The futility of minimal goodness

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.

—Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, Part 6, Chap. 3

Yesterday, of course, was the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Cycle B).  The theme running through the readings was of strife, envy and jealousy; the only counter to these problems is to humble oneself and become a servant to those whom one wishes to rule.

However — and this might be grounds for censure — the selected Gospel text (Mk 9:30-37) isn’t the one that occupied my attention at Mass.  Rather, another one floated into mind, a text that has had a lot of personal meaning:

[The Lord said,] “Will any one of you, who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep, say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down at table’?  Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and gird yourself and serve me, till I eat and drink; and afterward you shall eat and drink’?  Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded?  So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty’” (Lk 17:7-10).

It’s worth noting that the Greek word translated in most versions as “servant”, doulos, has the primary meaning “slave”.  In fact, that’s how the New American Bible had it translated when it was originally published.  It was re-translated back to “servant” with the 1986 revision, which is a pity; translating doulos as “slave” brings a lot more to the theological party.[*]

“We are worse than useless slaves, for we have done no more than what was required of us.”  That’s how it went, if my memory doesn’t play me false.  Doing the bare minimum is not a guarantee of a passing grade.

Or, at least, that was the initial impression.

Open letter to African-American voters

This is the first time you’ve ever faced such a crucial decision. The election of a black man, Barack Obama, to the office of the Presidency was a milestone despite the fact that his father did not share the same history as most of your families do — to be blunt, direct descent from men and women enslaved by white Americans. While the election did not cure all the ills besetting the African-American community, certainly it was grounds for hope for the future … at least, at the time.

However, election is only half the loaf; the other half is re-election. As the Associated Press reported Sunday, “There’s no question which candidate is expected to win the black vote. In 2008, Obama won 95 percent of black voters and is likely to get an overwhelming majority again.” A second term for Obama would demonstrate once and for all that the first election wasn’t a fluke, that racism no longer has the power to deny the person of color any elective office.

But there’s some question among you whether you can conscientiously vote for a president who supports gay marriage. As the Rev. A. R. Bernard of the African-American Christian Cultural Center put it, “When President Obama made the public statement on gay marriage, I think it put a question in [black Christian leaders’] minds as to what direction he’s taking the nation.”

At the same time, many of you are reluctant to support a Mormon, Mitt Romney, in Obama’s place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And so many of your church leaders are asking you to stay home rather than vote this November 6th. I disagree: it’s not enough to just not vote for Obama.

Choices, parties and Catholic social doctrine

Philosophy?  I’m a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all!

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

I’m pretty sure most of you have caught the news that John Carr, Executive Director of the Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has retired.  WaPo has a story on Carr’s influence and legacy in Washington politics that’s fairly laudatory … at least until reporter Michelle Boorstein turns to consider his as-yet-unnamed replacement.

Boorstein writes:

At a time when Catholics are watching their community become increasingly polarized along political lines, Carr is considered a dying breed: a Catholic moderate with a foot firmly in both camps.  He worked for the White House Conference on Families under President Jimmy Carter and was a Democratic candidate.  He has also zealously slammed the Obama White House for its mandate that employers provide contraception coverage to employees.  At a good-bye event this week at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops headquarters, Carr’s voice sounded angriest when he bemoaned the Bush-led Iraq War.

Catholics are becoming more divided over whether they focus on church teachings against war and poverty or the ones against abortion and gay marriage.  Catholic progressives are particularly worried about Carr leaving as Church officialdom in recent years has put greater and greater emphasis on defending the unborn [like Carr did anything to prevent or minimize it?  Carr is a pro-life Democrat!].

Okay, here’s the million-dollar question:  Why is there a division?  What makes anyone think that to be against abortion and gay marriage is to be for war and rampant poverty, or vice versa?

Matthew 7:1 and mainstreaming pathology

Publicity still from Yellow

According to director Nick Cassavetes, incest is “super-weird” ... but ultimately no real problem.

Cassavetes, whose new movie Yellow centers on a sexual relationship between a brother and sister, says his movie “is about judgment, and lack of it, and doing what you want.  Who gives a s*** if people judge you?  I’m not saying this is an absolute but in a way, if you’re not having kids — who gives a damn?  Love who you want.  Isn’t that what we say?  Gay marriage — love who you want?  If it’s your brother or sister it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.”

This is wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin.  Superficially, Cassavetes would seem to have a point if — and only if — we grant that people are entitled to be psychologically damaged so long as they’re not cutting throats or torching houses … that is, so long as they’re only hurting themselves.  This is nonsense on the face of it; it’s as if we were discussing a right to contract bubonic plague or an entitlement to leprosy.

FOXNews’ resident psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow, is having none of that:

… I don’t mind taking a stand on the side of inherent, human truth when twisting it confines people to psychological pathology and leaves them forever in pain.  So, here you go:  Sisters and brothers who have sexual affairs are not well.  They need help sorting out and overcoming psychological suffering and terrifying traumas that visited them long ago. … I’m here to help them, in part by telling them that, even if they are in denial about the underlying suffering fueling their symptoms (incest), they will have to confront it, eventually.

An outline of a secular argument against SSM (Part IV)

Well, here it is almost a week later, and I’m preparing to wrap up this extensive outline.  First, let’s recap the ground covered so far:

• Part I: Marriage isn’t simply a special relationship between two sexual partners. Rather, it’s a social institution which both privileges and guards the basic unit of the community: the nuclear family. It gives social and legal claims against the father for the benefit of the mother and her children, as well as establishing his vested interest in his genetic offspring and legitimizing their inheritance from him. Homosexual unions, sterile by nature, cannot and do not have this reproductive orientation.
• Part II: Insofar as a society recognizes the biological imperative of sex — reproduction — marriage serves to legitimize not just the children of the union but the union itself as proper. In our society, however, other forms of sexual union — especially homosexuality — are losing or have already lost their illegitimacy, nullifying marriage’s “stamp of approval”. In this light, SSM is “a solution without a problem”.
• Part III: In the current political climate, reliably neutral scientific study of gay parenting is impossible because both sides want too much to dictate the only permissible outcome. However, by looking at the effects on children of family structures other than traditional marriage, we find that none work so well as having both biological parents present and formally unified. Indirectly, then, we have reason to suspect that men and women can’t simply step into each other’s roles in parenting, that biological “hard-wiring” and blood relationship have their parts. Privileging gay unions, in this sense, is a misdirection of effort; we should be working to save traditional marriage, not promote “second- and third-bests”.

An outline of a secular argument against SSM (Part III)

III: The other horn of the dilemma

So far, we’ve been speaking about marriage as a specific relationship that has a specific function in society.  But moreover, we’ve been talking about traditional marriage, i.e., one in which one man and one woman remain together for twenty years or more, and in which all children are products of that same union.

However, traditional marriage is not the only context in which children are raised.  For example, 1 in 3 American children are raised in a single-parent home, including two-thirds of black children, over half of Native American children, and two-fifths of Hispanic children.[1] Forty-two percent of all American adults have at least one step relative: a step or half sibling (30%), a living stepparent (18%) and/or a stepchild (13%).[2]  Many children are being raised by both biological parents, but not within marriage or any understood long-term commitment (11% of all children under 1, diminishing to 2% of children from 6 to 11 and 1% of adolescents).[3]

In Part II, I alluded to the rise of alternative family arrangements, such as cohabiting parents, single parents, grandparents-only, and blended families, to illustrate the point that gay marriage is “a solution without a problem”.  Traditional marriage may have sentimental pride of place, but if it’s no longer necessary, then gay marriage isn’t necessary, either.  In fact, it has all the appearance of awarding the happy couple a free cruise on the Andrea Doria.

An outline of a secular argument against SSM (Part II)

[I don't often change my posts after they're published, except for minor edits (spelling, punctuation, syntactical errors, and so forth).  However, I'd completely finished Part III before I realized it had gone in the wrong direction.  So the last paragraph has been amended to fit the next installment.—TL]

One of my friends confessed, “I just don’t get marriage.  Why do people get married, anyway?”  This caused a bit of an embarrassed silence; the friend in question had left her husband and two kids for another woman, so there were all sorts of potential landmines for a well-intentioned idiot to step on.  Fortunately, I wasn’t there.

Again, we’ve been looking not at motivations, which are various and range from really good to really bad, but rather at marriage’s function in society.  I’m sure had anyone tried to discuss the matter, they would have dwelt on motivations while missing the fact that the question was really about the function. 

That no one automatically connects children with marriage anymore is hardly the tip of the iceberg; imagine my astonishment when, reading a thread on contraception, I came across a comment where a woman said, in dismissal of an argument: “What has sex got to do with reproduction?”  It’s as if we have started to believe that the primary purpose of eggs is not baby chickens but breakfast and baked goods, or that cars exist for satellite radio, Bose speaker systems and Corinthian-leather bucket seats rather than to get you from Point Alfa to Point Bravo.

And yet the future for the hosts of children born and raised outside of marriage is grim and looking grimmer. Researcher Kay S. Hymowitz argues:

We are becoming a nation of separate and unequal families that threatens to last into the foreseeable future.  On the one hand, well-educated women make more money.  They get married, only then have their children, and raise them with their husbands.  Those children are more likely to grow up to be well-adjust­ed, to do well in school, to go to college, to marry and only then have children.  On the other hand, we have low-income women raising children alone who are more likely to be low-income, to drop out of school or, if they do make it to college, go to a less elite col­lege, and to become single parents themselves.

An outline of a secular argument against SSM (Part I)

A couple of days after Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, I posted on a comment Brandon Vogt had gotten on Facebook: “So not allowing certain individuals rights based on a religious viewpoint is not dictatorship?”  In the central paragraph, I contended:

He’s assuming that opposition to same-sex marriage can be based on nothing other than traditional Christian morality, that a secular case can’t be made against it, and that therefore one-man-one-woman state laws and amendments amount to an establishment of religion.  He’s wrong; but had he said just that, a fruitful discussion on the First Amendment and the place of religion in the public square might have followed.  But no-ooo-o! he had to phrase it in a manner that implicitly equates religion with totalitarian regimes.

Them’s fightin’ words.  Or, to put it another way, that’s not how you change people's hearts and minds.

The one response I’ve gotten so far at this writing — and it was a nice comment, too! — came from Abraham:

I cannot help but notice that you do not make any attempts to provide any secular argument against same-sex marriage. Couldn’t it be successfully argued that once removed from a religious context, there is no valid reason not to recognize homosexual unions in the same way as heterosexual ones?

Apologetics toolbox: Abortion and the silence of Jesus

[Vice-President Joe] Biden is not wrong on gay and abortion, Jesus NEVER took a stand on either of these issues.  Jesus only talked about love and a belief in him, you people better take a deep look into yourselves because he is coming back soon and not loving your neighbor and not taking care of the poor and the less fortunate goes against everything my lord taught and if you do not do the same you spit on him and I would hate to be in your shoes.

This combox entry appeared in Carson Holloway’s piece, “Paul Ryan, Joe Biden and Liberal False Equivalence”, on CatholicVote.org.  Of course, besides our anonymous troll’s factual error — that Jesus talked about much more than love and faith in him is easily demonstrable from the Gospels — s/he also commits an argument from Gospel silence.  Such arguments, as I’ve said before, can become ad ignorantiam fallacies unless the argument to be made from the silence is consistent with what came both before the Gospels (pre-Christian Judaism) and after the Gospels (the New Testament letters; the writings of the Church Fathers).

And yet, there are those who will insist that Jesus the Compassionate would have understood, and implicitly given his approval to, a woman’s desire to abort her unborn child … especially if she were young, poor and in some sense downtrodden.  Not only is this argument hard to sustain without Scriptural proof-texts, it perfectly illustrates why asking “What Would Jesus Do” is bad moral advice: it invites us to turn the Lord into a sock puppet telling us to do what we want to do anyway.

Democracy, truth and the death of liberalism

©1980 David Horsey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

—Winston S. Churchill

In First Things, Matthew Schmitz writes an interesting breakdown of some recent social-survey data which indicate that youth support of gay marriage is somewhat soggy and undependable as a sign of the future.  His basic premiss, of course, is that liberals in the media misrepresent the numbers; a couple of years ago I would have argued that the misrepresentation wasn’t all intentional … in fact, on another subject, I did.  (Now, after the blanket party they threw for Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A, not so much.)

As good as it was, I wouldn’t even bring the article up except for a disturbing “drive-by” comment by a person identifying himself as “Dan”:

I realize that this article pertains to generational opinions on marriage equality for gays and lesbians, however a larger issue is being ignored. The USA is the only nation on earth that has allowed the public to decide this important civil rights issue via ballot measures. This is a grossly immoral act which violates every principle of our Republic. Ultimately, the majority has no right to determine the civil rights of minorities. Have we learned nothing from the struggles of women for the right to vote or blacks to attend the same schools? Therefore, whatever young people think regarding this issue is irrelevant [bold font mine].

So much for “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.  Perhaps Dan merely wanted to throw a cold bucket of disillusionment over our grand national fantasy of representative democracy.  Perhaps in reality we were always just token participants in our government; perhaps even the modern cumbersome and expensive primary process is just an elaborate scheme for putting the élite’s Chosen Ones in office and judicial chambers.

Considering Mitt Romney, I half believe it myself.