The Indiana RFRA and the torn-down forest

As of this writing, it appears that the Indiana state government is taking steps to undermine its own Religious Freedom Restoration Act. According to the Associated Press, Gov. Mike Pence has called for legislation “clarifying that [the RFRA] does not allow discrimination on his desk by the end of the week ... to address concerns that the law will allow businesses to deny services to gays and lesbians.” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, facing similar pressure, has already preemptively called for changes to an RFRA bill on his desk.

Nineteen states have RFRAs. Of these, eleven have non-discrimination laws at the city or township level, and two (Illinois and New Mexico) have state laws protecting gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Another eleven have RFRA-like restrictions based on SCOTUS decisions. (Source: Daily Signal.) On the surface, the problem with Indiana’s RFRA is that it’s loosely written; critics claim that businesses can refuse gay people’s business, and that the civil-rights legislation and decisions of the last sixty years have determined that “you don’t have the right to choose who gets to sit at the counter.”

The truth of the matter, though, is that the other states all caught the RFRA wave at the right time, before SCOTUS’ decision in Lawrence v. Texas (539 US 558, 2003) made it “okay to be gay”. Now that wave has long passed; the LGBT lobby has command of a sizeable chunk of the culture factories, as well as the allegiance of the majority of our celebrities and politicians.

This makes the conditions most favorable for anti-RFRA moral posturing, along with its attendant obliviousness. For instance, the Daily Caller reports, “Connecticut Gov. Dannell Malloy will issue an executive order on Monday calling for a ban on state-funded travel to Indiana” … conveniently forgetting that Connecticut has an arguably more restrictive RFRA. Oops.

“A climate in which belief may flourish”

Austin Farrer. (Image source: bbc.co.uk)

Recently, my friend Devin Rose, who works for Fr. Joseph Barron’s WordOnFire.org and runs St. Joseph’s Vanguard, posted this lengthy comment on his Facebook page (edited for format):

Have you ever had an idea, one that is strong and meaningful but tough to articulate, and then you stumble upon a quote that brings it into sudden focus? Such a quote flashes like lightning around the idea, illuminating it and allowing you to see it clearly for the first time.
I had the experience tonight after discovering a remark by Austin Farrer, an Oxford scholar and close friend of C.S. Lewis:

For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish. [in Jocelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C. S. Lewis (1966)]

I’ve spent hundreds of hours over the last couple years exchanging arguments with all sorts of unbelieving friends — atheists, agnostics, and other labels I didn’t know existed. Some fellow Catholics have warned me that, “Nobody has ever been argued into the Church,” or that, “Evangelization is more about the way you live than the arguments you give.” Neither sentiment ever rang true with me, at least not completely, but I couldn’t explain why.
Then I discovered Dr. Farrer’s quote, which affirmed two key convictions that have brewed within me during these many encounters. First, without arguments or good reasons to believe in God, most Christians will abandon their faith — especially while they are young. Religious experience and devotion can only carry people so far. Most of the atheists and agnostics I engage were raised in Christian homes, but ones that provided no intellectual support.
Second, Christianity is not even a viable option for most non-believers if, to them, it lacks respectable arguments. It’s not that they won’t find the Gospel compelling without good, supporting reasons; it’s that they won’t even consider it. Without a strong intellectual basis, they’ll pay Christianity as much attention as Scientology or Hinduism.

How I Work

So Thomas L. McDonald, the tech-and-history guru of God and the Machine, decided to post a couple of series based on Lifehacker's "How I Work", the other one being "How I Pray", featuring other bloggers. After posting his most recent (as of this writing), featuring The Curt Jester's Jeff Miller, Tom foolishly extended an invitiation to his Facebook blogger friends to write "How I Work" posts

How could I pass up an opportunity to engage in shameless self-promotion? (Except self-promotion isn't one of my strengths; I tend to overdo the false humility.)

*     *     *

Location: Denton, Texas

Current Gig:

Managing editor, Catholic Stand. Oh — you mean paying gig? None at this writing.

One word that best describes how you work:

Squirrel!

Current mobile device:

HTC EVO 4G Android phone; MID M729B Android tablet.

Current computer:

Compaq CQ5600Y with AMD Athlon II 2.0 GHz processor, 2 GB memory (practically brain-dead by today's standards), 500 GB hard drive, Windows 7 OS; Compaq S2022 series LCD monitor.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without? Why?

Microsoft Office, specifically MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Outlook; Faith Database; Photoshop and Photoscape in tandem; browser.

Microsoft Office: Besides my personal use, they're the office apps I encounter most frequently when I do work. Since I'm not a hard-core user, I don't do a lot of shopping around or experimenting unless I'm forced to (as I have been recently with browsers). I'm almost expert level with MS Word; MS Excel gives me pretty much all my spreadsheet and database needs; and MS Outlook does alright as an organizer/email tool. I picked up OpenOffice some time ago, but haven't gotten around to playing with it.

Paul Krugman Believes His Own Eyes—UPDATED

Photograph by David Levene/eyevine via Redux.

Tim Worstall’s recent Forbes.com piece, “Paul Krugman’s Amazing About Face On The Minimum Wage”, reminds me very much of the old joke that either came from or found its way into the musical Chicago: The woman who comes home to find her husband in bed with another woman. In the middle of protesting his innocence, the cad asks his angry spouse, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Worstall’s piece is all about the differences between “good Krugman”, who in September 1998 published an article derisively dismissing minimum-wage arguments (because “the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away”), and “bad Krugman”, whose March 2 NYT op-ed “Walmart’s Visible Hand” made a devastating concession: “… [E]xtreme inequality and the falling fortunes of America’s workers are a choice, not a destiny imposed by the gods of the market. And we can change that choice if we want to.”

Old Krugman said that Walmart paying higher wages might lead to less turnover, better morale and higher productivity. But only at Walmart because the operative part was “higher wages than other employers”. And that’s the one thing that a general rise in wages, for example a rise in the minimum wage, cannot accomplish.
New Krugman tells us that a rise in the minimum wage will accomplish exactly that thing that Old Krugman tells us is impossible.

What might be the difference between Old Krugman and New Krugman? Seventeen years of observation? The intervention of a recession which exposed underlying fallacies in free-market thinking? Oh, no: according to Worstall, the difference is a paycheck from that “hotbed of liberal ideology,” the New York Times.

And that, my friends, is pretty much the full substance of Worstall’s refutation of Krugman: He writes for “Hell’s Bible”.

Fourth Sunday in Lent: The Babylonian Exile

Image source: conformingtojesus.com.

First Reading: 2 Chronicles 36:14-16,19-23

Responsorial: Psalm 137:1-6

Second Reading: Ephesians 2:4-10

Gospel: John 3:14-21

The first reading recalls the fall of the kingdom of Judah, the southern half of the Davidic Kingdom of Israel, in 586 BC. The northern half, which had retained the name of Israel, had fallen to Sargon II in 722 BC, and had been redesignated an Assyrian province with the name Samaria. Now, with the twin invasions of the Chaldeans and Idumeans, the original Kingdom of David and Solomon was no more.

Moses had given the Hebrew people God and His Law. Nebuchadnezzar gave them their identity as Jews. The seventy years of the Babylonian Exile[*] had done more to make the Jewish people monotheists than had over four centuries of self-rule. The Hebrews had had an alphabet and a written language since at least David’s time; now they began to gather such records as they had and compile their oral traditions, to redact the beginning of what would eventually become the Tanakh — the Hebrew Bible.

This period, in which Jewish identity was being crystallized, also gave us Psalm 137 [136], a song of heartbreak and loss: “How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?” Not included in the reading of the psalm is the anger:

Remember, Lord, against Edom
    that day at Jerusalem.
They said: “Level it, level it
    down to its foundations!”
Desolate Daughter Babylon, you shall be destroyed,
    blessed the one who pays you back
    what you have done us!
Blessed the one who seizes your children
    and smashes them against the rock.

Thus was forged in the minds and hearts of the Jewish people the iron triad of God, the Law, and Zion, to which they have clung with stubborn fidelity for over 2,500 years.

Taking offense and taking action

Protest march at OU. (Photo source: Legal Insurrection.)

When an unapologetically über-conservative man and a hard-core leftist woman agree on a point, you can almost bet your life savings the truth is in the opposite direction. Especially when the topic is “offense discourse”.

Steven Crowder’s argument is about machismo more than anything else. “Both men and women respect men who take ownership, men who take action. Choosing to ‘be offended’ is the epitome of inaction. Today’s ‘offended’ men are seen as wimpy simply because they are. Instead of harnessing whatever affront is facing them, instead of facing it head-on, dealing with the problem and coming out the other side a stronger man, the ‘modern’ male chooses to sulk, to whine, and inevitably call Gloria Steinem.” Plus, “chicks dig it” when you take action.

I’m not sure Katherine Cross would agree with that last assessment … or, for that matter, to being called a “chick”. However, she does agree that “offense discourse” leads to inaction:

It has to be one of the most significant rhetorical own-goals of the Left since the 1960s: allowing the word ‘offend’ to become the go-to way of describing the harms of prejudice. “This content offends me,” “your words are offensive,” “his conduct gave offence to x,” etc. What this has always facilitated is the commonplace reactionary response to such moral injunctions, defending some imagined noble right to give offense lardered [sic] with smug Stephen Fry image macros. Cue “free speech”’ arguments ad nauseam that resolve into garrulous nothingness. … It is the deeds that flow from words which concern us, and which cannot be contained by the concept of offensiveness.

Of the two arguments, Cross’ is the more fully developed. Crowder’s post amounts to little more than a couple of chest-thumps and an admonition to “put on your big-boy britches and deal with it”. Both arguments, however, are simply wrong, or at least not fully to the point.

Second Sunday in Lent: Generosity and Sacrifice

The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Juan de Valdes Leal (1659).

First Reading: Genesis 22:1-2,9-13,15-18

Responsorial: Psalm 116:10,15-19

Second Reading: Romans 8:31-34

Gospel: Mark 9:2-10

In today’s Gospel reading, Mark gives us an account of Jesus’ transfiguration in the presence of Ss. Peter, John and James. A lot is packed into this theophanic moment: Moses, the Teacher and Lawgiver, sitting with Elijah, the greatest of the Prophets, both in conversation with the Word of God Revealed — not quite in his fullness of power and glory, but in a manner (somewhat) comprehensible to the three disciples. Moreover, they are conversing: neither Moses nor Elijah is a mindless shade, as many Mediterranean cultures conceived of the dead:

Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades,

      as do those who are alive and give thanks?

From the dead, as from one who does not exist, thanksgiving has ceased;

      he who is alive and well sings the Lord’s praises.

(Sirach 17:27-28 RSVCE)

So wondrous is this revelation that Peter, speaking from his heart, offers to build sukkoth for them. Sukkoth, on the one hand, were temporary shelters, walled with leather and roofed with palm fronds, such as field workers and religious pilgrims used; on the other hand, just such a tabernacle had been the temple of the Hebrews as they sojourned in the desert with Moses — a holy place that was wholly portable. God had “tented” with His people in the desert, in the Ark of the Covenant, just as His Word “tabernacled” among humanity in the flesh of Christ (cf. John 1:14 LXX, eskēnōsen).

First Sunday in Lent 2015: Spring Cleaning the Conscience

First Reading: Genesis 9:8-15

Psalm 25:4-6,7-9

Second Reading: 1 Peter 3:18-22

Gospel: Mark 1:12-15

In the first reading, God makes a covenant with every mortal being on earth through Noah: “Never again shall all creatures be destroyed by the waters of a flood.” (Genesis 9:11) In the second reading, St. Peter tells us this flood “prefigured” the sacrament of Baptism, “not as a cleansing of dirt from the body, but as an eperōtēma of a good conscience to God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 3:21)

The meaning of eperōtēma is uncertain. The Vulgate, following St. Jerome, translates it as interrogatio — a question, an interrogation, a cross-examination, perhaps even an argument or syllogism. The New American Bible, Revised Edition notes that it could also be rendered as pledge; “that is, a promise on the part of Christians to live with a good conscience before God, or a pledge from God of forgiveness and therefore a good conscience for us.” And Thayer’s Lexicon argues that “As the terms of inquiry and demand often include the idea of desire, the word thus gets the signification of earnest seeking, i.e. a craving, an intense desire ….”

So what did St. Peter mean by calling Baptism an eperōtēma? It helps us to step backwards, not only in the epistle, but also in Genesis.

Pope Francis, Humanae Vitae, and Margery Eagen’s devastating fallacies—UPDATED ALREADY?

Filipinos at Pope Francis’ Mass in Manila, Jan. 18.
(Photo: AFP/Ted Aljibe.)

You would think that a writer billed as a “spirituality columnist” for a website that professes to cover “all things Catholic” would have some familiarity with Catholic teaching, especially the most controversial doctrines. However, Margery Eagen, writing for Crux, talks about Pope Francis’ recent speech at the Mall of Asia as though her only knowledge of Catholicism came from Planned Parenthood.

Although he has not lived it himself, I had thought [Pope Francis] understood something about good people living real lives in real marriages. I had thought he even understood something about the beauty of sex in marriage, the need for sex in marriage.

I was wrong.

In the United States, his words will have little practical impact. Most Catholic women have used birth control for decades. There are no more families with 12 and 14 kids in the Sunday morning pews. But his words do reveal a heartbreakingly backward perspective: that the highest calling of married women is sacrificing all to rear children, as many as come along, no matter those women’s talents or skills or dreams.

These aren’t the words of a person who’s well-educated in Catholic doctrine, let alone someone who should be discussing Catholic spirituality. These are the words of a journalist content to work with the straw-man “Catholic beliefs” constructed for her by second-wave feminism, the kind of nonsense which led Elizabeth Dias at TIME to write that “the mainstream media has nearly no understanding of the Church.”

In fact, Francis’ words reveal no such chauvinist nonsense. To be sure, he offered a doughty defense of the goodness of family and childrearing against “ideological colonization”, a branch of “cultural imperialism”. Eagen’s criticism presents us with the kind of false dilemma demagogues love: you’re either for contraception or you’re against women working outside the home.

Talking smack about the Pope

It’s been over a week now, and certain people still haven’t gotten over the spanking Maureen Mullarkey received for her rather slanderous attack on Pope Francis. And a spanking it was; R. R. Reno, the editor-in-chief of First Things, not only washed his hands of her post but offered his own rebuttal to it, calling her criticisms and caricatures of Francis “overdrawn and ill-tempered”.

Oh, wait a minute — that’s not the spanking they’re not over. Rather, they’re not over the explosion from the Patheos blog, Catholic and Enjoying It, written by The Blogger Whom I’m Damn Well Going to Name for Just This Once, Mark Shea.

You see, Shea had just written the day before about the Catholic right’s pre-dismissal of Francis’ yet-to-be-completed encyclical on climate change; and lo and behold, out comes Mullarkey’s hit piece. (You could almost hear him yelling at the clay pigeon launcher, “Pull!”) So he unloaded on Mullarkey, as well as her First Things combox followers, calling it a “festival of crazy contempt for Francis” and a “revolting (in every sense) smear job”.

Christopher Ferrara at The Remnant promptly got upset on Mullarkey’s behalf, deploying even more right-wing buzzwords and straw men, along with a healthy dollop of radical-traditionalist contempt for “neo-Catholics”. (Apparently, Francis “kissed the Koran” when he posed for that shot holding the anti-fracking T-shirt.) Nevertheless, we might have been able to walk away from the shindy — certainly it doesn’t appear Shea’s given the matter any further attention — had not my Catholic Stand colleague Donald R. McClarey weighed in with further acid, preceded with the biggest straw man of them all:

“…[C]riticism of this Pope is verboten in the eyes of some bloggers.”