published a piece entitled,"In search of `pro-lifers who are really anti-abortion." I published a response in the paper eight days later, "Let us define pro-life for you." I reproduce it here:

In his Oct. 21 column, John Young claims to offer a critique of the pro-life position on abortion. Yet, he never once reveals to us the content of the pro-life position.

What then is the pro-life position? It is the view that the membership of the human community includes prenatal human beings, even if excluding them would benefit those who are more powerful than the prenatal and who believe that the prenatal’s destruction is in their interest.

It is the view that human beings have intrinsic dignity by nature that is not a consequence of their size, level of development, environment or dependency.

Somebody page Humpty Dumpty. Some folks in Washington State think they can make the word 'negligent', in a legal context, mean whatever they want it to mean. These stellar parents sued doctors at the hospital where their baby was born for negligence for continuing resuscitation efforts for an hour when the child was born without a heartbeat...because he survived with disabilities.

It boggles the mind.

A hearty cheer for the Washington State Supreme Court, however. I don't know much about that court, and for all I know it may have handed down lots of other bad decisions, but this time, the court did the right thing and came down on the side of the doctors.

HT Wesley J. Smith at Secondhand Smoke

The liberal dogma of Zero Group Differences, explained by John Derbyshire in terms of the following experiment -

Experiment Y: Take a largish group—say five thousand—of people at random from any fairly compact, but not too compact, populated region—fifty to a hundred miles across, say—anywhere in the world. Now take a second group of the same size from some other similar region elsewhere. Run both groups through batteries of mental and personality tests.

Experiment Y will, under all circumstances, with all possible combinations of groups, deliver identical statistical profiles on all metrics, with only statistically insignificant variations.

If group differences are real as a matter of statistical averages, then disparate outcomes are more or less entailed, and those of European descent cannot be blamed for this. If so, vast sectors of our contemporary political and economic culture are an absurdist kabuki theatre, a tableau of pretense and, in the case of those, say, denied admission to schools for which they are plainly qualified, injustice. Immigration and globalization become, on various levels, alliances of the elites and the global poor and underclasses against the middle, and the American future begins to assume the sociological shape of Brazil, instead of that of a first-world nation. We can have our literature back. And so on and so forth.

With respect to the Zero Group Differences mythology discussed in Maximos' post below, a commenter observes:

Essentially, a "noble lie" (Zero Group Differences) has been constructed to counter an ignoble one (ateleological reductionism), in order to prevent the horrific consequences that would follow from people accepting the latter on its own en masse.

So my understanding of the strength of the "zero group differences" mythology in the face of what has always been massive evidence against is this: that implicitly everyone understands that it is the only thing standing between the advanced liberal superman and the nazi.

I cannot hope to approach the aptness of Srdja Trifkovic's own title, Kosovo as a Symbol of Anti-Postmodernism, and so I have not tried. Nevertheless, the essay is a masterful summation of the significance this little piece of Balkan territory holds in the not-so-playful scheme of signifiers regnant in the West. Selected excerpts follow.

Blissfully unaware of the cultural tectonic shift that has taken place in “the West,” many Serbian political leaders, analysts and institutions in their contacts with the Western elite class keep invoking four sets of arguments in support of their position that Kosovo ought to remain part of Serbia:
1. Historical: Kosovo was the heartland of the Serbian medieval state;
2. Cultural: in Kosovo there are many priceless monuments of Serbian art and architecture that define Serbia’s contribution to the common European heritage;
3. Spiritual: Kosovo is “Serbia’s Jerusalem”;
4. Civilizational: Kosovo should not fall to the insurgent jihad.

As Jupiter could be hidden from all-devouring Time, as the Christ Child could be hidden from Herod--so the child unborn is still hidden from the omniscient oppressor. He...alone is left; and they seek his life to take it away.

G.K. Chesterton, from Eugenics and Other Evils, as quoted in Alvaro da Silva, ed., Brave New Family

For Holy Innocents' Day, a story with a happy ending from the Population Research Institute. (The story is from PRI's Global Family Life News, not available on-line.) PRI has set up a Chinese safe house in the first instance to help women pursued by the population control police of China when they are pregnant with second or otherwise "unlicensed" children. This story makes no mention of the forces of the law, though pregnancy outside of wedlock is, according to other PRI publications, usually illegal in China as well. But in this case, the mother, whom they refer to as "Rachel," was chiefly under intense pressure from her own family to abort her child.

Here's a disturbing story, one that is still in play and where those of you Christians out there might perhaps still make a difference by prayer.

16-year-old Javona Peters suffered severe brain damage when she had an allergic reaction to the anesthetic during what should have been relatively minor surgery. Though this all happened only two months ago, doctors are saying she is in a "persistent vegetative state." Her mother wants to remove her feeding tube (which the story calls "pulling the plug"--a highly misleading phrase) so that she will dehydrate to death and the mother can get on with suing the hospital. (The story also uses the demeaning phrase "ending what is left of her life.")

Until a few days ago, her father was adamantly opposed to any such thing, saying, admirably, "I don't give life and I cannot take a life." Her parents are estranged, and her father has custody. A court hearing is scheduled for January 7. I gather that this is a custody hearing; the mother hopes to get custody so she can authorize Javona's death by dehydration.

Touchstone Magazine has notified me (and certainly Paul, too) that its Jan/Feb 2006 issue is now available online, and has further offered encouragement to link to it. There's a bunch of good reading in it, including our own Paul Cella's review of Thomas Woods' How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Annually this number of the magazine puts a special focus on pro-life issues, and I am glad to have been a part of it twice, in this case offering a personal reflection called "A Stone for Shmuel." The title refers to this little fellow, who appeared in the magazine but is absent from the online version:

This just over the wire:

HENDERSON, Nev. (AP) - Democrat Barack Obama says he won't just be a president for the American people, but the animals too.

"What about animal rights?" a woman shouted out during the candidate's town hall meeting outside Las Vegas Wednesday after he discussed issues that relate more to humans, like war, health care and the economy.

Obama responded that he cares about animal rights very much, "not only because I have a 9-year-old and 6-year-old who want a dog." He said he sponsored a bill to prevent horse slaughter in the Illinois state Senate and has been repeatedly endorsed by the Humane Society.

"I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other," he said. "And it's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals."

Contrast those words with Obama's comments about the Supreme Court's 2007 opinion upholding the federal partial-birth abortion ban:

One day last week, while running a number of errands on a day away from the office - the state of PA neglected to send us a renewal form for my wife's driver's license, and, on top of that, her mobile phone was pilfered - I noticed a bumper sticker new to me, printed in that semi-florid script which usually distinguishes vacuous new-agey pseudo-profundities. The text, which I have not been able to locate on the internet, read, in what is at least a passable paraphrase, "The blessing of life lies in the consciousness of the blessing."

No doubt all in my audience will remember the passage in Slouching Towards Gomorrah where Robert Bork tells about walking down the hall during the Anita Hill hearings and saying to Irving Kristol, "They're showing the end of Western civilization on television."

Well, here's another moment rather like that: Dawn Eden links to a Planned Parenthood worker, a blogger, who openly admits that she provided birth control pills for a 12-year-old girl whom the blogger suspects is being coerced into sexual intercourse by a man much older than herself. And not reporting it, of course, to any authorities, despite the fact that such a "health worker" is legally a mandatory reporter of child abuse.

Each society, having attained an indeterminate, though critical degree of sophistication, develops and elaborates characteristic modes of aesthetic expression. In healthy, integral societies, these modes are disseminated throughout; though there may be higher and lower expressions of these forms - as with the relationship of classical music to various folk traditions. Seen under another aspect, these aesthetic forms are not separate from life; they do not confront members of a healthy civilization as an otherness to which one repairs in order to escape from a discontinuous and ostensibly hideous and impoverished reality. Art may express the sense of the transcendent - indeed, it cannot but do this on some level - but it is not regarded as salvific.

Hence, each society develops an implicit iconography, a series of images, tropes, and forms which constitute a sort of natural sacred, which disclose in sensory forms the religious ethos of that society. Without words, these may direct even the unlettered as to what, and to whom, reverence is owed. Communist societies, such as the Soviet Union of my wife's youth, for example, merely substituted for icons of Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints images of communist personages; and one might even suggest that socialist realism developed a sort of cycle of images, an obvious analogue and replacement for cycles of sacred images. Constructivism added further grotesqueries to the iconography of communist society, and socialist realism itself easily descended from the heights of hagiographic excess to the bathos of simple propaganda. And this is not to slight the monumental sculpture of communism, which, in its brutal modernism, perfectly embodied the essential inhumanity and violence of communism, theory and practice.

She used to look like this:

Not so much anymore.

And again we have a split between the victim's loved ones, this time between divorced parents: a father who wants to care for her and a mother who swears Lauren told her she'd "never want to live like that." The Court of Chancery believes the latter, and has awarded guardianship to her, as the state of Delaware's legal system stirs itself into sluggish but relentless motion, and the machinery of death once again takes on a certain 'life' of its own.

You can begin reading the story here, at Terrisfight.

You can also see the father's interview on Hannity and Colmes.

A YouTube video of Lauren with family (including the dog).

And a website devoted to her cause.

Intellectual and spiritual dumpster diving, that is: Rod Dreher links to Franky Schaeffer's maudlin hymn to Barack Obama, which, aside from inducing an almost-convulsive feeling of revulsion, confirmed me in my earlier judgment that the man has slipped the tether.

Those who earlier engaged in the ascetical act of reading Schaeffer's interview with John Whitehead concerning the former's misbegotten memoir will recognize in this latest missive the regurgitation of some rotten tropes. It's all there: his intellectual rejection of his past, his emotional reflexes towards that past, which he must check, and the sub-rationality of his present political leanings.

If I could proffer just a few words of counsel to Schaeffer, they would be the encouragement to Just. Go. Away. If you are bound and determined to make your peace with the liberal compact, the privatization of normative commitments which are properly public - and you know what these are - then do so quietly, and privately, causing no scandal by identifying my Church with the endorsement of Moloch-worship. Cease engaging in warfare with the past, as though you were still an adolescent rebelling against your father, and drop the pretense that your present views are so much more sophisticated and spiritual than those you held then - if there is any truth to the accounts of that past, the one constant is the need to stand on the corner shouting, "I thank Thee, O God, that I am not like those people", in this case the fundamentalists, God-botherers, and people who actually understand Christian ethics.

Update on February 26, 2008: For this blog entry, I relied on a press release by the group, "Students for Life," which referred to the hecklers as "prolife students." But I have since been told by several prolife students from the Franciscan University (Steubenville) who were present at the event that none of the hecklers was a student. So, students from the university were indeed protesting, but they were doing so in a respectful way. Although I did not mention Franciscan University by name, I can see why the protesting students from that fine institution would not like it implied that they had engaged in behavior in which they in fact did not engage.

In private email correspondence, Caroline Nye, a member of the Franciscan University College Republicans, has permitted me to publish on this blog her note of correction that I received on the evening of February 25:

I would first like to say that I applaud your support of the pro-life movement. However, as a member of College Republicans and as a Franciscan University student who personally attended the peaceful protest against Bill Clinton in Steubenville, Ohio, I would like to comment about the statement you made regarding students heckling the former president. You are quoted as saying, "what the 'students' did was disrespectful, and as a pro-lifer I condemn such conduct" (Weblog: "What's Wrong with the World" and EWTN news article). I would like to clarify that it was not in fact a "student" that yelled out during Clinton's speech. The man was not a student at Franciscan University and he had no connection with our organization. Furthermore, the entire goal of our protest was to be peaceful. While waiting outside, we prayed rosaries as a group. We recognize that violence and angry out bursts do not accomplish our peaceful objectives. I felt that it was necessary to bring the true facts to your attention and respectfully request that you retract your statement regarding "students" heckling the former president.

Bill Clinton said this today at a rally for his wife in Steubenville, Ohio:

I gave you the answer. We disagree with you,...You wanna criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree. I reduced abortion. Tell the truth, tell the truth, If you were really pro-life, if you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother as an accessory to murder in prison. And you won't say you wanna do that because you know, that you wouldn't have a lick of political support. Now, the issue is who, the issue is, you can't name me anybody presently in politics that did more to introduce policies that reduce the number of real abortions instead of the hot air putting out to tear people up and make votes by dividing America. This is not your rally. I heard you. That's another thing you need is a president, somebody who will stick up for individual rights and not be pushed around, and she won't.

Certainly, the prolife students, who you can hear in the audio portion of this video, should not have heckled President Clinton. What the students did was disrespectful, and as a prolifer I condemn such conduct. Nevertheless, there's a way to deal with such hecklers without engaging in an ad hominem attack against prolifers in general, which is precisely what President Clinton did in his remarks. In fact, it seemed to me (and this could just be my own bias at work) that the President's harsh response revealed a deep and unhealthy bitterness that he harbors against prolife citizens. Sadly, instead of taking the high road and defending the permissibility of abortion by explaining why he believes the view of the students is mistaken (or at least should be tabled for a more appropriate venue), the former occupant of the White House chose the low road and attacked the intellectual integrity of every American citizen who holds the prolife view.

In any event, I answer President Clinton's argument in chapter 5 of my book, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007), a portion of which I reproduce below (endnotes omitted):

Via Mark Shea, David Kopel writes that College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba assert the power and duty of physicians to euthanize the untermenschen, irrespective of the wishes of patients and their family members.

The right to die becomes the preference for death becomes the expectation of the affirmative choice for death becomes the duty to choose death becomes the mandate to die - and this mandate will be enforced, inasmuch as, having lost the capacity for autonomy, you stand as an affront to the authoritative doctrines of the age, a weak and debilitated reminder of human frailty and dependency, an existential refutation of the self-positing, self-creating man-god, who knows neither reason nor the Good, but only will and power. And so it is willed that you not be.

On February 17, 2008 I posted an entry titled, "Bill Clinton Lashes Out at Prolife Students." In addition to criticizing the former president, I chastised those who heckled the president, referring to them as "prolife students." I relied on a press release by the group, "Students for Life," which referred to the hecklers as "prolife students." But I have since been told by several prolife students from the Franciscan University (Steubenville) who were present at the event that none of the hecklers was a student. So, students from the university were indeed protesting, but they were doing so in a respectful way. Although I did not mention Franciscan University by name, I can see why the protesting students from that fine institution would not like it implied that they had engaged in behavior in which they in fact did not engage.

In private email correspondence, Caroline Nye, a member of the Franciscan University College Republicans, has permitted me to publish on this blog her note of correction that I received yesterday evening:

I would first like to say that I applaud your support of the pro-life movement. However, as a member of College Republicans and as a Franciscan University student who personally attended the peaceful protest against Bill Clinton in Steubenville, Ohio, I would like to comment about the statement you made regarding students heckling the former president. You are quoted as saying, "what the 'students' did was disrespectful, and as a pro-lifer I condemn such conduct" (Weblog: "What's Wrong with the World" and EWTN news article). I would like to clarify that it was not in fact a "student" that yelled out during Clinton's speech. The man was not a student at Franciscan University and he had no connection with our organization. Furthermore, the entire goal of our protest was to be peaceful. While waiting outside, we prayed rosaries as a group. We recognize that violence and angry out bursts do not accomplish our peaceful objectives. I felt that it was necessary to bring the true facts to your attention and respectfully request that you retract your statement regarding "students" heckling the former president.

This appeared in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer. Pennsylvania U. S. Senator Rick Santorum asks the question and then answers it: "Who would oppose a bill that said you couldn't kill a baby who was born? Not Kennedy, Boxer or Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even the hard-core National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Obama, however, is another story. The year after the Born Alive Infants Protection Act became federal law in 2002, identical language was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate. It was defeated with the committee's chairman, Obama, leading the opposition." Here former Senator Santorum's essay in its entirety:

First of all, a blessed Good Friday to our readers. I realize that any of you folks who are of the Eastern Orthodox persuasion are not celebrating Good Friday today, so I ask for your indulgence. I'll be wishing everybody a joyous Easter on Sunday, too, so this is a warning. (The wisdom of the Eastern Easter dating is, I must admit, rather evident just now where I'm located. We are having what may add up to be a record snowfall before Holy Saturday morning.)

Now: Wesley J. Smith has been blogging about the infamous case of a Dr. Roozrokh out in California. (See here, [unfortunately, the detailed news story linked from this article, which I read when Smith first linked it, has disappeared] here, and here. Here is the judge's opinion.) Dr. Roozrokh is going to trial for "dependent adult abuse." The allegation, attested by multiple witnesses, is as follows: Dr. Roozrokh is a transplant surgeon. He arrived at a hospital where a patient was going to be taken off life support so that a "non-heart-beating donation" could take place. This method, sometimes called the Pittsburgh Protocol, involves taking a person who is not brain-dead but is believed to be ventilator dependent off of the ventilator. When the person's heart stops beating, doctors wait for five minutes to see if he starts breathing or his heart stops beating again. If nothing happens, he is declared dead and the transplant team takes the organs. Only in this case, the patient actually wasn't so ventilator-dependent as all that, so he kept breathing. Everyone is agreed that protocols were flagrantly violated in that the transplant team was not even supposed to be in the room until the patient was declared dead by his own attending physician. But they were. And it just gets worse from there.

Catholic bishop Erwin Kräutler, of the Altamira diocese in the western Amazon region of Brazil, reportedly has a half-million dollar bounty on his head, all for opposing the dispossession of indigenous peoples and farmers by ranchers and other interests, debt slavery, and sexual slavery.

The situation may have a liberation theology angle, though this would seem not to be terribly pertinent, given that the abuses, economic and otherwise, are manifest. Resisting injustice is not Marxist praxis.

(HT: Henry Karlson.)

I bet you think you know what this post is about. Muslim violence, right? Wrong.

Mark Pickup, for those of you unfamiliar with him, is a long-time pro-life writer and, nowadays, blogger who has progressive multiple sclerosis. I've talked just a little about him here.

We all know about the thuggish intimidation tactics of the Religion of Peace (tm). "Say we're a peaceful, non-violent religion, or we'll kill you," is pretty much their slogan. What is less well-known even among conservatives is the history of violence among death worshipers of other sorts. The pro-aborts and pro-euthanasia types have done an excellent public relations job of portraying themselves as flower children who stand about singing "Love Makes the World Go 'Round," their violent proclivities limited to...the unborn, the disabled, the elderly. Well, so okay, maybe pro-lifers don't think they're nonviolent. But still, the impression often is that at least they don't engage in ideologically motivated violence against fellow talking, mentally competent human beings over their political disagreements. Human Life Review did a service years ago by publishing this article about little-known incidents of pro-abortion ideological violence.

Now I come to learn today that Mark Pickup has been the recipient of intimidating communications (letters? e-mails? phone calls?) warning him not to write about Robert Latimer. For those of you who don't know who Robert Latimer might be...

In many of my posts touching on foreign policy and the analysis thereof, I have referred to America's strategy of openness, a trope for the orthodoxies of the American establishment, according to which America, a society from which a cohesive cultural identity has been scoured by the deracinating forces of mobility, the fetishization of economic growth, vapid consumerism, mass immigration, and the failures of statist social engineering, requires a policy of globalization, underwritten by an interventionist foreign policy, in order to avoid disintegrating into a squabbling Babel of classes, ethnicities, interests, and ideologies.

As Prof. Andrew Bacevich was quoted in the original post -

In a society in which citizens were joined to one another by little except a fetish for shopping, professional sports, and celebrities along with a ravenous appetite for pop culture, prosperity became a precondition for preserving domestic harmony. Arguing on behalf of a populist vision of an engaged, independent, self-reliant citizenry, an acerbic critic like Lasch might rail against luxury as morally repugnant, insisting that "a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation." But in reality the prospect of unlimited accumulation had long since become the lubricant that kept the system functioning. A booming economy alleviated, or at least kept at bay, social and political dysfunction. Any interruption in economic growth could induce friction, stoke discontent, and bring to the surface old resentments, confronting elected officials with problems for which they possessed no readily available solutions. Lasch may well have been correct in charging that "the reduction of the citizen to the consumer" produces a hollowed-out American democracy. But by the 1990s no one knew now to undo the damage without risking a massive conflagration.

This being neither ethical, responsible stewardship, nor licit 'dominion' over the creatures of the earth, the two concepts positively excluding the deliberate infliction of grotesque cruelties, I associate myself completely with Lawrence Auster and Spencer Warren's opposition to this "hunt". For the sake of clarity, I do not place this moral enormity at the same depth in the moral abyss as the things we permit to be done to the unborn. I suggest only that a culture which assigns moral worth in accordance with sentience can justify virtually any abominations performed upon beings that don't measure up, regardless of species and nature. That skinning alive and eviscerating live seals is a lesser evil than abortion does not mean that it becomes not-evil. At the root of both is the spiritual disease of believing that beings exist to serve our whims and desires, and that those aspects of being which stand athwart those desires may be exploited/slaughtered/destroyed as we think best.

No. A thousand times, no.

Compare and contrast, that is, two comics originating from opposite ends of the sociological and ideological spectra, that nonetheless manifest a curious dispositional similarity: Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Inhospitable Political Environments, a graphic novel detailing the exploits of Choice Girl (perhaps Mark Shea's coinage; I''ll not be purchasing a copy for verification...) against fundamentalists and other anti-abortion retrogrades, who are portrayed as stereotyped African natives (select images at Shea's blog), and this, er, classic of Protestant anti-Catholic bigotry, which lingers over the damnation of all those Christians who have not trusted in the proper verbal formulae.

Numerous are the ways in which these two specimens could be analogized and disanalogized to one another. I'll just mention their longing for a sort of Summing Up, a Great Reckoning, at which the reprobate will be requited with the damnation that is theirs - a will to eschatological finality, and the belief that one already possesses the understanding thereof. It is an atmosphere alien to fine literature of orthodox Christian extraction.

It is not a frequent occurrence for me to find myself in agreement with David Frum. Nevertheless, when Frum writes of Doug Kmeic, a pro-life supporter of Obama, that he has descended into sheer foggy unintelligibility, I am compelled to agree. Consider this exercise in tumescent obfuscation:

Thus, as I see it, it is a choice between two less than sufficient courses:

(a) the continuation of an effort to appoint men and women to the Court who are thought willing to overturn Roe through divisive confirmation proceedings that undermine respect for law and understate the significance of non-abortion issues in a judicial candidate’s evaluation; or

(b) working with a new president who honestly concedes the abortion decision poses serious moral issues which he argues can only be fully and successfully resolved by the mother facing it with the primary obligation of the community seeing to it that she is as well informed as possible in the making of it.

It is a prudential judgment which course is more protective of life.

Frum observes:

Here's what's really going on: Doug Kmiec, a former dean at the Catholic University of America, has decided that quitting Iraq is more important to him than stopping abortion. Fine! His call! It's a free country!

Just say it, man: you oppose the war, and Obama is more likely to end it than McCain (not much more, in my judgment, but there you are). Please, though, abstain from acts of self-deception where abortion is concerned; at least let us be clear about that.

George Neumayr, discussing the seeming abdication of the Republican and conservative establishment from the cultural conflicts of the age, particularly in the wake of the California marriage ruling, observes:

Mush, not real substance, is all that's on offer in the Big Tent. Even the California Supreme Court's ruling in favor of gay marriage, which supposedly represents a great political opportunity for Republicans, underscores the GOP's identity problem: the ruling's author, Justice Ron George, is a liberal Republican, as is the governor who promises to back it. (Snip)

Meanwhile, John McCain's stance on this issue is about as galvanizing as his opposition to "amnesty." What exactly is the major difference between his position and Obama's? They both technically oppose gay marriage, and they both support the right of states to enact gay marriage. Perhaps the only difference in the end will be that McCain also supports the right of states to reject it (though presumably Obama, if only for political reasons, holds this view at the moment too).

ON SUCH SLENDER reeds hangs the GOP's agenda. Commentators predict a coming "culture war" between the Democrats and Republicans on this issue. I doubt it. A culture war presupposes two fighting sides. Only the Democrats are fighting on this one, and prominent Republicans long ago surrendered one of the principles upon which opposition to gay marriage rests: it is bad for children.

Democrats are full of passionate certainty, but Republicans grow ever more vague, opposing gay marriage merely on democratic, not moral, grounds. The media still clings to the culture-war model, but it looks more and more anachronistic.

Rod Dreher has been posting a veritable cornucopia of resigned commentaries, tinged perhaps with a measure of despair, on the apparently inexorable societal death march towards the dissolution of marriage since the California Supreme Court's issuance of its egalitarian diktat. In the most recent of these commentaries, each of which has broached numerous substantive issues meriting further comment, and relied upon the MacIntyrean judgment that moral disagreements in late modernity are incommensurable (late modern 'ethics' being essentially emotivist, its valorized ideals of selfhood, autonomy, and desire regarded by classical and Christian ethics as the collective fons et origo of those problems moral theory is supposed to solve), Dreher references Margaret Liu McConnell's recent essay on marriage in the American Conservative, en route to a citation of Scalia's typically prescient dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, averring that he found her argument wanting:

But we must recognize that insisting that traditional marriage is best for raising children is not effective. A better approach is to emphasize that traditional marriage promotes the ideal that no parent should abandon his child. Who would argue against that? It’s consistent with other governmental policies in the area of child welfare. It’s in accord with human nature. But making the argument requires the courage, honesty, and humility to say that some ways of procreating are not as good for the general welfare as others, whether the parents are of the same sex or are married heterosexuals.

Adoptive parents do God’s work when they provide homes to children, and those homes can be as loving and stable as the home of any natural mother and father. But adoption is a humane response to what is already a tragedy in a child’s life, the loss of a parent. Those adorable adoptees from China, for example, are the byproduct of a cruel policy of child restriction that has lead to the deaths of thousands of children.

Reproductive technology, like adoption, without doubt can produce children who are loved by their new parents in homes as stable as those of any biological parents. But the various techniques, when employed by same-sex couples, always require that at least one of the child’s natural parents give up the child. This tempting world of sperm banks and egg brokers is the domain of the affluent and easily verges toward eugenics.

Adoption and reproductive technology as methods of forming our next generation are no foundation for a stable society. Social order doesn’t depend on parents being forced to give up their children for adoption because of poverty, illness, supposed unfitness, or the brutal policies of a foreign country—nor on parents giving up their children in advance of birth in sterile, scientific transactions. Those historical Supreme Court cases declaring marriage a fundamental right lauded the stability-promoting aspects of marriage, emphasizing the good that radiates throughout the broader society from the promise the man and woman make on their wedding day: “Marriage … creat[es] the most important relation in life … having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution.” “Upon it society may be said to be built, and out of its fruits spring social relations and social obligations and duties.” The promise of the married couple to keep and care for one another and for their children engenders a respect for unconditional responsibility that serves us all.

Extending marriage to same-sex couples would leave no other institution to promote the ideal that every parent promises to care for his child. It’s easier for fathers to walk away from their responsibilities when society no longer promotes the simple norm that a child belongs to both parents equally, and each has a duty to care for the child—the norm encompassed in traditional marriage. As the NAACP, La Raza Centro Legal, and the National Association of Social Workers know, the pain and deprivation caused by the erosion of this norm fall hardest on the poor.

Nonetheless, aside from the hackneyed conceits of late modernity and its increasingly strident nominalism, such an argument ought to be persuasive, though the matter is considerably more grave than McConnell expresses. It is not merely that emotivist-nominalist marriage, extended to homosexuals, will enshrine in law the principle that some parents must abandon their children for the sake of the rights-regime, but that such a marital regime entails the commodification of children. Children, in Christian thought, are a supervenient grace; upon the intrinsic good of the conjugal, self-giving love of husband and wife, the gift of new life supervenes, both ratifying and expanding the good of marital love. More than this, a marriage open to children instantiates the great cosmo-theological principle that through self-giving, self-sacrifice, and abnegation (marriage is regarded as both loving and martyric), the world is reborn; by dying to ourselves, we instead receive life more abundantly. Such an order also renders our origins concrete and particular; we are rooted in particular histories and places and lineages. The deformation of marriage to accommodate homosexuals* will definitively ratify and cement in place a contrary principle, once children are factored into the 'marital' equation: children, desired by many such couples, will become objects of felt entitlement, and claim-rights upon their 'inclusion' in such marital units will be asserted; but because such unions are intrinsically infecund, the claim will thus be that adoption and reproductive technologies be enshrined as rights, so that all can claim their 'rights' to produce or possess a child. The child will no longer be a gift, a living symbol of a love which precedes him and envelopes him, but something something acquired or created, to the end that someone might 'fulfill himself' or realize his private conception of the meaning of the universe; this will entail the apotheosis of the consumerist mentality of us moderns: as we consume - according to the logic of advertising & etc. - in order to create our very selves, the things we acquire being instrumentalized towards the satisfaction of transient desire, so even children, sundered from natural biological origins, will be instruments of lifestyle preference-satisfaction. This is the gateway to the final frontier of commodification. When once we admit into law and culture the idea that some persons exist, or may be brought under the discipline of existing, so as to complete the world-images of others, conjured from the nothingness of their desires, a fathomless abyss of evils will lie before us.

Via Rod Dreher comes this GQ article on Hugh Hefner's son Marston, who is preparing for his first semester at college. The article bears reading, I suppose, as a cultural artifact; there is, after all, a frozen-in-amber quality to the atmosphere at the Playboy Mansion, one that goes beyond the decor and special features, which have passed unchanged from hip to dated to retro. Decadence is rather monotonous. The real reason to read it, however, is the revelation of just how pathetic the lifestyle turns out to be in the end: Hugh cannot recall the age of his children in a photo, and requires talking points about Marston in order to get through the interview, and sounds a mighty blast from the trumpet upon rising from his couch, wearied by the effort of having to talk about his own son:

Sounding the trumpet valedictory for the Playboy philosophy, ah reckon.

About what it's worth, too. Things of inestimable importance fell by the wayside, and so the entire thing amounts to so much noxious vapor. What a loser.

Or, almost beyond belief, given what we know about the degradation of the humanities under the ministrations of 'cultural studies' vandals:

And you thought that the Middle Ages was all about jousting knights and damsels in distress. That's because you have never attended the medievalists' congress, the annual first-weekend-in-May ritual at Western Michigan where Persels read his wine-bottle theorizing and where it is definitely not your grandfather's Middle Ages. Persels's paper was part of a Thursday morning panel titled "Waste Studies: Excrement in the Middle Ages" and devoting a full hour and a half to human effluvia. The other two scholars that morning read papers dealing with excrement in Icelandic sagas and the theology of latrines.

Waste studies is a brand new academic discipline invented by Susan Signe Morrison, a dark-haired, extroverted 49-year-old professor of English at Texas State University's San Marcos campus and mother of two (her husband is also an English professor) who organized the session and admitted with good-humored candor in an email that her new field's disgust-provoking subject matter might be a "challenge" to scholars thinking about specializing in it. Morrison's own specialty as a medievalist used to be women on pilgrimages, but then she got the idea for her latest book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics, forthcoming this September. In her email she explained that the idea for the fecal book came to her partly because she noticed that dung and privies played a role in the works of Chaucer, Dante, and other medieval authors, and partly because her "son was potty-training." And so a new scholarly industry was born.

Initially, I believed, or was greatly desirous of believing, that Charlotte Allen's essay in the Weekly Standard was an elaborate satire. This because, in spite of myself, and perhaps against my better knowledge, I do not wish to be that cynical. Alas, satire it was not, but a Boschean vision of horror translated to this plane of being. Fecopoetics. The very notion raises the serious question of whether the night of simple ignorance might be preferable to such willful endarkenment. Is it time?

A Florida kindergarten teacher prompted her students to vote out a fellow student who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome. Alex Barton, as all rational human beings would expect of a 5-year old, particularly one coping with an autism-spectrum disorder, is traumatized:

Alex hasn't been back to school since then, and Barton said he won't be returning. He starts screaming when she brings him with her to drop off his sibling at school.

Thursday night, his mother heard him saying "I'm not special" over and over.

Barton said Alex is reliving the incident.

The other students said he was "disgusting" and "annoying," Barton said.

"He was incredibly upset," Barton said. "The only friend he has ever made in his life was forced to do this."

“I asked (Alex) what the students said, and he said the students said he eats paper, picks boogers and eats them on top of the table and bites his shoelaces,” the report said. “He told me Mrs. Portillo said, ‘I hate you right now. I don’t like you today.’”

I couldn't care less for the teacher's rationalizations - that Alex had to be made to understand "how his behaviour made the other children feel" (the treacly language of therapeutics, as is often the case, here invoked to justify cruelty), and that the vote was only intended to keep him out of class for one day. While a child with an autism-spectrum disorder may not be suited to the routines of a standard kindergarten classroom, this form of discipline - hazing, really - is utterly inappropriate; I can attest from personal experience that the callousnesses of teachers inflicted at that age leave enduring marks on the psyche. Somehow, moreover, given a legal system in which, rightly or wrongly, education is posited as a right, I don't believe the democratization of this decision would fly. In a just world, ie., one in which teachers' unions were somewhat less powerful than they are in this one, the teacher would lose her job. Were I Alex's father, I'd have to settle for slapping her with a civil suit and hoping that it proved financially and socially ruinous.

A few years ago, a friend of ours married the interpreter who acted as a sometime intermediary when my future wife and I first met in Kiev. It so happened that, for whatever utterly inscrutable reasons, they enjoyed watching Sluts Sex and the City, a program I have loathed, from its inception, on account of its superficiality, nihilism, moral corruption, and tendency to promote the most insipid banalities as the very apogee of wisdom. On my personal Scale of Detestation, the program probably ranks up there with all things Quentin Tarantino, which is to say that it is a celebration of the Nothing, and that its popularity is a certain harbinger of The End.

That said, I have found that the smartest take on the new film adaptation of the series is that of Helen Rittelmeyer, who, in a brief comment on the film, manages to encapsulate virtually everything that has inspired my loathing:

Having decided that marriage is not the right lifestyle choice for her, Carrie ends the movie with a question: “Why is it that we’re willing to write our own vows but not our own rules?” That’s right, girlfriend! Marriage is just a bunch of rules that other people made up, and buying into it will only obscure the Inner You. Never mind whether those other people might have been wiser than you are, or whether the transformation might be an improvement.

Or take Samantha, whose life philosophy is summed up in the line “I love you, but I love me more.” She abandons a man who loves her and whom she loves because she can’t stand not to be the center of her own universe. Even the ladies’ four-way friendship, supposedly the show’s moral center, involves so much confessional self-reflection that one is tempted to conclude that relationships with other people are only interesting insofar as they enable self-discovery. Strange—I always thought it was the other way around.

As for the matter of friendship, well, yes - those who instrumentalize sexually intimate relationships as voyages of self-expression, self-discovery, and so forth are bound so to instrumentalize friendship as well; if one first acts as though one is not a body situated in social and relational contexts, but a gnostic Self striving to realize its own True Being in a world of indifferent or malign stuff that must be forged into instruments of the Self, then there is no reason for this to halt at the boundaries of friendship. Why would it? The idea that it might is merely an expression of the idea that sex is somehow special, unique; but the reduction of sexuality to gnostic animality strips it of its uniqueness; and if something considered so critical to personal identity is nothing more than desire objectifying the other, why should friendship be immune? It will be little more than a sounding board for the Self: a chorus of approbation for those who have 'dared' to 'write their own rules' and negate the world actualize the Self to the uttermost. The gnostic Self is a universal corrosive.

I know, I know - Christian civilization is dead and buried, the corpse having passed through the stages of putrefaction and decay, and now all that remains of the remains is a pile of dry, old bones. Humour me. At a minimum, we could refrain from urinating on the grave.

All of which is a way of stating that, while there must be an hypothetical societal structure lying behind this lamentation, which appears to suggest that a) Public citations of biblical teaching on homosexuality, and b) Public rumination upon the incompatibility of Islamic and Western cultures, are offensive, and derogate from the dignity of homosexuals and Mahometans, and that perpetrators should be liable to torts - I have yet to discern it. Whatever it might be, it appears to overlap functionally with the managerial lifestyle/multicultural leftism that is the public religion of the West, though its first principles must diverge from that leftism.

We may dwell in a post-Christian epoch, and labour under wholly post-Christian cultures, governments, and societal structures, but I perceive no necessity of cooperating with them.

[Cross-posted on Southern Appeal]

Pepperdine Law Professor and prolife legal scholar, Doug Kmiec, has announced that he is endorsing Senator Barack Obama for the U. S. presidency. I have learned so much from Professor Kmiec's clear and persuasive academic writings, and very much appreciate his contributions to the study of jurisprudence. For this reason, I have been disappointed by his less than compelling apologetic for his presidential endorsement. Consider, for example, these recent comments by Kmiec about a meeting he and others had with the Illinois Senator (HT: Carl Olson, Insight Scoop):

This will be short and bitter. Rod Dreher links to a fascinating NPR story by Barbara Bradley Hagerty on the clash between gay 'rights' and religious liberty. No prizes to those who divine the tendency of the conflict.

Ponder, though, for your edification, these expressions of fulminant turpitude and stupidity, from Dreher's comments section:

Next time somebody asks, "How can gay marriage hurt anybody else?" -- well, here's one answer. You discriminate against law-abiding individuals who live in a way you don't approve of, your church, synagogue, mosque or religious institution will pay a price. You can't deny it.

In that sense, it's no different from 1960 and the society deciding whether it is appropriate to discriminate against blacks and interracial couples based on religious belief. Should believers be able to discriminate with impugnity in violation of laws enacted by legislatures? That's the bottom line, and it has nothing to do with gay marriage.

They'll still be able to preach their beliefs, hire and fire according to their beliefs, unless its publically funded, and say no to whoever they want if doing otherwise would go against their beliefs.

And so it comes to pass that the old Soviet doctrine of religious liberty comes to America: we will be free to profess whatever creeds it so pleases us - between our ears, and no further.

(Update 7/1/2008: This poster was created by my blog brother at, and creator of, Southern Appeal, Steve Dillard)
(HT: Steve Ray)

The argument has often been made that we should basically shut up about torture as long as abortion is legal, since the legalization/normalization of abortion on a large scale is more grave than the legalization/normalization of torture on a small scale. Both are evil, and both ought to be opposed in principle, but we should basically shut up about torture until we can say 'mission accomplished' on abortion.

Needless to say, I find this argument unconvincing. We can't say everything all at once, and we have an obligation to oppose the legalization/normalization of both torture and abortion ferociously, in general.

There is an underlying truth though, a truth which is being misused in this argument, which is not so easily dismissed. That underlying truth is that the legalization/normalization of abortion on a large scale is in fact more grave than the legalization/normalization of torture on a small scale.

What follows from this should no doubt make progressives and those with progressive sympathies uncomfortable. Progressives tend to be rather squishy on the compelling need to treat abortion legally as a form of murder, and to ferociously advocate for such treatment. Indeed "ferocity", if it applies at all, usually applies to their efforts to undermine the point and reverse the objective priorities. As a result they have a credibility problem when it comes to torture, precisely because of the obviously upside-down priorities. And that credibility problem does a great deal of damage to making the case against torture.

When it comes to opposing torture in the company of those who are soft on making abortion illegal, the old adage 'with friends like these' comes to mind.

(Cross-posted)

Just saw this on the Catholic League's website:

Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website.

Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:

“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

Here's Professor Myers' contact info, and his reply to the Catholic League.

(cross-posted)

The University of Minnesota, Morris professor, P. Z. Myers, who has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist,
has secured the support of Richard Dawkins. Writes Dawkins:

PLEASE WRITE IN SUPPORT OF PZ MYERS. By Richard Dawkins

Readers of yesterday's thread "It's a Goddamned Cracker" will be aware of somebody called Bill Donohue, whose grasp of reality is so poor that he can't tell the difference between a wafer and Jesus. The shrieking hysteria of Donohue and other Roman Catholics over the temporary removal of a communion wafer from a church service epitomises all that is ridiculous in the religious mind.

Today's development is that Donohue is now inciting a witch-hunt against PZ, and is trying to whip up Roman Catholics to write to the President of the University of Minnesota, urging him to sack PZ. We need a massive counter flood of letters in support of PZ Myers. Please write, bearing in mind PZ's two requests:-

1. Please use your own name, not a pseudonym
2. Please take care to write in a good, literate, adult style, in order to increase the contrast between the letters of support and the incoherent, juvenile flaming that will doubtless characterise the letters from the Catholics.

For details of the address to write to, see Pharyngula, here (or PZ's post below)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/fight_back_against_bill_donohu.php

Please rally round and show support for PZ, in the face of this hysterical latter-day Grand Inquisitor.

Thank you

Richard [emphasis added by FJB]

Apparently, Dawkins' instructions for a "literate, adult style" are not being followed by supportive commentators on Myers' blog. (Unless Dawkins meant by "adult style" what "adult" means in "adult bookstore.") Take a look for yourself here, here, and here. But make sure that you are over 18 and no children are looking over your shoulder.

UPDATE: Apparently, Professor Myers' website, Pharyngula, on which his pledge to desecrate the Eucharist is published, was accessible via his department's faculty page for several years, until it was taken down within the past 48 hours. Fortunately, it had been cached on July 6, 2008 by Google here. If one consults the Wayback Machine, it looks like the taxpayers of Minnesota have supported UMM's biology department's portal to Professor Myers' anti-religious screeds since at least November 9, 2006. (You can find all the archived pages here). Professor Morris has also had Pharyngula mirrored on the University of Minnesota Morris' server, here.

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (via Dawn Eden's blog), from a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace:

Via Glenn Greenwald, Tom Friedman ruminates on the strategic rationale for the Great Mesopotamian Quagmire Near Eastern War of Democratic Liberation:

Friedman's astonishingly puerile and uncouth exposition features a choice piece of verbal legerdemain, which begins with a mention of the Open Society and our willingness to defend it, and concludes with a vulgar peroration, which has American servicemen (and women, of course, for one mark of our civilizational superiority is that we send our women to bleed and die in our wars) going door to door between "Basra and Baghdad", telling anyone who might oppose the Open Society to "Suck on this." I mentioned a piece of legerdemain, by which I mean an unthinking attempt at esotericism. Friedman, of course, commences by discussing the Open Society, and then avers that no border controls, no clever INS officials - in summation, no declensions from the (utopian) conceit of the Open Society - could possibly suffice to protect us from further terrorist assaults, leaving as the inevitable conclusion the imperative of converting the recalcitrant of the world to our visions of global order. But, of course, this standard line is a farrago of nonsense. The firm proscription of certain Islamic doctrines, the cessation of Muslim immigration, beginning with the abolition of the Visa Express programme and student visas for nationals of countries which contribute disproportionately to the jihad, and rising to the encouragement of Muslim emigration from the West, would, over time, mitigate the threat of jihad, and all without the perceived imperative of wars of (democratic capitalist) imperial conquest. What, therefore, Friedman really means is that we cannot maintain simultaneously the Open Society and measures inhibiting the social and economic intercourse of the Western and Muslim worlds; we can undertake either, but not both, and, inasmuch as the latter is simply unthinkable - a form of apostasy, in reality - we must opt for the former by means of war. The exoteric rationale is that we cannot defeat "terror" save by waging wars of "liberation"; the esoteric reality is that our elites cannot preserve the politico-economic articulation of their class interests save by waging wars of "liberation".

Glenn Greenwald takes Friedman's utter self-delusion, his incomprehension at negative global perceptions of the U.S., and nails it to the wall:

Via Dawn Eden, a sampling of PP's posters.

This one gets my vote for the worst.

You don't have to be a heavy thinker to get the message: "We know that your boyfriend is merely using you sexually and will certainly not take responsibility if you get pregnant. Be sure you don't lose him by telling him that you're pregnant. We can help you to hold on to such a boyfriend by making sure you never get pregnant or are made swiftly un-pregnant if necessary."

How many inner-city women will say, "No thanks" to that sort of empowerment? And how is it possible to fight that message?

When Planned Parenthood offers with public dollars its own "theology of the body," if you will (warning: this is some vulgar stuff), any alternative distribution of government money suggested by religious citizens is called a violation of the separation of church and state.

So, it seems safe to say that if the federal government were paying for a wide distribution of John Paul II's Theology of the Body to America's teenagers, the strong church-state separationists would be calling it a clear violation of the First Amendment. Thus, according to the "enlightened" understanding of our present legal regime, when the federal government underwrites PP's lessons, which answer precisely the same questions about human sexuality answered by John Paul II, then church and state are playing their appropriate roles, and theology remains, as it should always remain, in the back of the secular bus.

But that does not seem right. For if Planned Parenthood can be given public money to proselytize for its philosophical anthropology to the nation's children, then why should not religious citizens be allowed to do the same? After all, if each group is offering contrary answers to the precisely the same questions--questions whose answers depend on one's philosophical understanding of the nature of man--why is one "non-religious" and the other "religious"?

The "establishment clause," sadly, has become a means by which militant secularists may disenfranchise certain citizens based on a metaphysical litmus test that is applied capriciously.

Regular readers of my personal blog and my comments elsewhere no doubt realize that I am unsympathetic to appeals to "reasonable men can differ" when we are talking about, literally, a willful holocaust of millions of innocents.

No, reasonable men cannot differ. Unreasonable men will differ, of course, but that is a different matter.

In point of fact, I see this as another riff on the infamous Cuomo-riffic "personally opposed, but" reasoning. Some folks claim to be personally opposed to voting for Barack Obama, the most zealous pro-abortion Presidential candidate ever: that is, they won't be voting for him themselves. Yet these same people defend as reasonable the choice of others to vote for him. I'm not sure which is worse, frankly. At least the man who says he is going to vote for Obama has the courage of his (wrong) convictions. The "personally opposed" camp, though, is willing to scream for wiggle room for others to vote for the man who personally blocked passage of the Induced Infant Liability Act in the great state of Illinois, without having the courage to do so themselves.

Senator Barack Obama may have committed an "out of alignment with his values" when discussing his voting record on infanticide. See the stories here and here.

If only these newborns were Alaskan Caribou aborted at Gitmo...... A boy can dream, can't he?

Courtesy of Jay Anderson at Pro Ecclesia, Pro Familia, Pro Civitate (including a nice collection of links at the bottom):

Senator Barack Obama, from last night's Saddleback Valley Civil Forum on the Presidency:

"We still don't abide by that basic precept of Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me."

First, it's not Matthew's precept. It's Jesus' precept, which appears in the Gospel of Matthew (25: 40). Second, the context of Matthew 25 is the Last Judgment at which the Son of Man separates the sheep from the goats, with the latter going to eternal punishment and the former to eternal life. Third, it is telling what Christ in fact says about the goats (v. 41-43 - NIV):

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

When Senator Obama, while in the Illinois senate, had the opportunity to require by law that medical professionals provide nutrition (something to eat), hydration (drink), protection (clothes), and shelter (inviting them in) to the smallest and most vulnerable strangers of all, the true "least of these," newborns who had survived abortions, Senator Obama stood with the goats.

(Cross-posted)

From today's National Review Online.

Apparently, for the Matthew 25 Christian, it is not above his pay grade to offer an account of the reasons why he led the charge to defeat an Illinois bill that would have required that medical personnel provide assistance to children who survive abortions:

Obama reminds me of a very bright doctoral student in a graduate seminar who thinks that his well-articulated string of verbal obfuscations accompanied by pondering facial expressions is the same as thoughtful reflection.

That is the title of the latest essay by the inestimable Hadley Arkes at The Catholic Thing. As Peter Wehner points out at National Review Online, the federal Born-Alive Infant Protection Act is the brain-child of Professor Arkes. You can read about the Act and its history in Professor Arkes' wonderful book, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Here are some excerpts from The Catholic Thing piece:

From Hugh Hewitt's blog:

Now the full weight of the Catholic Church is coming down on Nancy Pelosi.  Bravo to Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori who join Archbishop Chaput in setting an example for their fellow Church leaders.  Now, how about the Bishop of San Francisco?  The story:

Lydia's recent post about how the pro-life movement is corrupting itself through compromise has generated quite a bit of interest. A fundamental dividing line in the discussion seems to be between those who are sometimes willing to compromise on who to vote for, and those who are always willing to compromise on who to vote for: between those who are willing to draw a line beyond which one will not support a candidate, irrespective of how bad other viable candidates may be in the current election, and those unwilling to draw such a line.

I have a hypothesis about why some appear unwilling to admit even the abstract possibility of such a line. My hypothesis is that this unwillingness is related to the actual facts of the actual current presidential election: that it is obvious that if one were willing to draw a line beyond which one is unwilling to compromise, one would be forced to draw that line in a way which excludes the possibility of supporting either of the two viable candidates for President in the current election cycle. The least bad of the two candidates - whichever one of the two you may think that is - has a long history of supporting the federally funded wholesale slaughter of tiny but real and fully human children.

And if one isn't willing to draw a line there, then how could one possibly concede the validity of drawing lines at all?

(Cross-posted)

One of the more profound insights I've found in the writing of Pope John Paul II, though of course the idea does not originate with him, is that the things that we choose to do always end up changing who we are. This is a profound truth about the human person. Sin brings us closer to Hell because it makes us more the kind of person who will ultimately be at home in Hell. Good works, done out of our own free will with the help of grace, bring us closer to the Beatific Vision because they make us more the kind of person who is close to God. What we choose to do changes us.

A lot of argumentation in the blogosphere, though - particularly political argumentation - tacitly assumes that this is not the case. The notion seems to be that if I vote for a medical cannibal like John McCain or Barack Obama, having decided to do so as a choice of the lesser of two evils, that making that choice does not mean that I will do anything else differently: I will be the same person and do all the same things subsequently whether I vote for a cannibal or not.

But this is obviously not the case. It is not the case for an individual, whose effect on the election is literally negligible. And it is not the case when we aggregate individuals. Five million people who are unwilling to vote for a cannibal are a different kind of group from five million who are willing to vote for a cannibal. Refusing to pull the lever for the least bad viable option is in the end far more powerful on an individual basis than pulling the lever for the least bad viable option, because pulling the lever or refusing to pull the lever changes what kind of person you are. And what is true on an individual basis is true in the aggregate.

"If everyone did it the pro-life cause would lose" is simply false, because it rests on the unspoken assumption that all else remains the same. But all else never remains the same; and most especially we don't remain the same.

(Cross-posted)

Last month I published a WWwTW entry with a link to Professor Eileen McDonagh's review of my book, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007). I finally got around to composing a response, which took longer than expected because of the move to South Bend as well as a few publishing deadlines and speaking commitments.

You can find my response online here.

I and a few others have elicited skeptical responses to the notion that being McCain's vice president may end up ruining Sarah Palin. In fact, just being his running mate is bringing forth the early signs. Via Stony Creek Digest we get a little preview of things to come:

GIBSON: Embryonic stem cell research, John McCain has been supportive of it.

PALIN: You know, when you’re running for office, your life is an open book and you do owe it to Americans to talk about your personal opinion, which may end up being different than what the policy in an administration would be. My personal opinion is we should not create human life, create an embryo and then destroy it for research, if there are other options out there[*]… And thankfully, again, not only are there other options, but we’re getting closer and closer to finding a tremendous amount more of options, like, as I mentioned, the adult stem cell research.

I can only imagine what eight years of being McCain's vice president may do to this very promising and potentially formidable pro life politician. I again reiterate that the best thing for Sarah Palin, and the best thing for us with respect to Sarah Palin's future as an American politician, may be a McCain loss.

UPDATE: And the hits keep on coming. Also courtesy of Jeff Culbreath, McCain-Palin have a new radio ad, which goes:

They’re the original mavericks. Leaders. Reformers. Fighting for real change. John McCain will lead his Congressional allies to improve America’s health.

• Stem cell research to unlock the mystery of cancer, diabetes, heart disease.


• Stem cell research to help free families from the fear and devastation of illness.


• Stem cell research to help doctors repair spinal cord damage, knee injuries, serious burns.


• Stem cell research to help stroke victims.

And, John McCain and his Congressional allies will invest millions more in new NIH medical research to prevent disease. Medical breakthroughs to help you get better, faster. Change is coming.

McCain-Palin and Congressional allies. The leadership and experience to really change Washington and improve your health.

Paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee.

[*] - In the video, Mrs. Palin emphasizes this phrase.

(Cross-posted)

This just in:

Keepers of Protestantism’s pacifist traditions will showcase just how far they’ve come from their humble roots in Europe’s persecuted peasantry when they share an intimate dinner Thursday in New York with a world leader.

It’s not just any world leader, however, but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who’s been labeled an international pariah for his nuclear ambitions, denial of the Holocaust, saber-rattling toward Israel and alleged support of terrorism.

But for Quakers and Mennonites who’ll be at the table, breaking bread with this controversial man means drawing deeply on the same spiritual roots that sustained their embattled ancestors long ago.

“Jesus ate with lepers and with tax collectors, and in the United States right now, Iran would be in that category,” says Arli Klassen, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, an outreach arm for Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in the United States and Canada.

The New York gathering, an Iftar dinner to commemorate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, will mark the fourth time since 2006 that Ahmadinejad has met with American religious leaders. Each time, Klassen says, it’s been at Ahmadinejad’s request.

Read the rest here.

This appeared today on JohnMcCain.com:

Statement From John M.Murtagh On Barack Obama's Relationship With William Ayers

ARLINGTON, VA -- Today, John M. Murtagh made the following statement on Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers:

"When I was 9 years-old the Weather Underground, the terrorist group founded by Barack Obama's friend William Ayers, firebombed my house. Barack Obama has dismissed concerns about his relationship with Ayers by noting that he was only a child when Ayers was planting bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. But Ayers has never apologized for his crimes, he has reveled in them, expressing regret only for the fact that he didn't do more.

Via Wesley J. Smith comes word of a new front being opened in the culture of death: In Switzerland, pro-death groups (literally, pro-death) seek to force nursing homes to allow them access to patients to assist them in committing suicide.

Apparently some doctors in Switzerland retain professionalism, and the suicide group Exit says there have sometimes been "showdowns" with doctors when they have shown up to help patients kill themselves on the premises. Since in Switzerland it has been declared a legal right to kill yourself (even if you are mentally ill), Exit claims that nursing home directors and doctors must be forced to allow them to "help" patients die.

(HT: Justin Taylor; cross-posted)

That is the title of the essay that appeared this morning on the Witherspoon Institute's new web page, The Public Discourse. It is authored by my good friend, Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. This should be distributed far and wide to Catholic and Evangelical groups throughout the United States. Here are some excerpts:

Sen. Barack Obama's views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals - who aggressively promote Obama's candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.

What is going on here?

I have examined the arguments advanced by Obama's self-identified pro-life supporters, and they are spectacularly weak. It is nearly unfathomable to me that those advancing them can honestly believe what they are saying. But before proving my claims about Obama's abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as ''pro-abortion'' rather than ''pro-choice"....

Earlier this week, I linked to an essay by Princeton professor Robert P. George ("Obama's Abortion Extremism") clearly showing that Senator Obama's views on abortion are the most extreme of any presidential candidate in U. S. History. Now, with Yuval Levin, Professor George replies to Obama's misleading defense of his abortion record in Wednesday's debate. Here are some excerpts from the essay:

Obama's latest excuse for opposing the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is that the law was ''unnecessary'' because babies surviving abortions were already protected. It won't fly.

In last night's presidential debate, Sen. John McCain finally found an opportunity to confront Sen. Barack Obama on his vote against protecting children who were born alive after an attempted abortion. Obama's response followed the pattern of his approach to this subject throughout the campaign: deny the facts and confuse the issue. He said:

''There was a bill that was put forward before the Illinois Senate that said you have to provide lifesaving treatment and that would have helped to undermine Roe v. Wade. The fact is that there was already a law on the books in Illinois that required providing lifesaving treatment, which is why not only myself but pro-choice Republicans and Democrats voted against it.''

But the facts of the born-alive debate tell a different story...

In response to George Weigel's Newsweek piece, Cornell University law prof, Eduardo Peñalver writes on the Commonweal blog:

In an essay called "Little Murders," Archbishop Charles Chaput of the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver has this to say about Professor Doug Kmiec, "prolife" supporter of the most pro-abortion presidential candidate in American history, Barack Obama:

Most pro-lifers are familiar with the argument that there is no such thing as being called upon to disobey the current abortion regime in the United States, because the current abortion regime doesn't require anyone to participate in an abortion.

Welcome to Abortion Regime, Stage 2: In Victoria, Australia, a law just passed last week that says, inter alia,

1)If a woman requests a registered health practitioner to advise on a proposed abortion, or to perform, direct, authorise or supervise an abortion for that woman, and the practitioner has a conscientious objection to abortion, the practitioner must--(a) inform the woman that the practitioner has a conscientious objection to abortion; and (b) refer the woman to another registered health practitioner in the same regulated health profession who the practitioner knows does not have a conscientious objection to abortion.

Got that?

(HT: Melinda at STR)

This is the conclusion of an essay penned by a resident in Massachusetts:

Homosexual “marriage” hangs over society like a hammer with the force of law. And it’s only just begun.

It’s pretty clear that the homosexual movement’s obsession with marriage is not because large numbers of them actually want to marry each other. Research shows that homosexual relationships are fundamentally dysfunctional on many levels, and “marriage” as we know it isn’t something they can achieve, or even desire. (In fact, over the last three months, the Sunday Boston Globe’s marriage section hasn’t had any photos of homosexual marriages. In the beginning it was full of them.) This is about putting the legal stamp of approval on homosexuality and imposing it with force throughout the various social and political institutions of a society that would never accept it otherwise. To the rest of America: You've been forewarned.

Read the whole thing. This is what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) meant by the "dictatorship of relativism." Conjugal relativism is a jealous God that will not tolerate any dissent.

Now that liberal Catholics have gotten what they wanted, I'm looking forward to seeing the constant stream of loud, relentless, and unequivocal denunciation of the legality of abortion from them. The obligatory constant, unrelenting public criticism of the Obama administration's abortion and embryonic stem cell research policies by Doug Kmiec is going to be particularly edifying to see.

(Cross-posted)

A number of people seem to have misunderstood my last post, so I'm going to make this more explicit.

Catholic Obama supporters justified their support of the most pro-abortion presidential candidate in history by appealing to the principle of double-effect. (Even those who did not work this out explicitly must have done so implicitly, in order for it to be justified). In other words, they supported Obama knowing of his wicked and vicious policies on the theory that there were other proportionate reasons to support him. Whether explicitly or implicitly, they appealed to the moral theology of double-effect to justify material cooperation with his vicious policies because they thought it would be good for him to be elected in spite of his vicious policies.

Any Catholic Obama supporters who did not vote for him on this basis were formally cooperating with Obama's wicked and vicious policies, committed a grave sin, and will go to Hell for it if they do not repent, confess, and do penance. I'm not really addressing those Catholics in my posts, but I do pray for their damned souls, that they may repent before it is too late.

Now that the election is over, the measure of Catholic Obama supporters' sincerity will be how vocally, publicly, unequivocally, and persistently Catholic Obama supporters oppose his vicious and wicked policies. They no longer have any proportionate reason to cooperate with his vicious and wicked policies, because the election is over. Furthermore, the fact that they materially cooperated with his wicked and vicious policies in the first place brings upon them an especially grave obligation to oppose those policies, just as a country which engages in war has a grave obligation to mitigate and repair damages - however unintended - caused by that war.

And it is in this vocal, public, unequivocal, and persistent opposition to Obama's vicious and wicked policies that Catholic Obama supporters can count on the help of social conservatives.

(Cross-posted)

(Note: I originally wrote this post for my personal blog, which assumes the context of Catholic orthodoxy; but I thought it might also be of interest to the more general readership of What's Wrong with the World.)

A number of people reacted rather strongly to this post, as if I had said something shocking. The part that got the strongest reaction is where I re-state the Catholic doctrine that formal cooperation with grave evil is mortal sin, and that when we commit mortal sin that means we will go to Hell for eternal damnation unless we repent, confess, and do penance.

(As I mentioned in the comments, I don't know if God in His grace grants some or all a final chance at repentance upon death: I hope so, but too much of that kind of hope can easily turn into presumption, and in any case my hopes are not doctrine.)

I have a suspicion as to why the reaction to a simple restatement of doctrine in plain terms is so strong.

The legal expert gives almost a textbook circular argument. There's a Spiegel article on the case here.

You never can tell about people, of course, but the truth is that you can tell a whole lot more about people - and I include myself here - than we would like to admit. That thought regularly crosses my mind when I read certain blogs.

We know what Catholics who endorsed Obama would be busy doing if their reasons for doing so, however objectively flawed in my view, were fully sincere. And to the credit of some, we do see evidence of that misguided sincerity. On the other hand there are things we should expect as the result of the pangs of a guilty conscience; and we see plenty of that too.

I present the following deliberate overstatement to provoke discussion:

If a man does not believe that his body belongs to God, he ends by believing that his body belongs to the state.

Now, since I said that this is a deliberate overstatement, why would I say it? I don't actually think that everyone who starts out by denying that his body belongs to God ends by believing that his body belongs to the state. I'm not even sure that it could be shown statistically that the majority of individuals who start out by denying that their bodies belong to God end up believing that their bodies belong to the state.

The thought was sparked by this post and thread on Secondhand Smoke, though at the time I didn't have time to blog it. There WJS documents the recent suggestion of "organ conscription"--if we can't get "enough" organs from voluntary organ donation, the state should have the power to take them, either without permission or even against the wishes of unwilling donors.