How the next civil war will begin

On April 12, 2011, it will be 150 years since the opening shots were fired on Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of the bloodiest conflict in American history—the Civil War.

Today we stand poised on the brink of an even greater disaster. For over forty years, the pro-life movement has largely defined itself in its opposition to abortion, although a host of other issues have come in its wake, issues the movement was prepared to fight: euthanasia, assisted suicide, eugenics, in vitro fertilization, fetal stem cell research. But it appears now that the knock-out punch, the key victory the “culture of death” needs to reign triumphant, is going to come from the direction we were least prepared to fight.

That issue is gay marriage.

So just how far have we progressed?

Thursday, I ended my post with the example of Caesar’s wife. This morning, after a night of simmering and fretting over the not-distant-enough collapse of Western civilization (God, I would love to be Chicken Little rather than Cassandra!), I started thinking of the conditions that obtained in 59 BC, when Julius Caesar, having finished a frustrating and not entirely successful consulship trying to work around his obstructive junior consul Marcus Bibulus—people would end up joking about events taking place “in the consulship of Julius and Caesar”—rode off to Gaul and his destiny.

The day he left, the Roman Republic had only fifteen years to live.

Sticking a fork in Virginia's abortion industry

Rock and a hard place. Devil and the deep blue sea. Hobson’s choice. Use whatever cliché expression you will—that’s where the pro-abortion forces find themselves in Virginia.

In chess, the knight is a particularly useful piece because of a placement called the “fork”. In a knight fork, the knight is placed so he can attack two or more of the opponent’s pieces—say, a rook and a queen, or the king and a bishop—simultaneously, forcing the opponent to save one and lose the other. This is particularly effective when one of the pieces being forked is the king, due to the priority of check: because the knight is so difficult to block, the king has to move.

On Thursday, the Virginia legislature approved a measure that would require abortion clinics to meet the same minimum health and safety standards required of a hospital. According to AP reporter Dena Potter, this would force seventeen of the state’s twenty-one clinics to close. Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, and Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, whose Catholicism Potter found some obscure reason to mention, will sign the bill into law.

Here’s the fork: Do abortion advocates promote safety at the risk of losing access, or promote access at the cost of appearing to not much care about unsanitary clinics and women damaged by the procedure?

Lies and Lila: Caesar's wife

The opening volleys of the “Lies & Lila” battle were almost deafening. Now, it’s settled down to riflemen in single-shot mode, with the occasional rattle of a machine gun. But it’s still a battle—worse, it’s a blue-on-blue incident.

Last Friday, Mark Shea titled his second National Catholic Register blog entry on the controversy “Last Comments on Lying for Jesus”. Then, he felt compelled to make additional remarks on Sunday (“Faustian Bargains”), and again on Wednesday (“Augustine vs. the Priscillianists”). So one of his respondents on the latter’s combox accused him of lying on Friday.

This issue has gotten touchy enough that even a lightly flippant remark can spin off into a round of squawking and squabbling. For all that we’re supposed to practice Christian charity in our remarks, some of the defenses on both sides have become rather acidic — and, by the way, I repeat my apology for my impatient and unjust treatment of Dr. John Zmirak’s argument in defense of Lila; it has since been corrected. Shea, who can be rather snarky to people whom he’s arguing with, senses this, and has toned down his rhetoric … to not much effect.

Satan must be laughing his ass off right now.

Fish need bicycles

It’s been around a century, more or less, since Sigmund Freud threw up his hands and asked the question all men have asked since Adam bit the apple: “Woman: what does she want?”

The answer appears to be that women don’t really know, either.

On Saturday, the online edition of the Wall Street Journal published an extract from Kay S. Hymowitz’s Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Turned Men into Boys, under the title “Where Have The Good Men Gone?” And, as Jennifer Fulweiler reports in her blog on the National Catholic Register, “Only hours after it was posted, it had 300 comments, most of them from men who basically said: ‘Right back at’cha.’ They wanted to know where all the good women have gone.” (The extract has been “liked” over 60,000 times as of this writing.)

According to Hymowitz, women are no longer satisfied with “guys”, i.e. men in their twenties and thirties stuck in an “Animal House” mindset, not really caring about careers, content to spend long hours at the PlayStation with their buddies, drinking beer and downloading internet porn … “a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance” now being called “pre-adulthood.”

Men aren’t completely satisfied with it, either.

Getting our priorities straight

Over the last hundred years, under the malign influence of Madison Avenue, we’ve managed to corrupt the concept of “need” almost beyond repair.

Take a look at the Bowflex doing duty as a coat rack in your rumpus room. You don’t have the discipline to do free sit-ups every day for six weeks; what made you think you had the discipline to do the dozen or so exercises on that thousand-dollar machine for the same length of time? But it looks cool, the pitchperson promised “fast results”, so you said not “I want this” but “I need this!” Now you have a household traffic obstruction and a beer-keg belly.

(I’m not blaming pitchpersons; my cousin by marriage, Laura Kristi, has done a few commercial shoots herself.)

Welcome to the wonderful world of social engineering, where various enterprises of dubious morality routinely screw up our priorities by transforming our desires into psychologically completing must-haves. We never knew how empty and unfulfilling our lives were until we learned about the Sham-Wow. Just how did we manage to survive so long as a species without the ability to surf the Web and video chat from the most barren spots in the US?

Forgiving the Unforgiveable

I’ve been robbed at gunpoint twice in my life. In both cases, the perpetrators were black men. Some months after the second episode, I learned that one (white) friend had told another, “Well if he doesn’t hate black people now, he never will.”

I never will.

One of the things I’ve learned in my life is that I own my reactions. I don’t have to yell back when I’m yelled at; I don’t have to insult when I’ve been insulted; I don’t have to be hurtful when I’ve been hurt. My control isn’t complete; my temper still occasionally gets the best of me … but not nearly as often as when I was ten years old. The “serenity prayer” helps.

I don’t believe in a “victim discount”. Anger doesn’t justify an unjust dislike of a whole class of people. Being hurt by Person A doesn’t make an automatic distrust of Person B rational simply because the two share some accidental commonality. My having been a victim doesn’t excuse me from exercising my share of the seven virtues to the best of my ability … or praying to God for assistance when that “best” falls short.

I bring this up not to boast—“See what a wonderful person I am!”—because I’m still very much a “work in progress”. Rather, I’m trying to explain why I get impatient with some of the public actions and words of SNAP and their counterparts.

Save the heathens!

In response to “A house divided”, BetternBefore writes:

This probably is all over my head. Is it wrong for me to question why Catholics (or Mormons for that matter) would want to legally force non-Catholics like me to produce unwanted children? Did I misunderstand when I was thinking the objective was for the number of Catholics to grow? With the overpopulation of this planet continuing, you can’t possibly want more of us heathens around.

I actually welcome the question, because it provides me the opportunity to bring together some threads of thought from earlier posts. It also gives me an opportunity to practice charitable responding, because BetternBefore is a friend of mine, whom I cherish and respect.

To recapitulate: “A house divided” noted that most successes of we call (pace Ven. John Paul II) the “culture of death” have come from a divide-and-conquer strategy of pushing different agenda items at different times. The Pill made it possible to finally disconnect three human activities—sex, reproduction and marriage—which need to remain connected, even when looked at from purely non-religious anthropological grounds.

Lies and Lila: Constructing a "just lie doctrine"—UPDATED

I have what I hope will be my final thoughts on the issue here. But, as Harry S. Truman said, "Never say 'never', 'cause never's a helluva long time."

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The law falls silent in the midst of arms.
—CiceroThe mere fact that war has broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.
—Gaudium et Spes, 79 § 3 (cf. CCC 2312)

For the last two weeks, the Catholic blogosphere has been rather turbulent with the burning question: Were Lila Rose and LiveAction justified in securing the videos exposing some of Planned Parenthood’s corrupt activities through pretense? Is lying justified in the fight against abortion? Is it ever justified?

A quick survey of the answers:

• Reginaldus, New Theological Movement: It’s a sin to lie, even to Planned Parenthood. (Note to self: never embed your conclusion in your title.)
• Carolyn Moynihan, Mercatornet: Entrapment is too much of a sticky wicket; even MSM journalists are backing away from it.
• Richard Collins, Linen on the Hedgerow: Of course you may lie; you can be a saint and lie. (See the note under Reginaldus.)
• Christopher Tollefson, Public Discourse: A movement built on truth shouldn’t win its victories by lies.

Why does a good God allow suffering?

In an email I received just today, a non-Catholic friend of mine reported, “A very good friend of mine, her dad’s a rancher, & he fell off a flatbed truck & broke his neck & is mostly paralyzed now & in terrible pain constantly now, next week moving from rehab to the VA. It’s heartbreaking. Very hard on my friend. What can prayer do for that, huh?”

Before you get huffy, let me tell you that the question wasn’t meant to be sarcastic. I don’t know, and won’t presume to guess, where she is on her spiritual journey. But she is respectful of other religions, even as she struggles with the tough questions … as do we all, if we possess sufficient reflection.

The problem of suffering is one such question: “How can a benevolent God allow people to suffer?” In fact, if you equate suffering with evil, you can see it ties into the logical problem of evil. At some point, every philosophical and religious system must directly deal with suffering and give some answer to it; otherwise, it’s not worth holding.