Of mortgages and marriages (Part II)

I ended Part I by saying that the “warm, fuzzy feeling” most people associate with love is a good and necessary component for marriage but that it isn’t sufficient cause for marriage.  I suspect in saying that many people will feel that I’ve committed at least an impiety on the order of suggesting that St. John the Baptist was a cross-dresser.

First, we need to draw a distinction between the conscious motives people have for getting married and the underlying anthropological rationale for the institution’s existence.  Certainly people marry who have never had a desire to raise children, just as others have married for status or to cement political alliances or to make a public statement; nor do all such marriages end in divorce decrees or murder investigations. 

But just because somebody has used that butter knife to remove a screw from the wall doesn’t mean that it’s become a screwdriver or that it can no longer spread cream cheese on your morning bagel.  Why you got married and why you stay married doesn’t affect one way or another the reason marriage exists as an institution, just as the reason why you choose to have sex on a particular day with a particular person has no influence over whether you get pregnant or not.

But the “warm, fuzzy” feeling isn’t a sufficient cause for marriage in the sense that you don’t need to be married to maintain that feeling.  Indeed, if for some strange reason you believe love should require no effort to maintain, then — all moral and spiritual considerations aside — cohabitation is less expensive and has fewer complications.  They used to call cohabitation “playing house”, and in a large part it still has that essence of childhood games: we’ll pretend we’re a married couple, but only until it stops being fun. 

Book review: Love song for Homo oeconomicus

I apologize for the long break between posts; I'm finding it more difficult to find time to write than I thought I would.  Thanks for hanging in with me!

Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, by Mark R. Levin (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012)

The political dialogue of today demands not only that complex subjects be reduced to black-and-white simplicities but that personalities be similarly reduced to “good guy/bad guy” homogeneity.  It’s not enough that they be corrupt, jack-booted authoritarians trying to ruin The Good Life As We Know It: we must maintain an intellectual separation bordering on naïveté concerning the less savory aspects of our allies.

Such was my overarching impression on reading radio host Mark Levin’s Ameritopia.  For the record, I’ve never listened to Levin’s show, nor have I read any of his previous books; the latter may affect this review more, because I may be missing some intended context if Levin didn’t expect Ameritopia to stand on its own.  Also for the record, while I have sympathy for many conservative ideas, to identify myself as conservative would be misleading at best, for reasons which I hope will become clear as we go along.

In Ameritopia, Levin traces a quick sketch of the intellectual history behind what he calls “utopianism” and what I’ve called “progressivism”.  That history begins with Plato’s Republic, wends through St. Thomas More’s Utopia and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to fetch up at Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Communist Manifesto.  He also compares these writers to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Charles de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, along with their impact on the Founding Fathers, and includes the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville some forty and fifty years later.

On marriage and mortgages (Part I)

After a few weeks back in the mortgage game, I’m reminded of why it’s better for couples not only to be married but to stay married.

Doctor Hilary Towers and Mike McManus provide a very strong argument for creating a counter-revolution against the culture of cohabitation and easy divorce. Especially haunting is their quote of Michael Reagan, who writes in his book Twice Adopted:

Divorce is where two adults take everything that matters to a child – the child’s home, family, security, and sense of being loved and protected – and they smash it all up, leave it in ruins on the floor, then walk out and leave the child to clean up the mess.

The center of the sexual relationship is the creation and rearing of children; because they require time and stability to come to maturity, they need a home environment not just of love but of commitment to love over the long term. For as we have forgotten but are being reminded, love does not “work” or last of its own accord; it requires effort, communication and self-sacrifice from both parties.

Living together without the commitment to stay together for the long run simply doesn’t work. Marriages preceded by cohabitation tend to split up in greater numbers than marriages that aren’t; second, third and fourth marriages have worse track records the higher the numbers go.

But it’s not just that non-traditional relationships don’t succeed as well as do traditional marriages in establishing that stable environment for childrearing. As Reagan so tellingly illustrates, it’s also that divorces are often nasty, ugly events, legal processes whose outcomes are often unjust and absurd, and whose effects can be felt years after the decree is issued. And nothing drives that point home like trying to refinance or modify a thirty-year mortgage on one income.

Rush, Fluke and Ms-takes

Right now, there’s a lot of guffawing and name-calling over Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke’s testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on Monday.  Among other things, Fluke estimated that “Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school.”

Over a three-year period, that’s about $83 a month and change.  A quick browse through the Internet got me a range of prices on generic estrogen-progestogen pills going from $49.52 for a 3-month supply (≈ $16.51/month)[*] to $25.99 for a 1-month supply of Levora or Lutera.[†]  Craig Bannister figured it out at $1 a condom … largely for laughs.  Yet unless the braniacs attending Georgetown Law still don’t know how to go generic, or the Safeway Pharmacy on Wisconsin Avenue is deliberately ripping the rich kids off, there’s still quite a gap between $25.99 and $83.33 a month — Ms. Fluke’s numbers refuse to add up.

But Bannister’s joke calculation that Hoya students are boinking 2.74 times a day is simply another way to express the same point radio loudmouth Rush Limbaugh was trying to get across in his typical talk-first-think-it-through-later style.  “What happened to personal responsibility and accountability?  Where do we draw the line?”

So let’s strip away some of the misconceptions (uh …) about the HHS mandate debate.

Book review: The American hierarchy as empty miters

The Broken Path: How Catholic Bishops Got Lost in the Weeds of American Politics, by Judie Brown (American Life League, 2011)


I have never met Judie Brown of the American Life League.  After reading this book, though, I have a pretty good idea of what she's like.  In Yiddish, she would be called a bren, a real no-nonsense, take-charge person, the kind of woman who always walks with a sense of purpose, who runs both home and office with efficiency and energy.

This reflects even with her Introduction, which not only sets the parameters of the book but also its tone.  Although Ms. Brown doesn't say so, her target reader is not the "cafeteria Catholic" or the non-Catholic interested onlooker; if you're not convinced the Church in America has been on the wrong path for over four decades, she's not going to waste time persuading you.

To a certain degree, the subtitle is misleading.  Ms. Brown actually spends little more than a chapter on tracing the historical path the American hierarchy has taken, and doesn't go into a lot of depth.  A full chapter could conceivably have been spent detailing the growth and flowering of Americanism just by itself, or looking in-depth at the "Land O' Lakes Declaration" that was the 95 Theses of American Catholic theologians.

Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

"Remember, Man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Such are the familiar words of the ceremony, as the priest or deacon traces the ashes on the faithfuls' foreheads.  Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem revertis. "Remember that you are mortal," the slave used to whisper in the ear of the triumphator even as he was hailed as a god by the Roman crowds for his victories.

The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne;
The brow of the priest that the mitre hath worn;
The eye of the sage, and the heart of the brave,
Are hidden and lost in the depth of the grave.

Even today, there are those who seek to deny this fundamental truth of human existence.  The alchemists and sorcerers now wear lab coats, the philosopher's stones replaced by centrifuges and smoking draughts replaced by enzymes.  And yet it's the same misdirected imperative — the desire to live longer rather than live better.

Contraception and economic collapse

Having written yet another post on the HHS mandate — think this issue’s gonna go away soon? Fuhgeddaboudit! — I thought I could actually relax and write about something more congenial and directly religious, such as the upcoming Ash Wednesday celebration.

Then Tina Korbe tweeted a link to Mark Steyn’s “Contraception Misdirection”.  The first two paragraphs were enough to make me reach for my hypertension meds, as Steyn described the future of the national debt as illustrated by charts from the Office of Management and Budget:

My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on page 58 of their 500-page appendix on “Analytical Perspectives” [faithfully reprinted above].  This is entitled “Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections.”  …  Just to emphasize, this isn’t the doom-laden dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it’s the official Oval Office version of where America’s headed.  In the New York Times–approved “responsible budget” there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the debt curve into something approaching reentry with reality.

The one presented to the budget committee was even worse: “an even steeper straight line showing debt rising to 900 percent of GDP and rocketing off the graph circa 2075.”  According to House Budget Committee Paul Ryan, “We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.”

Is the mandate issue a blunder for the GOP?

Almost a month after the Department of Health and Human Services reaffirmed its refusal to take First Amendment conscience protections seriously, the battle over the contraception mandate is spinning — or rather, being spun by the MSM and Obama Democrats — into a pseudo-debate about contraception itself, and its role in women’s health.

The “why” of this is fairly obvious.  On face value, to prevail in a SCOTUS challenge to the Obamination’s mandate the Catholic Church doesn’t need to argue why she teaches the immorality of contraception; it’s enough that she does, and that some Catholic-Americans do indeed believe artificial contraception to be wrong — 22%, according to a recent CNN/ORC opinion poll.  As long as the issue is focused on religious liberty, slightly more Americans disapprove of the HHS mandate than approve (50% to 44%, with a margin of error of ± 3%).

But while the mandate can be seen as a part of a larger “cultural war”, conventional wisdom holds that putting it directly in those terms would be a mistake. MSNBC’s First Read argues that GOP strategists believe “Republicans should be talking about the economy, not social issues.”  And Andrew Sullivan writes in Newsweek:

The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base. I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.

Romance, self-sacrifice and St. Valentine

I fail miserably at romance.  I’m like the guy in Billy Joel’s song, “Leave a Tender Moment Alone”: sometimes I get so tense, I’ll say or do something that completely spoils the moment … usually, it’s a joke. 

So if I were to write a post telling men how to win women’s hearts, I would be putting myself in a false position.  I don’t even have the excuse of being a priest;  a priest could at least form some conclusions from what he hears in confessions and spiritual counseling.  In fact, I’m convinced that even Dr. Phil is making educated guesses when it comes to women. 

(“What do women want?” asked Freud in despair … to which cartoonist Mimi Pond replied, “Shoes.”  Thanks, Mimi.  Big help.)

It’s especially difficult to write about romantic love when, in one sense, both “love” and “romance” have lost meaning in the post-modern world.  Saint Valentine, his day stripped of its sanctity in the name of secular commerce, now presides over a semi-ritualized gift-giving that drips the same sappy sentimentality with which American marketing saturates every major holiday.  Where is the passion, the adventure, the hypergolic mix of eros and agapē?  At the same time, why bother with the jewelry and the chocolates when you can just as easily get laid on Groundhog’s Day as Valentine’s Day?

No such thing as free contraception

Yesterday, Catholics across the country were merely angry with the Obamination.  Today, we’re not only angry but mortally offended and insulted.

Why?  Didn’t Pres. Obama outline an accommodation on the HHS mandate that would allow religiously-affiliated institutions to not offer contraceptives and sterilizations?  What more could we want?  Isn’t that enough of a compromise?

In truth, it wasn’t an “accommodation” at all.  Under the “accommodation”, the insurance company would offer the employee the coverage … at no additional cost (wink-wink-nudge-nudge).  But since the employer is still paying the insurance company, and because the insurance company doesn’t get a conscience exemption, the net effect is that the employer will still be paying for the contraceptives indirectly through higher rates … the bookkeeping will look a little different, that’s all.

Let’s explain it a different way: Under the old phrasing, the religiously-affiliated employer was subsidizing coverage for no-copay contraceptives.  Under the new phrasing, the employer is still subsidizing coverage for no-copay contraceptives … but she’s allowed to say she’s not.  But she still has to tell the employee how to get the coverage she’s not providing from the carrier she’s paying to not provide the coverage the employee is still getting.  Make sense to you?  It doesn’t to me.

By offering such a transparently phony compromise, Obama told mandate opponents, “Forget it, you’re not gonna get out of paying for birth control.  I’m just offering you this one chance to chalk up a face-saving ‘win’.  Then you might as well just shut up and bend over.”