A Sound of Sheer Silence

As I've said before, while I don't agree with Ross Douthat on many things, I think he is by far the most worthwhile and thoughtful conversation partner on the right.   His post from yesterday is an example of why I think he brings a lot to the table. Douthat hits on the spectre that floats around the gay marriage discussion in the United States, and that is the Civil Rights Movement.  On January 14, 1963, upon his inauguration as Governor of Alabama, George Wallace gave his infamous "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" speech.  Eighteen years later, the United States Supreme Court stripped a private religious college in nearby South Carolina, Bob Jones University, of its tax-exempt status for mandating segregation among its students.  In eighteen years, the notion of overt segregation between black and white went from a mainstream part of political discourse in the South to so beyond the pale that it was completely unacceptable to be advoca...

Pope Francis memorably called upon people to "make a mess" in the Catholic Church.  If you would like to see what a "mess" looks like, San Francisco would be a good place to start. As most people know, San Francisco is maybe the most progressive city in the United States.  What few know is that San Francisco has a strong and diverse Catholic presence and Catholic identity.  Now, because of the first part the Catholic identity tends to be on the progressive side, but nevertheless the Catholic Church is a significant, visible presence in the city.  The current Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, is a serious culture warrior-- in fact, he is the point man for the efforts of the U.S. bishops to oppose gay marriage .  His selection by then Pope Benedict was seen, and it is hard to argue with this, as a bit of stick in the eye of the city that has always been at the forefront of gay rights issues since the 1970s.  It was basically inevitable that...

Chapter 2 explores the question of the moral status of the fetus.  Here, a quick note--Camosy uses the term "prenatal child" in places as a substitute for "fetus."  He says that his use of the term is not a polemic, but I confess to a bit of skepticism on that point.  I have never encountered the term "prenatal child" before reading Camosy's book, whereas "fetus" is a real medical term.  Given the politicization of language in the context of abortion, I think Camosy's language choice is unfortunate, as it detracts from his attempt to forge some kind of middle ground.  I'm going to go with "fetus" throughout, because I think medically-approved terms are the closest we are going to find to neutral ground. Anyway, Camosy begins by doing important work in defining the question that one is trying to answer with this exploration.  It is not, as many assert, an attempt to figure out whether the fetus is "alive," as tele...

A shade over 35 years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop San Salvador, El Salvador, was assassinated by government-backed gunmen while he was in the middle of saying Mass.  There was no dispute regarding the motive behind the killing--Romero was outspoken in his opposition to the government on the side of the poor.  He was, like many of his generation among the Latin American clergy, a leftist, a proponent of liberation theology.  Was he a Marxist?  Not really.  As his contemporary, Dom Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil, famously said "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." [Ed. note: I butchered the quote in a previous version.  My mistake.  BTW, Dom Camara may be on his way to sainthood as well ]. In a couple of months, Oscar Romero will be beatified, the "level below," if you will, being named a saint.  No one seriously doubts that he will be canonized is due cour...

Camosy begins the book by laying out the state of the issue of abortion in the United States.  In doing so, his core point is that there is a fundamental discontinuity between abortion rhetoric and abortion practice , as seen in several dimensions. First, Camosy notes that the general rhetorical position of pro-choice advocates, especially pro-choice politicians, is some version of the formula "safe, legal, and rare," emphasizing the idea that abortion is, and should be, a low frequency occurrence.  And yet, as Camosy points out, the abortion rate in the United States is quite high.  Camosy cites a figure of 1.2 million abortions per year, which corresponds to figures from the Guttmacher Institute of 1,287,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2003 .  That works out to 21 abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, or 31 abortions per 100 live births.  It should be noted, however, that this figure has been declining since the middle 1980s , and in 2011, the figure...

Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, wants to run for President of the United States.  In doing so, he is going to be asked about gay marriage.  But, Governor O'Malley has a problem--he's a Catholic.  So, he is going to be asked about how the Catholic position of the question impacts his own views. He gives a typically political, mealy-mouthed answer .  And, equally typically, he gets slammed for it by people like Deacon Kandra.  Indeed, Kandra cites to some document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which purports to outline obligatory standards for what Catholic politicians should do in the context of the gay marriage debate.  And this document is unambiguous: When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law s...

One topic I haven't discussed in my Another Theology of the Body series is the question of abortion.  In part this is due to my own conflicted and uncertain thoughts on the topic.  Since I don't clearly know what I think on the topic, I don't have much to say.  Nevertheless, it is clearly an important topic, and it is something that is worth exploring and talking about. Along those lines, I just finished a book entitled Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation  by Charles Camosy.  Camosy is a professor of Christian ethics at Fordham University in New York City, which happens to be the  alma mater of the older of my two sisters (making me, obviously, well disposed toward his work).  The thesis statement of the book is that there is a way forward from the polarized and fossilized abortion debate in the United States, one that takes seriously the commitments of pro-life people while respecting the concerns of (at least some) pro-ch...