Meanwhile, down in North Carolina, liberty was subverted

In March, the Charlotte, NC district office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission closed the investigation of a complaint by eight faculty members against Belmont Abbey College, finding that the college’s decision to exclude contraceptives from its health plan was not discriminatory.

Then, disturbingly, the case was reopened.

Early last month, as reported in the Wall Street Journal by Patrick J. Reilly, director Ruben Daniels Jr. ruled that Belmont Abbey did in fact violate federal law. The EEOC considers that contraceptive coverage in employer-provided health plans is required by the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act. Now, if Belmont Abbey doesn’t knuckle under, the EEOC will recommend court remedies.

Caritas in Veritate and Papal Infallibility

On August 18th, a group of sixty-eight people representing the intelligentsia of Evangelical Protestantism released a statement titled “Doing the Truth In Love: An Evangelical Response to Caritas in Veritate”. Now, having been exposed to many years of out-of-power party responses to sitting presidents’ speeches, and having built up the uncharitable notion “Evangelical = anti-Catholic” in my subconscious mind, I was more than a little prepared to read something condemnatory of Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical.

Imagine my surprise when I found the response advocated was warm adoption: “We commend the way in which this encyclical considers economic development in terms of the true trajectory for human flourishing. … We echo its call for a new vision of development that recognizes the dignity of human life in its fullness, and that includes a concern for life from conception to natural death, for religious liberty, for the alleviation of poverty, and for the care of creation.” In short, they love it, love it, love it!

Yeah, that’s our Pope! Gotta love him!

Making the world safe for stupidity

Sometimes, it seems like the only issues religious debates hang on now have to do with sex and reproduction. It’s like listening to Johnny One-Note playing the kazoo: it gets old very fast. Like much else, the same ground gets covered over and over, like a flock of crime-scene investigators looking for a toenail in a farm field.

Take the issue of contraceptives, for example. At least since 1968, the year Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, various people (both Catholic and non-Catholic) have been grumping about the Church’s decision to maintain its traditional opposition to artificial birth control, either damning it as an example of the Church’s refusal to join the twentieth (now twenty-first) century or bemoaning it as well-intentioned but ineffectual.

The "Lazy Man's Diet"

I’ve used this line quite a bit, but I’ll go ahead and repeat it anyway: It wouldn’t be true to say I’ve battled obesity since I was fourteen. Rather, it’s been a long, slow surrender punctuated by occasional fits of dieting.

The least I’ve weighed since graduating high school, at a slightly short 5’8”, was 175 pounds, just before I was released from the Marine Corps. For most of my adulthood afterward, it varied between 200 and 220, with a peak of 240 and a valley at 187.

Is "pro-choice Catholic" an oxymoron?

In a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter, Kate Childs Graham declared as her final argument for being pro-choice, “… my Catholic faith tells me I can be. The Catechism [of the Catholic Church] reads, ‘[Conscience] is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths’ [CCC 1776]. Even St. Thomas Aquinas said it would be better to be excommunicated than to neglect your individual conscience. So really, I am just following his lead. After years of research, discernment and prayer, my conscience has been well informed. Being a prochoice Catholic does not contradict my faith; rather, in following my well-informed conscience, I am adhering to the central tenet of Catholic teaching—the primacy of conscience.”

Um, no. Where she got the idea that the primacy of conscience is the central tenet of Catholic teaching, I couldn’t tell you, but it wasn’t from The Catechism of the Catholic Church. (If there is a single central tenet, it’s that Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection set us free from sin.) Let’s look a little further, in paragraphs 1790-1792:

A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. … Yet it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed.

This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the case where a man “takes little trouble to find out what is good and true, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin” (Gaudium et Spes, 16). In such cases, the person is culpable for the sins he commits.

Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church’s authority and her teaching [emphasis mine], lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment in moral conduct.

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, Part III

In Part I, we saw that there were reasons to question the conventional wisdom that homosexuality is innate, but that funding for research for an alternative explanation is not likely to flood the academies soon. In Part II, we saw that homosexuality, innate or not, can still be classified a sexual dysfunction because it channels the reproductive urge into a non-reproductive channel; if it isn’t innate, then it can (and should) be treated like any other dysfunction.

The foundation of my argument—that sex exists solely for procreation—was deliberately cast as a Darwinian argument; Catholicism doesn’t teach such a strict position. Indeed, the Church insists on the combination of both the unitive and procreative aspects of married love. I note with some amusement that the celibate St. Paul, that old puritan, counseled married couples to give in to one another, allowing for short breaks of mutually-consented restraint (1 Cor 7:5).

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, Part II

In the last post, I talked about the conventional wisdom about homosexuality and the obscure evidence that it needn’t be a lifelong orientation. Of course, there’s a list of mental health professional associations whose members strongly object to the idea that homosexuality can be “cured”—nay, that it even needs curing. Since many of these people are in positions to determine who gets research funding and who doesn’t, it’s safe to say that proposals to research alternative explanations will ordinarily find their way to the bottom of the priority lists … if they ever get added to such lists.

How can we be sure that homosexuality is dysfunctional? After all, the reparative therapists may simply be finding precisely what their Christianity tells them to find, to give their narrow-minded bigotry an electroplating of respectable science, just like the scientists who backed the racial theories of the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler in times past.

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, Part I

I used to have a good friend who, among his other traits, was gay. My standards for fellowship were, and still are, fairly low: If you make me laugh, I’ll hang out with you. And Sean definitely had a sense of humor … most of the “fag” jokes I ever knew were ones he’d told me.

Which is not to say that he wasn’t capable of taking his sexual identity seriously. From him I first heard the word “Catholic” used to describe someone who pretends acceptance of homosexuality. When I asked him, quietly and non-threateningly, if he’d ever considered chastity as an alternative, he gave me what I take to be the rationale behind much dysfunctional sexuality: “I can’t live without love.”

A Slice of Humble Pie

Having waited a few weeks for the shame and humiliation to pass, I hereby take this opportunity to remove myself forever from the game of political forecasting. McCain beat Obama!? What was I drinking!?

At the time that I predicted the presidential contest was Sen. John McCain’s to lose, I was confident of a couple of things that, in retrospect, were little more than fantasies. Sure, Barack Obama’s choice of Sen. Joe Biden could have easily backfired because of the latter’s unpredictable tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. And McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin gave us a national sweetheart for the balance of the contest; it would have been pure brilliance, had McCain been ten years younger and with a few less bouts with cancer under his belt.

Invest With Harrah's

I spoke to a customer, in my role as a customer service rep for a major home lender, who was extremely irate. You see, the web site wouldn’t allow him to make a payment because it asked him why his payment was late. The answers it permitted didn’t include as an option the response: “Your f——g company caused the whole g———d economy to go into a f——g tailspin, and I lost most of my d——d money due to the fluctuations of the g———d stock market because of it!”

Because my professionalism (and my tenure) depends on my not making caustic replies to overheated emotional vomit, I couldn’t respond, “Sir, if you really attribute the current economic problems to my company’s investment in subprime home loans, you should probably leave stock investment to the professionals. No matter what the President said, it’s just not that simple.”