My Sandy Hook rant

For the sake of my Facebook friends, I’m going to try to get this out of my system now, and let it go:

F*** the children of Sandy Hook. You’ve played the compassion card once too often.

Don’t get me wrong. My heart aches just as much as yours does. Maybe more, because 6 and 7 is getting a little old for Limbo, and I have no way to know how many of those kids were baptised. To most of you, they just don’t exist anymore. I know they exist; the question is where, and in what state? I think of my own grandchildren, as far as I know unbaptized, and past the age of reason, and their grandfather, who hasn’t done squat about it. And because of that, what can I say to you anti-gun Christians who want to bulletproof children’s bodies, but not their souls? How can I know that the stopped clock of the Westboro heretics isn’t right for once, and those children are in Hell?

And those bodies? You gave the prudential decision on how best to protect school children from nutcases to a government which is down with killing children, and demands that I pay for others to do so. And you want to give them even more prudential power in that matter?  That didn’t work so well this time; do you think it will work any better the next time?  When that government which is cool with abortion comes for your mom, for the handicapped, for the Jews/blacks/conservatives/Presbyterians/whatever, what are you going to do, when they have all the guns?

But we’re going to water their graves with our sentimental tears, because 31st-trimester abortions are somehow worse than 1st-trimester abortions. I guess that until somebody loves you, you’re just a product of conception. And we’ll slick up the dance floor with their blood so everyone can do the gun-ban dance, so they can look righteous in public and be seen to have “done something.”

The worst are the businesses. Cerberus I cut some slack to, because they’ve taken a political shekel, and he who pays the piper calls the tune. But Walmart? Dicks? And especially Cheaper Than Dirt, flipping the bird at their customer base? Why the preemptory apology for something they had no hand in?

Virtually every mass shooter has been taking psychiatric medications with side effects of violence and delusion. Nobody in the mainstream media is talking about banning them. Freedom Group (makers of Nancy Lanza’s Bushmaster) had sales of $775 million in 2011. Novartis (maker of Fanapt, Adam’s drug) had sales of  $58 BILLION in 2011. You do the math. Big Pharma is a LOT bigger than Big Firearm, but just as culpable. [UPDATE: Lanza may not have been on Fanapt, but was probably on something else; my point still stands.]

Speaking of Nancy Lanza, how do you like the “survivalist” slur? They say that like it’s a BAD thing. Oh yeah, she was paranoid, so no wonder her kid was a nutbar.  It’s not paranoia if rational analysis shows you that we’re headed for trouble. And if your analysis doesn’t show you that, you’re not rational. Now, I’m not impressed with Mrs. Lanza as a prepper. With a $200k/yr divorce settlement and no job holding her down, there are much safer places she could have lived than New York City’s ileum (coastal NJ being its rectum). If she was harboring the mentally ill, why weren’t her guns locked up, preferably mostly off-premises? Why indeed (except for parental love) have a dangerous adult under your roof at all? We’ll never get an answer; survival FAIL.

Well, fine, friends. I’ve thrown dielectic at your rhetoric for five days now, to no avail.  I get better arguments out of those grandgirls: “Grampa, can I have some gun control?” “No. Why?” “Cause” “Cause why?” “Cause I want it.” You’re going to get your gun control, if not now, then in 6 months or a year when martial law is declared. And the guns will remain uncontrolled, and the shootings will continue, because I have a moral obligation to protect my family, and some people think they have no moral obligations at all. Have fun with your kitchen knives and baseball bats, when society collapses because of institutionalized sin.

Back to the future

So what is this allergy that the Obots have about the 1950s?

This has been a recurring theme in the Obama campaign, and I really don’t understand it. It works because most Americans didn’t live through it and don’t know their history.

1950s: near full employment.  Married women didn’t HAVE to work (but could). Lower crime. Stable families. Much lower rate of divorce and out-of-wedlock births. HIgh point of the Catholic Church in America, and a better time for churches in general. Strong unions that weren’t Communist, and a Democrat Party that was not a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CPUSA. Real money made out of precious metals. Journalists who at least pretended to report. Millions of babies not being murdered in the womb. No War on Poverty programs creating a permanent underclass. A vigorous space program. Mail-order guns. Classical music on commercial TV and radio. Ven. Fulton Sheen. Few chain restaurants.

Negatives: segregation. Restricted access to birth control (not sure that’s a negative, but I’ll give it to them). The Cold War (we have one of those too, only it’s religious). High taxes to pay off WWII. Nightmares about mushroom clouds. More boring (but healthier?) food. The beginning of Richard Nixon’s career. Electric coffeepots that cost as much or more than the modern ones in fixed dollar terms, but brewed less good coffee (they did last longer though).

Technology doesn’t count. No society has ever willingly abandoned a technology, so if Romney takes us “back to the 50s”, we’ll still have Internet, cable, MRIs, etc.

Given that, just why again shouldn’t I regard this as a Romney campaign ad?

Why I’m NOT a Christian Democrat.

A Facebook friend posted a link to this essay, which I read because I really don’t understand Christian socialists. Well, I still don’t understand them. I have a feeling for them, maybe, but not an understanding. I understand more than I used to, when I started in the faith ; I’m willing to entertain the notion that government can be the vehicle for the fulfillment of moral imperatives. But I’m still not convinced that that’s the best decision prudentially, and I don’t think it’s the argument that the Left is actually making, since they generally argue against the intersection of morals and politics.

Ms. Dollar’s arguments, such as they are, amount to “I am a Democrat because they support all these good things.” It’s hard to argue against that; I want all those good things too. But as a Christian, I am responsible for my own actions, as are we all, and I will face my Judge to answer for the evils I have committed and supported.And my belief is that to vote Democrat is both to support evil, and not to support good. Let’s deal with the negative first.

The Democrat Party supports intrinsic evils, which we are forbidden to cooperate in.  First among these is abortion, which until 1930, Christendom universally condemned as murder. As a self-proclaimed theological conservative, Dollar should be standing with the past.  But I note that Dollar’s definition of “conservative” is “believes in the Nicene Creed”. That’s not the definition of a conservative; that’s the definition of a Christian. That’s been the filter between orthodoxy and heresy in Christendom for nearly 17 centuries, and if there are people whom Dollar accepts as Christian who do not believe in those propositions, both she and her church have major problems. (If she were truly theologically conservative, she’s be an orthodox Catholic, since the entire Reformation was an innovation.). She “align[s] myself with the political party that most consistently puts the interests of marginalized Americans on their national agenda.”  Yet the unborn are the most marginalized Americans of all,  since their very humanity is called into question; they are a “baby” or  a “fetus” depending on whether the mother wants them. To say “It’s not really murder” is like saying “It’s not really stealing,” the language of the justification is self-refuting. Even if one doesn’t know what a human is, somehow, the fact that the preborn class of humans are usually called “baby” should lead one to invoke the precautionary principle. Do you really want to appear before King Jesus saying, “I didn’t know” as He gives you perfect recall of your friend’s baby shower? It’s possibly unfair to note here that the Democrat Party was, historically, the party that marginalized Americans, if they were black.

Nor does Dollar get to hide behind the belief that “abortion is a personal matter”, because she accepts the notion that the State is an agent for her moral choices. If her obligation to feed the poor can and should be fulfilled by government, how much more her obligation to defend the defenseless and to act as a Good Samaritan? Even supporters of the most minimal forms of government agree that, if government has any legitimate function at all, it is to prevent or punish murder. There’s a limited exemption for self-defense, but to use that here would be to accept Murray Rothbard’s argument that the fetus is a parasitic invader that needs to be defended against… and hence not human. And if it’s human, then it’s not a moral actor in being where it is; nobody asks to be conceived. Worse is the unholy conjunction of abortion and charity which states that I have to pay for somebody else to kill their child, which means that abortion is no longer a “personal matter”, as there’s no conscience exemption.

This is not the only intrinsic evil supported by the Democrats. (I will gloss over the contraception issue, as most Christians no longer have a problem with it.) Their entire political philosophy and campaign strategy is based on envy, on the violation of the 10th commandment. It’s all about taking from those who have to give to those who have not. And the definition of “need” constantly expands. Our poor live what in much of the developed world would be considered a middle-class lifestyle. At what point are the poor no longer poor; at what point have we helped enough? I think we all agree that having to live under a bridge is unacceptable, but is there a right to fast food or discounted smart phones?

And the whole mechanism of wealth transfer can be morally questioned. Voting to aid the poor is not like pledging to United Way. In that case, one has a choice whether to contribute, and that choice doesn’t commit anyone else to do so. Indeed, one can get out of fulfilling one’s pledge. However, when you vote, that vote is binding on others who themselves chose otherwise.  And the State, unlike United Way, has guns; all state action is ultimately supported by armed force. Now, if I point a gun at you and request money, it’s a crime, even if I stick the contents of your wallet into a Salvation Army kettle. If I and a mob do so, it is still a crime; it may indeed be several crimes (inciting a riot, conspiracy). If a majority of the population were to do so, would it still be a crime? Why not? What is the magic whereby the State has a moral right to do this?  The Christian might cite Romans 13, but that begs the question of the moral standing of government action. Rom. 13:3-4 assumes we are dealing with just government. If we read 13:1-2 without the light of 13:3-4, we must assume that all governments without exception are ordained of God, including those of Hitler and Pol Pot, and equally to be obeyed, and there is no just-war right to revolution. Now, historically, the Church hasn’t had a moral problem with normal taxation, unless it reaches an oppressive level, so I will freely admit that this argument is ahistorical. Yet it offers a possible counterbalance for the prudential judgement of those who were not taught about solidarity and subsidiarity.

But  some of Dollar’s arguments are also ahistorical, particularly the distinction between “fairness” and “justice“. Indeed, by etymology, she has them reversed if there is any real distinction at all, since justice is legal whereas what is fair is a moral issue….probably more of the rotten fruit of Luigi Taparelli (The class-differentiation is built into the words : Latin vs. Germanic.) Quoting Matthew 20 here is a two-edged sword. God is “fair” exactly as the vineyard owner is. His covenant with us is to grant eternal life to those who repent and believe on His name, whether we do so from birth or on our deathbed, and regardless of how long we have labored in the vineyard. Like the early workers, we might be disturbed at God’s insane generosity to the latecomers. But we contracted for the penny because we need the penny, and can’t lose the chance through death.

She goes on to discuss “everyone giving out of what they have so that all have what they need (e.g., the Loaves and Fishes, Matthew 14:13–21).”  I’ve dealt with this heresy elsewhere (and it IS a heresy to deny what is clearly described as a physical miracle.). But in the State, not everyone gives what they have. The tithe was not a progressive tax, and the widow’s mite was praised because losing anything was a hardship for her. Clearly the centurions should have gone to a Pharisee’s house, and made him pay for her.

This brings us to the other big problem with government support of the poor: it’s not charity, and like bad money under Gresham’s Law, it tends to drive real charity out of the marketplace. You get no moral brownie points for voting for taxes. You get even fewer for paying them, except for those applicable to obeying the law. You aren’t paying out of the goodness of your heart; you pay them to avoid unpleasantness with the IRS which may well include losing your home or freedom. Paying your tax doesn’t change who you are. Now, we sinners don’t want to come up off the dime, and I am the worst in that regard. Some of us solve that problem by making the government force us to come off the dime. It’s somewhat like the closet gay legislator who wants more anti-gay laws because he doesn’t think he can keep it in his pants otherwise. Others of us solve the problem by just doing it. It’s a form of pump priming; as we give, giving gets easier. And it changes us, making us more like Christ, which for Christians is the name of the game. But there aren’t enough real Christians to maintain the poor? Uh, maybe you should take some of the effort you put into Get Out the Vote and put it into evangelization, as Jesus told you to.

“None of us practice a pure faith. Our faith is always influenced by both the Christian and wider cultures in which we live. ” As a statement of fact, I can’t disagree with that. After all, we don’t only read the Bible in Greek as the Muslims read the Koran in Arabic.  As a theological position, though, it runs up against Romans 12:2. I have to wonder whether Dollar’s religion is actually liberalism for which she uses Christianity as a justification, just as she (and I) might well question the extend to which my libertarian leanings might wag the Christian dog. But the goal should be, first, to find the pure faith, and then to prayerfully and objectively apply it to life, including political life.

Religious liberty rally post-mortem.

We were off Saturday in the pickemup truck, pickemupping a new used washer, and we had on a rebroadcast of Friday’s rally for religious freedom (Cleveland version), which I couldn’t go to without screwing Stephen. Most of what I heard was boilerplate, until I heard somebody talking about how the bishops had been working for “a fair and equitable health care system”, and I turned the radio off in disgust.

Here are my observations:
1. You don’t get to cite natural rights in defense of religious freedom and at the same time advocate the violation of the natural right of man to retain the fruit of his labor. You don’t get to choose between natural rights; you’re all-in, or you’re out, or as Ken Kesey would have put it, you’re on the bus or off the bus. You may disagree whether something is in fact a natural right, but you’d best have a good argument. One that I’ve heard about material wealth is that everything comes from God anyway. True, but irrelevant; if it’s OK for the armed mob called the State to take God’s stuff, then it’s OK for me too, 7th Commandment be damned. I have to support the bishops’ position in this, not only in unity with the Church, but because some liberty is better than no liberty, but the fact remains that a lot of the bishops were in support of “health care reform”, and they really need to apologize publicly for the extent to which they supported socialized medicine and called the Obamacare abortion into being (an act I don’t expect to happen any time before their particular judgement). The simple fact is that one does not merely have a religious right not to pay for sin; one has a right to not pay for anything. There is no moral obligation to provide health insurance, or to buy anything else. there’s a moral obligation to treat your employees right, which in this society could be stretched to include health care, but that’s an obligation between you and God, and the state has no place in it, unless you’re really a theocrat.

2. There were too few people, and I do feel some guilt for not being there. 1000 or so is not peanuts; it’s enough to get you noticed by the press. But it’s not enough to induce fear, which is the only language the government knows. These are the folks who can shrug off hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers in DC. If all the ambulatory Catholics of Cleveland and half the committed Protestants filled Public Square, and that was repeated at each rally, the powers that be would get nervous.

3. Kresta complained that the press was getting the message of the rally wrong, saying it was about the HHS mandate instead of religious freedom. Reporters report what they see, and based on the signs and the speeches, they were exactly right in what they reported. I’m not sure the message could have been controlled, even by the most organized movement, without draining the blood from it; it’s this specific act that makes folks angry. Yes, the bigger principle has to be articulated (though as I pointed out above, there are big principles that the Church just isn’t going to touch). But abstractions don’t fill the streets.

Somebody invited Barnhardt, and they got what they expected.

To my lady friends, re the Issa hearing

You’ve been punked by the Huffington Post and Planned Parenthood.

They showed you a picture of an all-male panel. That panel was all clergy, of various faiths…which, for various doctrinal and historical reasons, is a male-heavy profession. There was a second panel, after the Democrats walked out, which contained 2 women, one of whom was a doctor.

Still, you say, how do men have a right to tell me whether I can use birth control? Well, they weren’t discussing birth control; they were discussing freedom of conscience. Nobody is talking about restricting access to contraception. It’s an absolute non-starter, politically. If there were enough women interested in making contraception illegal to do so, they wouldn’t be using it, and thus there wouldn’t be an issue worth making laws about. And single men aren’t going to get behind such a law, because contraception makes it possible for them to use you (and vice-versa). Not to mention that there’s a mess of caselaw in the way, and such an attempt would be swatted down faster than you can say Griswold v. Connecticut. However, lying and saying it’s about your rights was a good way to fire up the base, wasn’t it?

Me, I’m pro-choice on everything short of murder. It is your body, after all, so it’s up to you to decide what to put in it: raw milk, cocaine, hormone pills, penises, tobacco, food supplements, Oreos deep-fried in peroxidized fat…it’s all fine by me. I’m even a squish about things like the IUD and the morning after pill that are technically abortifacients but do their thing at or near the time of conception. I wouldn’t use them, but I’m not into your business enough to say that you can’t.

But I’m a little mystified by this notion that you have a “right” to free contraception, and that if you can’t get it free, your rights are being violated. How did you ever survive that violation of rights over the past umpteen millennia?  Yes, you have a natural right to pick leaves off the contraception bush and eat them. (Apparently the ancient Greeks had such a bush, which is now extinct.) But you don’t have a natural right to force me to be a contraception-bush farmer. I’m a 2nd-Amendment fundamentalist; does that mean I have a right to free ammunition, or that I have a right to force Mennonites and other pacifists to buy it for me? Of course not!

And I also don’t understand why (actually I do understand why, but it’s not an explanation you’ll accept) it’s the Catholics who have to finance other peoples’ sins. Where is the outrage over the Amish and Christian Science exemptions in Obamacare? Why is nobody outraged over the Amish not having to pay Social Security tax if they work for other Amish? They might work for English later, or change their minds and take the dole…it’s patently unfair. How come they have their own schools? What about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their exemptions. Why is it that a Wiccan coven can run a church in a residential neighborhood in violation of zoning laws? Why are you so wrapped up in the plight of a few people who can buy their own birth control or quit working for a Catholic employer? It’s not like we’re draftees in our employment, though the current job market makes it seem so at times.

I’m told that the personal is political, or the political is personal, or however it goes. So, ladies… since I and folks like me are the people who fund Catholic institutions…tell me, why must I buy you an abortion? Don’t deal in generalities; get specific. Better still, come to my place and take my stuff and sell it to buy abortions for poor women;  put your bodies where your mouths are.

ADDENDUM: More details on the circus.

Kresta v. Rahe, 2012

Al Kresta was fulminating about this article (and another similar one) on his show this afternoon, which suggested that the American bishops got what they deserved with the HHS mandate mess. He was carried away with it enough that I kept clicking the radio off and then back on. I’m going to take his points in no particular order.

1. Kresta says that government was not a result of the Fall. Huh? Yes, man had dominion over the animals, and God had a one-law government in Eden. But perfected man has no need of government, as he won’t violate his neighbor’s rights, and he will help his neighbor. Under King Jesus, our wills will be aligned with God’s; is it government when everyone is doing what the ruler wants anyway? Now, that the Fall made government necessary does not make government a bad thing; far from it. But governments are run by fallen people. So, for that matter, is the Church. But the State does not have the Magisterium.

2. Kresta says “It’s the wrong time” to criticize the bishops. OK, let’s give credit where credit is due. The quality is risen in the past 10 years or so, and the response of the bishops to the HHS mandate has been nothing short of magnificent. I’ve got their backs on the battlefield. But… this is an act of repentance, and while they’re now on the straight and narrow, it is still legitimate to suggest that we got here through specific erroneous beliefs. That “we” applies to the laity as well as the bishops, but I would suggest that the reason the bishops are finding backbone is that the laity is learning the faith through lay evangelization, and are insisting they act like bishops and priests. EWTN and the blogosphere are doing the clergy’s job for them, and that’s not right, but better that than that the job not be done at all, or that “Catholicism” be defined by that well-known devout Catholic, Nancy Pelosi. Yes, the bishops opposed Obamacare as passed. But they supported healthcare overhaul, and did so in a way that led directly to this.

Here’s the problem: a good end can not be achieved by bad means. Per CCC 1903: “Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it.” How can governments be said to act for the common good when half of all citizens contribute nothing to that government? How can a state be morally licit when it takes wealth from some at gunpoint to give to others, whether they be crony capitalists or the voting poor? What empowers a government to perform acts which would be clearly sinful if performed by any other group of people? How is human dignity served by the financial enslavement of generations not yet born; where is the concern for the unborn at budget time?

The rot goes back to Luigi Tapanelli, who invented the nonsensical term “social justice”. (“Society” is not a moral actor, so how can it be just or injust?) The events of 1848 were much like the events of 1968, and in both cases, the Church tried to accomodate the Zeitgeist. Rahe calls out Cardinal Bernardin and his “seamless garment” (The body is a seamless garment too, but note Matt. 18:8.). I don’t see it at all as an attack on “the bishops” as “these guys sitting in the chairs right now.” but rather as a whole history of failure to act, with a few exceptions (like shutting up Fr. Coughlin?) Indeed, Rahe’s piece ends on a positive note; it’s very possible that bishops will soon “get” personal freedom again. But it won’t happen unless we talk about principles.

Unitarians, Catholics and HHS

God bless all the folks who have come out in support of the Catholic Church’s right not to subsidize sin. And God bless (with His rod) the folks who so don’t-get-it that they actually came out in support of the government in this matter. It’s pretty much the usual suspects, and there are all kinds of snark I could make on each one. But I’m going to concentrate on just one in this post: the Unitarian Universalist Association. They should know better, I will show that they do know better, and my wife had to set one of their congregants straight yesterday.

The Seven Principles of the U-U Church include “The inherent worth and dignity of every person” (unless they’re preborn, apparently) and “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.”  If this isn’t a matter of conscience, I don’t know what is. U-Us are in general so supportive of the right of conscience that you can believe pretty much anything and still be a U-U (excepting, again, the belief that abortion is murder). But if you want more clarity, here is a resolution from 1982:

Personal Religious Freedom

WHEREAS, the central issues for religion include the beginning, duration, nature and meaning of life, the extent to which individuals can be in control of their own lives and bodies, and the moral and ethical responsibility of individuals to the lives and bodies of others; and
WHEREAS, the 1982 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association reaffirms our heritage of personal religious freedom of belief and acknowledges as one of its tenets the right and responsibility of persons of all ages to decide and act upon these religious issues according to their own conscience and faith, without government interference or invasion of privacy;

BE IT RESOLVED: That the 1982 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association calls upon Unitarian Universalists and all individual groups, both religious and secular, of like mind to oppose attempts for legislative policy changes that would limit the free exercise of this, our religious heritage; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That this Assembly calls upon the governments of the United States and Canada to oppose all attempts to legislate such limitations.

Now, the HHS contraceptive mandate quite clearly bears on “beginning… of life, the extent to which individuals can be in control of their own lives and bodies.” It could be that this was meant to be a weasel-word support of the right to abortion. But since they’d expressed that much more clearly 4 years previously, I have to take them at their word here.  Neo-Catharism (not breeding) is apparently a tenet of Unitarianism.  They are extremely pro-reproductive-freedom. But that doesn’t negate their conscience statement. Nor does this: “we believe that, regardless of income, every person has the right to all reproductive health information and basic services”. They may believe in the right to free birth control, but it doesn’t follow from that that any particular entity needs to provide it. Indeed, one might ask: if there are Catholic hospitals, where are the Unitarian free women’s clinics? Why haven’t they put their money where their mouths are?

But the Unitarians have been more than happy to have their freedom of religion protected by the government.  In First Unitarian Church v. Los Angeles – 357 U.S. 545 (1958):

Solely because they refused to subscribe oaths that they do not advocate the overthrow of the Federal Government by force, violence or other unlawful means, or advocate the support of a foreign government against the United States in the event of hostilities, petitioners were denied tax exemptions provided by the California Constitution for real property and building used solely and exclusively for religious worship.

In my own back yard, we had Unitarian Universalist Church of Akron v. City of Fairlawn, Ohio, 2000-01. The city decided that the U-Us could not build a fellowship hall on their land (owned before a zoning change), and backed down under legal pressure.

But the religious liberty strain of classical liberalism, which was so much a part of their tradition for so long, seems to have fallen by the wayside. Of all the religious groups that filed amicus briefs in the recent case of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC (unanimously decided for plaintiff), the UUA was the only one to pick the losing side.

What makes this particularly odd is the the U-Us have become a haven for neo-pagans and Wiccans, who have a long history of religious persecution. They’re the growing edge of Unitarianism, since there’s no longer the pressure to “be something, and Unitarian is the least you could be” and religious atheists are in style and no longer need to blow off several hours a week not-worshipping their non-god. Pagans have benefitted directly in such cases as Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah 1993 508 U.S. 520. So why aren’t the pagan elements in the UUA fighting to keep the church on the side of freedom? I suspect that reproductive issues, being one thing that most U-Us can agree on, have become a defining doctrine of the faith. And Catholics stand against that. But there’s more than disagreement there. One step in my own conversion involved the observation of the visceral hatred many Pagans hold for Catholicism, way beyond any historical explanation (I’ll see your Burning Times and raise you a Coliseum.) I decided that fierce irrational Satanic hatred meant that there was a power in the Church worth paying attention to.

Anyway, while I don’t respect the U-Us, I respect their right to worship as they please, and to not be commanded at gunpoint to perform acts which they consider morally repugnant. I just wish they would give me the same respect.

Komen-tary

To my lady friends who are having the vapors over the Komen decision:

1. I’m seeing a lot of “Punish Komen” thoughts, including going after their corporate sponsors. If breast cancer is your real concern, do you really want to do that? Is your real motivation in doing that to make sure that increased contributions by pro-lifers don’t have an effect?

2. Planned Parenthood claims to provide “lifesaving care for women where Planned Parenthood is their only source of health care.”. I doubt that. There are few if any places in the country without Medicaid or some other charity care. Besides, I thought Obama fixed that. And Planned Parenthood is not in the mammogram business — and rightly so, given that their name is not Women’s Health Services.  If PP is just serving as a pass-through point for Komen money, why can’t Komen designate a different pass-through point, one where there will be no danger of money being skimmed off to support a procedure the majority of Americans oppose? Kaiser, maybe?  Might it be because the breast cancer service is the fig leaf over PP’s bloody business? As for contraception, Barry Obama and Katie Sebelius have that covered, no matter what you or your employer thinks.

3. There is no reason this can’t be a win-win for breast cancer. Pro-lifers who had a conscience problem with Komen can now contribute. Pro-abortion folk who think it really important that PP do breast exams can donate directly to PP…and can use their money to make certain that the exams actually get done, instead of going to other procedures (though I note that PP’s online donation page has no way of earmarking a donation for non-abortion services). We could end up with MORE money to fight breast cancer…and how is that a bad thing?

But of course this isn’t about breast cancer. The reason you’re so upset is because it’s an instance of a private foundation caving to public pressure on the abortion issue. You don’t like that the culture is turning against you…. which is why the courtesan media have tried to make this about “a politically-motivated investigation by one crank in Congress”. Well, when Congress appropriates money for something and evidence surfaces that perhaps that money is not being used for intended purposes, and the folks you’re giving to may be involved in illegal activities, don’t you think the recipient should be investigated? At least if they aren’t America’s abortion monopoly?

Believe me, I’m sympathetic. You’ve been living under the protection of Roe…, er, Dred Scott, and here are these upstart abolitionists in Oberlin who won’t return your property, the body you have a right to. It’s enough to make you want to start your own country.

UPDATE 2/3: Contributions to Komen are up 100% over the past 2 days; I hope that’s not just a blip of feelgood. Meanwhile the drunken clown Cleveland councilman Zack Reed is talking about pulling their permit for the annual run. Like I said, these folks don’t really care about breast cancer.

UPDATE 2/3. The ball-less bastards caved. I wonder if Simcha Fisher misses her $10 yet? Consider spending your charity dollar at one of these organizations. And no more pink. It’s just a paler shade of red.

UPDATE 2/7 And Karen Handel is out.

The Obamacare scandal

I suspect that most folks who would read this are aware of the current furor over self-identified Catholic Kathleen Sebelius’ announcement that Catholic institutions will have to fund free sterilization, birth control, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance as part of Obamacare. At last count, 115 bishops have stood up against the requirement that the Church must enable sin.

A somewhat contrarian Catholic voice to this has been provided by Karl Denninger, who points out that the Church (or loud factions thereof) has never strongly opposed tax funding of contraception. I think that he ignores what opposition there has been on that score, but he is in essence correct that leftist Catholics have had no issue with Catholic money funding sin, as long as they aren’t the ones collecting the money. If they made  exceptions to the socialist program on the basis of certain sins, they would need to admit all sins… and the modern welfare state has encouraged sloth, envy, and gluttony, and is funded by theft. He’s absolutely right that the lines should have been drawn long before. Part of the problem is that Catholic social teaching doesn’t have the same clarity as Catholic teaching on sexual issues. It’s a lot more like their stand on capital punishment…if it weren’t for the capital punishment of Jesus, we’d still be damned, and there’s a certain embarrassing history of “turning over to the secular arm”, but it’s pretty obviously state murder, so the message comes out that “we’re not going to say it’s a sin, but we’re against it in almost all circumstances”. Likewise, the social teaching of the Church begins with “What would Jesus do?”, but gets tangled in how to apply that to industrial and post-industrial society, with non-concepts such as “social justice” (Is society a moral actor? ) leading to turning charity over “to the secular arm”. To an extent, the HHS mandate is liberal Catholicism’s chickens coming home to roost.

In spite of this valid point, there IS a difference between permitting individual Catholic consciences to be raped by the State, and having to pay as an institution for the rape of conscience, because it is the Church collecting the money, even if the State is waving the guns around. Denninger has similar fuzzy thinking when he suggests that the Church could simply provide the insurance, and that no sin would be committed because Catholics do not use “reproductive services.” This is laughable. First, Catholic social services sometimes hire non-Catholics, who would not feel themselves bound by church teaching on this, but contraception is a sin whether practiced by Catholics, Protestants, or heathens, and the Church would be enabling it. Second, Catholics themselves use such things, especially when they’re free. As Denninger said, they could be excommunicated, but how are you going to prove the case? And the Church is hard up enough for membership that they won’t even deal with egregious scandalous cases like Nancy Pelosi; nobody is going to send in the Inquisition to find out why you only have one child…not when you could say that you’re really good with NFP. Also, past sins have no relation with the present. Just because American Catholicism has screwed up tax-funded matters for the better part of a century, it doesn’t mean that they have to get this wrong too, just to be consistently wrong. Repentance is always a possibility.

Vox Day attaboys Denninger, but adds in an issue of his own:

I think it is great that the Roman Catholic Church is finally being leashed and brought to heel. Perhaps now it will finally understand that a government that possesses the power to dictate to others in accordance with your wishes is a government with the power to dictate to you in accordance with the wishes of others. The Church has always been at its best when it is standing in opposition to the governments of the world, and at its worst when it is working in collaboration with them.

It is never good for an institution to be brought under the heel of the government. A violation of rights is wrong even if you think the recipient is richly deserving of the educatiuon. And it’s not the place of the Church to be for or against governments; its Kingdom is not of this world , and it has done best when ignoring the secular arm. The Church has always had a delicate balancing act with regard to the State, which fears any competing center of power. It opposes the state only on religious matters. Sometimes the State has made the religious into the political, as in the refusal to honor the Roman state deities. The Church will not burn incense to the secular Moloch of abortion, sacramental as it may seem to some, and that will again put it on a collision course with government power. The martyrs may be white rather than red, but martyrs there will be, and the same winner as always.

UPDATE 2/1: Denninger has another post on this, with some new logic lapses. First he gripes that Catholics have had to pay for treatment of STDs that are contracted by violating the sexual rules of the Church. Does he really think that being able to treat the clap creates a moral hazard and an incitement to sin? Or is it in fact cleaning up the mess left by sin…which arguably is the Church’s core mission?  Likewise,  type-2 diabetes is contracted through gluttony; was it hypocritical for the Church not to object to that? Then he deals with the issue of the Catholic “faithful” and birth control, and how they can’t be excommunicated. That’s true…but it’s a problem of catechesis.  Priests are reluctant to take on ANY sin, especially birth control, and if they won’t do the easiest thing, they won’t do the hardest. So 98% of PiPs are using unnatural family planning? 98% of Catholics eat too much, 98% take the Lord’s name in vain, cheat on their taxes, gossip, or commit any other sin you might care to name. But the Church doesn’t pay for those sins. OK, this is a wedge issue to get the PiPs to  take birth control seriously…again, what is wrong with that?

Obama lied, babies died

Hey Bart Stupak, how do you feel about that Executive Order figleaf that bought your vote on Obamacare? Were the 30 pieces of aluminum worth betraying the American people for?