The purpose of marriage (appendix)

I had a fascinating discussion with one of my quasi-bosses today. He came over from India the better part of two decades ago. Somehow, our conversation turned to the sad marital statistics in this country these days. Being an old-school Hindu, his marriage was arranged with a woman he didn't even know at the time.

Such marriages, while not unheard of here, are quite alien to most homegrown Americans. Who could imagine leaving such an important decision to the judgment of, well, anyone else?

It's certainly intimidating, but in India, trust and obedience are still more highly valued than they are here, so I'm sure there's a lot less angst about ending up with someone who turns out to be a bad match, and while parents sometimes make bad calls, I imagine the rate of bad matches revealing themselves in the first five years of marriage is probably far lower than 50%. They have fights now and then, too, but occasional marital stress just makes them normal, like the rest of us. Somehow, they keep on keepin' on.

I think there's something to this old school stuff, and I don't mean the higher stigma of divorce, although there's something to be said for being reluctant to just give up when things get tougher than you expect.

Imagine yourself being presented with a marriage arrangement. The people who know you best have selected someone for you to build a life with, someone brought in by the people who know her or him best, someone who has the same expectations and reservations. While you may lack the motivation to bond of a preexisting relationship, you also lack the illusion that whatever feelings you happen to have right now constitute all the foundation and effort needed to make a marriage work. You're not going into it just to up the ante on commitment as a sign of love. You're not going into it just looking for a legal rubber stamp on whatever you're already doing with your girlfriend or boyfriend.

What you are doing is going into marriage knowing what its purpose is. Sure, Americans might have a head start on the unitive angle, in practice if not in principle, but people like my quasi-boss harbor few to no misconceptions about the importance of the procreative angle.

I'm not saying we have to start arranging all our marriages, but I think we could learn something about the way the marital priorities are emphasized. Something all too easily forgotten in western society.

Not even original garbage

Okay, maybe "garbage" is unfair. I suppose that, blurred historical details aside, Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code is decent enough pulp. Then again, I've read other books I'm willing to say are less entertaining than Left Behind, so take it for what it's worth.

Anyway, as you know by now, Dan Brown's up for plagiarism, and to the purpose of his defense he issued a statement, which reads in part:

Being raised Christian and having sung in my church choir for 15 years, I am well aware that Christ’s Crucifixion (and ultimate Resurrection) serves as the very core of the Christian faith. It is the promise of life everlasting and that which makes Jesus ‘the Christ’. The Resurrection is perhaps the sole controversial Christian topic about which I would not desire to write; suggesting a married Jesus is one thing, but questioning the Resurrection undermines the very heart of Christian belief.

I'll parse the choir comment as a sign of devotion to the church, and not a claim to expertise.

I have to wonder what else Brown would actually be willing to write about if he considers the Resurrection to be "controversial." There's a respectable precedent for calling the Crucifixion a "scandal," which might qualify as a controversy of sorts, but is there anyone out there who thinks the jury's still out on the matter of Easter, whom orthodox Christians need concern themselves with?

Now a member of the B-Team!

By now you've probably noticed my Amateur Catholic graphic off to the right, there. I would have posted on it sooner, but, you know.

Rick Lugari, head honcho of the Amateur Catholic blogroll et al, said it was heartening to hear "'dirty papist' being muttered through clenched teeth in [his] direction." I agree, although my confrontations usually end with shocked disbelief. Actually, Rick's word was "heatening," but I presume he meant "heartening," although I confess I still sometimes take it personally when Mother Church is insulted in my presence.

I figured I qualified because the quality of my scholarship isn't terribly impressive. Maybe our good Mister Lugari would have been more impressed with my completely vacant list of regular readers. (; Eh, my work's modest enough to qualify, apparently. Now, if only I could say the same thing about my attitude....

Trans-hyperdulia

The Shrine of the Holy Whapping (see link in sidebar) recently posted an article about the Ebenezer Lutheran Church (aka Her Church). I'd heard about their "goddess rosary" but wasn't going to comment, until I saw this video.

The church seems very communal and group-building, neither of which is a bad thing of itself. You'll notice they don't have any footage of liturgical activity until approximately halfway through the video; I'm not sure if it's designed to sort of warm up the viewers with a montage of cheery social images before showcasing a priestess saying what looks like a mass slanted towards the "sacred feminine" or...not.

I'm not sure if they and Dan Brown are cut from the same cloth or one inspired the other's ecclesial schema or if it's a coincidence. I'm leaning towards a fad rationale.

I think my favorite part was the "active liturgy" on the part of the laity during worship; it wasn't just folks from the pews taking the place of the priestess during the blessing of the bread and what appeared to be merely water, like a cynic would expect in this post-conciliar era, but kids playing musical instruments, making drums and mosaics, and adults going on "photo treks." Maybe the treks were for something else.

Quoth the pastor (maybe I shouldn't call her a priestess, what with being nominally Lutheran):

Ebenezer Lutheran Church, which is also known as Her Church, has taken it upon itself to integrate the heart of feminism and Christianity, which we believe really are interchangeable.

Is true feminism, in essence, compatible with Christianity? Certainly. Is it interchangeable with Christianity? Uh, no; it's severely lacking. In today's postmodern era, I don't think you can turn a gender-based demographic struggle philosophy into a religion until you add the dimension of race-based struggle.

My least favorite part is touched on in the Holy Whapping combox. Drew of the Shrine had accused these Protestants of worshipping Mary, and a commenter disagreed, pointing to a total absence of references to the BVM, Mary Magdalene, or Martha. True, there are no explicit references to the honored women in our tradition at Ebenezer's web site, but in the video they have a brief clip of a recitation of whatever they turned the Hail Mary into, referring to a "goddess full of grace" and the "Holy Cosmic Mother of the Risen Christ."

I think the case for a critically blurred line can be made.

The other thing I want to know is where a congregation that small got such a large and well-appointed church.

News to me...

Apparently "homosexual" is no longer an acceptable term for people with same-sex attraction. This change in preference in the SSA community strikes me as odd, since historically it's a pretty clinical, neutral term, but apparently there are some who will argue with me over both my impression and my use of the word "clinical," since the American Psychiatric Assocation declared some time ago that SSA is not to be classified as a diagnosable mental disorder, but just as another expression of humanity, part of that great diversity that comprises the human species. Maybe it's not a widespread change of acceptable nomenclature, I only heard the assertion made once--I mean, the one about the change in preferred terminology; the APA bit I heard once before, not even a year ago, yet the source I have at hand says the APA published the decision in 1973--although I've been hearing "queer" used a little bit more lately than I did in the past, and the alphabet soup that covers for Gay, Lesbian, Other, Etc. keeps getting richer, but maybe I'm seeing two largely unrelated phenomena.

Excuse me while I dial my credulity and respect for the APA down a few notches.

It's not diagnosable? Is the APA trying to say it's not a distinct condition they should be identifying, even though the symptoms are obvious, at least to the person with SSA? Having SSA might be something worth factoring in during your observations or diagnosis of someone coming to see you as a psychologist, wouldn't it? The only alternative reading I can think of is that they mean it's not actually a disorder, which still wouldn't it make it a nonissue on the couch.

Isn't it a disorder, though? Is being disinclined to form species-perpetuating dyads a legitimate and natural variation in the phenome, an expression of a normal genotype (if it's genetic after all)? We're not talking about a trivial trait like hair color, or something you can chalk up to shyness. We're talking about something as functionally basic to being human as being born without testes or a uterus. Maybe it's neurochemical instead of anatomical (which would still be biochemical in origin, in all likelihood), maybe it's environmental like long-term abuse from a family member, but either way, it's a condition that yields no offspring, and all these other cases qualify as problems to be solved, or managed, so why is homosexuality excepted?

Producing offspring is part of any orthodox (ah, maybe there's my problem--I'm trying to be concrete and consistent) definition of life. Some may elect not to procreate, or may be prevented by external circumstances, but an inherent inability to do so, either physical or mental, logically must be disordered, medically as well as morally.

Why not just define diabetes or bipolar disorder as undiagnosable conditions? Maybe these conditions bring something good to the table. After all, folks with sickle cell anemia boast a higher resistance to malaria.

Oh, wait. SCA still has its own concrete drawbacks, as do radical shifts in mood and blood sugar.

Who's making these decisions? Do we also want to stop referring to people in hospitals as patients, and calling their illnesses diseases or vice-versa, in order to empower them to feel like nothing's wrong?

We all have our debilitating features. Some more than others, some more obvious than others. Saying it ain't so doesn't make it otherwise.

Prayer request

My dad got the results of a CT scan for colon cancer yesterday. He was diagnosed almost a year and a half ago, had surgery the Thanksgiving before last, and responded really well to chemotherapy. Three months ago he had a scan and it was clear--everyone was ready to say it was an actual cure, not just a hopeful case of remission. The most recent scan showed multiple spots on the liver (there were a few there originally, but they all were removed or had disappeared during chemo) around an inch across.

We don't know what it all means, especially after his recovery that even impressed the doctors, but his bloodwork also came back as abnormal, so it's probably not just an image artifact. We'll find out more when he actually goes to meet with his doctor, which I think is tomorrow.

Every prayer you'd be willing to throw our way would be most appreciated. If you want to trade special intentions with me, feel free to follow up with a prayer request for whatever's on your mind and heart, and I ask everyone reading to pray for you, too.

Arguments for abortion I've seen just this week, numbered for your convenience:

1. "[Pro-lifers] do not care that the landmark ruling [of Roe] has stood for over 30 years. Nor do they care that its overturn could threaten the legitimacy of the institution where a change in decision would clearly be due to a change in membership."
   
2. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers tend to argue on a superficial level--how frequent abortions are, the demographics of who has them, and how the fetus/embryo/blastocyst appears. The real issue is when the fetus, etc. becomes a human person entitled to equal protection before the law.
   
3. Newly fertilized ova are biological entities with human DNA in the same way as unfertilized gametes. Fertilization does not make it a person. A kidney cell contains the full genetic code of a person, so why isn't it considered a human being?
   
4. Personhood does not begin at the advent of any milestone in development, like when the heart starts beating or when the child begins to "look like a child." After all, personhood is not lost by grossly disfiguring accidents or debilitating diseases, or temporarily suspended during a heart transplant.
   
5. Humans that are merely fertilized ova are not persons, and claims that they are human persons because their human DNA prevents them from becoming anything else falls flat, for no one denies it.
   
6. Failed implantation of zygotes is morally equivalent to voluntary abortion, so why aren't we focusing on all those tragically killed innocent humans?
   

Responses, respectively numbered for your convenience:

1. Abolitionists did not much care for the "landmark rulings" on Dred Scott or Plessey, nor were they interested in the preservation of the institution of slavery, nor did they feel that if the membership of SCOTUS continued to favor institutionalized servitude, then they should have just given up.
   
2. Arguing about how "human" an embryo looks may be superficial, but many people continue to judge a book by its cover ("If it just looks like a blob of cells, then it can't be a person"). See item #4.
   
3. A gamete may contain demonstrably human DNA, but it only contains half of what it's supposed to. Thus, it either lacks the discrete humanity of a zygote, or it's some kind of haploid miracle or it falls far short of viability and miscarriage before abortion could even be considered is all but a certainty. A kidney cell, as the kidney containing it, is by definition part of the whole, not the whole of an entity. Removing a kidney does not dehumanize a person; the zygote is not an interchangeable part of a person, but can only be removed as a whole (indeed, there is no way to remove part of it without great risk of destruction) from the mother. There's nothing to distinguish it from, as a kidney cell can be distinguished from the whole organ or organism, except the entire mother. Some philosopher must have already tried to make or disprove arguments of this form, of what constitutes a part versus an essence. Anyone care to point me that way? Bueller?
   
4. I'm surprised by this point. Most people pick the detection of brain activity for their arbitrary criterion of personhood. I wonder how many of them consider pets to be people. A good point is raised, though: humanity is not lost with a decrease in our ability to judge a human by sight. What are we left with, though? We have to choose either conception, or an arbitrary point based on such things as viability or risk to the mother, and neither of the latter is particularly satisfactory. The former will converge on the moment of conception as technology improves--and we've already shown conception to be possible through externally applied technology--so it doesn't have any inherent ethical capacity. The latter will also decrease as technology improves, but it leaves unanswered the question of whether we're pitting the rights and responsibilities of a pregnant woman against anyone else's rights, so this point is contingent on other arguments, none of which I find moving, as you can imagine.
   
5. No one denies it because such a ridiculous claim would comprise too direct a means of forfeiting the debate on the account of psychosis. This claim isn't a stand-alone argument; "I say you're wrong, because no one disagrees with your proof, which I will not believe is valid." An alternative criterion for humanity or personhood is still needed.
   
6. I don't know how to stop the famines in Africa, either. Should I then not volunteer at the local soup kitchen? Maybe my example should be reversed--I have no idea how many zygotes are miscarried versus the number of abortions. Either way, there is a world of difference between failing, being unable, to prevent deaths, even a lot of them, and deliberately killing someone, innocent or otherwise.
   

Let me follow up...

Why's it matter, anyway? Don't people, at least in America, have the right to determine the direction and content of their own lives, even if they do make mistakes?

Sure. A diabetic also has the right to eat as much sugar straight from the bag as he could want. A blind man has the right to drive (well, the same entitlement to the privilege of driving as a sighted man; driving on public roads isn't a right) A woman has the right to be a priest.

See?

American jurisprudence may have a few things to suss out, but it's not the hook we hang this meat on. We all have certain capacities, certain charisms, and lack others. A mildly diabetic man could get by without medication if he didn't want to eat more sugar than he could stand, but he's not capable of reducing to the significantly different question of tooth decay like a man who happens to have a healthy pancreas. A blind man, through extraordinary hearing, might do a better job of keeping a car between the curbs than the many people who deposit their own vehicles in ditches, around trees, and all over other vehicles every day, but they're in no position to make an attempt under common circumstances. A woman may be highly capable of being a spiritual shepherd, but it's not an accident that Rome considers itself lacking the authority to extend Orders to them. In fact, we all lack the authority to circumvent the circumstances of our being by philosophical or legal fiat. Rights and privileges aren't a factor, it's the metaphysical authority, not simply the permission to exercise temporal power in an apparently similar way.

What about adoption, as long as we're here?

Homosexual couples might do a better job of raising kids than some heterosexual parents, estranged or together, but they're incapable of demonstrating the fullness of humanity in the way that a man and a woman as the primary parental figures in a child's life can.

Being gay isn't hurting anyone else, so why should I care, right? Okay, it doesn't really impact my life if you're gay, unless one of us chooses to make it so, but the same argument is made for smoking (I refuse to hold the marginal increase in my insurance rates over the heads of smokers), and no one really pretends that people make it to show that it's not actually harmful. It doesn't show it is harmful, either, but you don't get to use that argument for raising children until you show it isn't.

Oh, you say you have the right to raise your children as you see fit? Yes, you do, within other limits you won't disparage, but they're not your children.

Marriage isn't about having kids anyway, remember?

The purpose of marriage

What is it?

Well, there are two: union and procreation. The latter is often downplayed or trivialized by apologists for gay marriage, for obvious reasons, although I realize that the distinction between the inherent sterility of a homosexual union, and the apparent sterility of the union between a man and woman who are aged or have a medical condition, can be hard to appreciate.

Earlier this evening I read a critique of "conservative" marital policy that I found tellingly sad. None of the material was new to me, but it was pretty well capsulized, which you may have deduced by now is something I find motivating. It's not the best case I've found of "I'm so openminded I must be right, and evidence to the contrary is actually evidence of a conspiracy and/or the exception that proves the rule, just like all the other exceptions," but it was convenient.

The thesis was basically that the definition of marriage has been the volleyball of elitist, xenophobic, bigoted politicians throughout history, especially Christian ones as far as those of us in western culture are concerned. Things like "binding young girls from one family to some old man from another." I guess the unwashed masses only practiced the sort of informal marriage that secular progressives teach...oh, except that those relationships were usually based around love and an expectation of children (wait, those ideas are a "Judeo-Christian innovation," which makes it the oldest concept too progressive for modern minds to accept), instead of pragmatic statesmanship and perhaps the production of a single heir, like the far less frequent political marriages that are far more important because of their rarity. Is my irony showing yet?

I was amused to see the procreation criterion being disproven by the halo effect. "Conservatives," especially "good" Christian ones, used to have miscegenation laws for social control, not because Jews or blacks couldn't interbreed with whites and therefore shouldn't try; thus, homosexuals are only prohibited from marrying because someone wants to hold them down, not because it doesn't benefit society in any graceful way.

Well, I don't think it's up to you, me, or anyone in particular to decide exactly what function other peoples' marriages should serve.

I think someone's trying to make just such a decision. You know, I don't think anyone should decide what function roads or courts or skirt steaks are for, either. It should be a decision left to Other Individuals, and you should be careful in case you make a decision for yourself that Other Individuals don't like. We're so locked down by our cultural preconceptions. Maybe we can be like the beatniks and throw off our cultural preconceptions about hygeine, too. They were so free, their doctors had to virtually turn to the history books to diagnose diseases that were thought to be moot, if not actually eradicated.

This line of thought came from ISCA, if it matters to anyone. Well, the beatnik bit was my own embellishment, but I only borrowed it from somewhere else. I used to be impressed with the level of discourse, once the edges were worn off the novelty of people arguing with their intellectual equals and it was no longer just obnoxious flaming, but now most of the discussion is between caricatures of the impressive personas I remembered. Maybe I'm outgrowing it. I hope so. I'd rather burn bandwidth and wetware on something actually important, although in some ways it's a convenient microcosm whose pulse I can keep my thumb on.

I've still never seen a good reason why gay marriage should not be allowed.

Why do I have the feeling this guy never will, either?

A modest theory

Consider the decrease in vocations in America that appears to coincide with the decrease in serious respect for canon law and even some of the coarser points of theology that should have stuck with American Catholics after they finish their run through CCD.

Some suggest that the lukewarm, even blase lay attitudes about the church in this country, and the progressive, banal (insert your own adjectives) execution of liturgy and ecclesial and pastoral work have resulted in a decrease in the number of men recognizing and accepting priestly vocations.

I submit that it may in fact be the other way around. Maybe the priest shortage isn't a symptom of a church that's adrift, a church that would be heretical if it were honestly serious about the oddities advocated in the pulpit or demonstrated before the altar. Maybe the priest shortage is the medicine for it.

The problems with the Church in America are not limited to its parishes, nor to its dioceses. Heterodox and ambivalent pastors by and large come from seminaries that encourage moral and factual relativism and such. If it were my job to make priests and dole out other vocations, I would be making arrangements to minimize the enrollment at deviant or disobedient centers of formation.

Maybe that guest on NPR who thought the Church, if it couldn't survive the sex abuse scandal, would be replaced by something better, was half right after all. Just replace "the Church" with "the church in America" and read "something better" as "the Catholic Church."

The Sorrowful Mysteries

1. The Agony in the Garden

Jesus, taking a few of the Apostles with Him, went into the garden and prayed until He sweat, until He was clearly in anguish. Jesus boldly prayed to be spared His Passion, but submitted His will to that of the Father's. This mystery, along with the crowning with thorns and carrying of the cross, reflect the necessity of sacrifice, of service unto pain and death--suffering brought upon a king by his needful subjects, in their need for more than administration and leadership--for those who look to Christ as savior and king, and for those who look to us as Christians to guide and be an example to.

2. The Scourging at the Pillar

Our sins consign to us guilt and punishment, both temporal and eternal. While Pilate had Jesus whipped to satisfy the baser appetites of the mob rather than out of a properly motivated sense of justice, it shows us that we should not expect a free ride through life, and that justice is not extinguished by love and mercy, even though our salvation was brought to us gratuitously. Christ calls us all to mortifications of a sort, and asks us all to be like Simon of Cyrene in some way.

3. The Crowning with Thorns

In one of the cruelest parodies of His ministry, the Romans mocked Him and placed a crown of thorns upon his head. God is strongest in the weak, however, and confounds the proud by raising up the meek. The Romans acknowledge in a backhanded way Christ's kingship of the humble, the downtrodden, the ones who will be subjects in the only kingdom that matters. The king of the weak, and the king of the Jews, is also the king of kings.

4. The Carrying of the Cross

Christ carried His burden--our burdens, our sins, us--to Golgotha, because only He could. Simon's reluctant aid doubly reflects Christ sharing with us His Passion, as He will share His union with the Father with us in heaven, and the stilling of our own concupiscence.


5. The Crucifixion and Death of Jesus

Christ was rejected by the world but still saved it. He was the sacrifice, and through the instrumentality of the Romans, also the priest. We cannot save ourselves, and will only crucify God (which, without His resurrection, will leave only us as the dead ones) when left to our own devices, but God deigns to work through us, out of love and as a sign of the good we're supposed to do for each other.

Since I've been on this abortion kick lately, anyway...

Jimmy Akin and pals discuss the abortion subplots that have appeared on Battlestar Galactica recently, with more clearheadedness than I am currently in a position to muster. I encourage everyone to head over there and...and just check out the show. More than once I've turned off the TV after an episode and just sat there, saying to myself "Wow. Whew."

I might comment on the issue myself, but I think I'm experiencing some topical fatigue, else I wouldn't just be waving you to someone else's blog with little preamble. Feel free to tell me what you think, though....

The Unaborted Atheist...

The Raving Atheist has a few posts about the pro-choice, or pro-life, bait and switch that takes place when pregnant women (maybe we should start saying a pregnant woman is "with child," just to remind folks what's at stake, although it makes for some rather unwieldy verbiage) go in to one type of clinic or another for some, ah, medical guidance. Based on the largely hostile content of the comboxes, the posts must have struck a nerve; although a few commenters suggest that, in essence, an atheist has no business supporting life issues, I couldn't shake the impression that most of them were simply upset to be presented with such a thorough refutation of their position.

Let us remember not to get as caught up in things when we're in the same position. We have more important things to live for than the ability or inability to argue our beliefs and philosophies. Not everyone has the vocation of apologetics.

Although, you know, it would be good if more of us were better at it.

The Law of God = Spiritual OS?

I confess, I may have let my attention drift a bit during today's readings. At one point during the second reading (2 Cor 1:18-22) I wasn't so much listening to it as I was thinking about the passage, with which I was already familiar in a paraphrased sort of way, but then the reader got to the end and I was sure I misheard him somehow.

I think I started to come back to the actual words being read aloud by the last line, for the first half of it sounded completely different from what I later looked up, but the very end was pretty close.

What I heard in my head was "And the Lord has written love in our hearts in a full install."

I don't think looking at God's love/law as a metaphysical operating system would be fruitless, but it's some imagery I really wouldn't have expected, even if Paul were around and writing for us today.

Persiflagic Comma

According to the leading headline on a recent issue of that college rag I occasionally read:

Quad rally denounces hate

Great, I'm glad to see opposition to hate, but I couldn't but laugh at how disingenuous the headline made the event sound. In fact, it was a demonstration against the cartoon riots, which is all good, but at a glance, I couldn't tell if it were something about global unrest or recent fallout from some school mascot controversy, or something as Earth-shaking as the dining services' beverage and catering contracts. For all I knew:

Quad rally denounces hate
Hundreds of students gathered on the Main Quad today to protest haters. Brief, spontaneous demonstrations broke out elsewhere on campus for such diverse causes as universal suffrage, an increase in scripted television, and not wearing underwear on the outside of your clothing.

Of course, there's only so much room on the page for a headline, and the folks who set the headlines don't always get the chance to read the whole article before coming up with a provacative and concise way of telling the reader to read the article, or at least, to help the reader decide whether reading the article would be worthwhile or not.

Plus I wanted to see if I could get away with a word like "persiflagic."

I wasn't going to watch Boston Legal this week...

...but I ended up catching, after all, that episode of Boston Legal, where a pregnant teenager sues the Catholic hospital where she was taken because of a rape, because they wouldn't prescribe the morning after pill, and by the time she was discharged, it was too late for her to get the pill elsewhere.

I was going to skip it, having heard how it ended, and not wanting to get too caught up in another skirmish in the culture war over some fiction (with apologies to DVC opponents), but someone in the house--me, for all I know--set the DVR for it and my roomie decided to watch it while I was already in the room, so I figured I'd see for myself if at least the quirky writing redeemed it. After observing that it seemed a bit weak to inquire about an abortifacient drug called, cryptically, the Morning After Pill, and get turned down on moral grounds, and then not even check with the more accomodating family doctor until after discharge, but in a move worthy of a Stella Award, then goes back to blame the hospital; after observing how contrived, if not implausible, this plot device is, I'm going to cut to the thick.

Long story now ripe for shortening, the defense argued (more coherently than I expected) that the doctor was legally within his rights not to act against his own religion, but the jury decided that hospital policy should not constrain the type of medical treatment a patient could receive.

I'm sorry, but personal morals have to supercede externally imposed professional duties. It is, I would say, a thoroughly American principle, although it's not that parochial. It's the autonomy of self: on the healthy side, it's the dignity of the indivudal--a pacifist can refuse to enter combat, and a soldier can refuse an illegal order; a suspected criminal is given the benefit of the doubt during his trial; a person who is compelled to act wrongly by the authorities is not guilty of that wrong, but has been entrapped by said authorities, who retain the guilt; on the unhealthy side...this kind of stuff. I can quit being a doctor but I can't quit who I am. Funny how the doctor is obligated to subvert his own ethics, but the victim, being a Victim (and I am not here to downplay the ordeals that real rape victims face), never has to compromise. A woman who gets raped has paid enough of a price, I can get behind that idea, although citing "heavy" prices like delaying college to have the baby (by what, one semester?) and battling her incarcerated rapist for custody are, as one of the characters said, tasteless, and as the character should have also said, trivial given the circumstances--but "the customer is always right?" It's pretty much what the verdict amounted to. There could have been better rationales to fall back on...ah, but I'm not going to make their case for them.

Naturally, it's not always as simple as a discrete, autonomous moral agent acting against the collective wisdom of his professional peers or whomever, as sometimes a perfectly civilized man is called to fight for his country, and no honest man who volunteers for military service should be surprised and recalcitrant when given a combat assignment, but we have to leave room for the individual to refuse to comply with something that is completely morally unacceptable to him or her. Not even a jury of "peers" can decide, not merely how someone should do his job, but what the acceptable bounds of someone's job are, unless "peer" actually means "professional colleagues," which is the only standard that would make sense. No one else is qualified. If you don't like the way somebody's doing business, shop elsewhere. If you don't get the service you want someplace, but it's after the fact, and you already knew it, why is suing the smart choice? Because it's a litigious society where you solve every problem that way? Would I be justified in suing Burger King for not having a Big Mac, because I burned too much of my lunch hour waiting in line at the wrong place to go to the right place and try again?

Yes, I realize it's not the same thing by a long shot, but in this one way it's not actually different. An analogy is not false for being weak. Maybe I don't need to say so here, but usually I have to make that point eventually, so...keep it in mind for future reference.

Then, of course, the teenager got an abortion after all. Her comment on the stand early in the episode turned out to be foreshadowing: "I've always been morally opposed to abortion...but I never expected something like this," if I'm remembering it correctly. I'm not sure if the girl's change of heart for the worse is supposed to signal to the viewer how nuanced beginning-of-life issues are to those outside the culture of life, or just suggest that contraception's okay even for reasonable people who oppose abortion (although their language got sloppy, repeatedly mentioning contraception after conception, with the only correction coming from the Catholic doctor on the witness stand), or when push comes to shove, even someone who opposes abortion will get one rather than put up with an inconvenient pregnancy.

I'm not sure if the life issue with the cat on life support was supposed to be a counterpoint to the "A" plot, or not. If I may paraphrase:

Lawyer:"Who...is to say that the spark of a soul is any less important because it resides in the body of a cat?"
Judge:"I am. It's a cat."

How ironic. Even if the judge had ruled in favor of preserving the life of the cat, the contrast of a baby with a pet would only further trivialize the life of the unborn by the act of juxtaposition itself.

Finally, with marginal relevance (so I shall not hesitate to marginalize the relevance of the remainder of this writing, as well) to the cat and to a thread of satire that is apparently increasingly left-leaning--although you should be able to see how tired the propaganda is regardless of your political preferences--Denny and Alan are discussion the former's desire to have the latter euthanize him with a gun. Euthanasia's bad enough, but when Alan refused, Denny gave all sorts of sincere but terrible reasons for justifying the necessity of shooting people, finishing with "Where would we be without guns?" to which Alan replied "Where indeed?"

Bleeding to death from a thousand knife cuts. Incapacitated by concussions from rocks and clubs. Maybe blowing each other up with IEDs. Euthanizing each other with pharmaceuticals.

But at least there wouldn't be any guns.

Pro-Life Search Engine

Looking for ways to combat the culture of death? Here's something simple you can change in your routine.

ProLifeSearch.com is a search engine where the revenue generated by ads and whatnot is donated to pro-life organizations. It's powered by Google, so its functionality should be little different from what you're used to even the first time you use it, although they have some naughtiness filters in place, so...the functionality should still be little different from what you're used to. Click here for a brief rundown on what it's all about.

Go ahead. It's good for you.

Any man who says "It's none of my business" has already committed abortion in his heart

I'm not in a position to say how crucial it may be, but one thing more pro-lifers need to do is stop assuming that the pro-choice position is the correct one.

Morally, no, we don't think that way, but to hear people talk, I am not surprised when I get the impression that in conceding the fact of the legal right to abortion, pro-life people unwittingly concede a moral right to it before their opponents, as well.

What we say doesn't contradict our stance, but how we speak does compromise it.

I'm not saying we should start calling the pro-choice movement pro-death or anti-life as a matter of course, although it may be worth risking the offense of a few people to make some rhetorical points now and then. I'm saying we need, in part, to stop lying down whenever someone refers to us simply as anti-choice.

Actually, I didn't have that example in mind when I first sat down to write, but it encapsulates what I'm trying to say. Usually we're all polite enough to refer to each other by the labels we've chosen for ourselves. Although I'm confident it's happened, I can't remember any time when a pro-life person or publication casually referred to the pro-choice side as pro-death or what have you. One or two particular uses of the epithet to make a point, I've seen, but the response was always outrage at the mischaracterization (which I'll get to in a minute). However, I've almost never seen anyone speak up when someone, say in the MSM, refers to us generally as anti-choice.

Calling us anti-choice is at least as mischaracterizing as the pro-death label. Notice I made a distinction between particular use to make a point--certain individuals might actually be interested in all sorts of infanticide for population control or what have you, and other individuals may want to legally recategorize women as chattel, both of which are separate issues from abortion--and broad use, to generalize or stereotype. The former would have to be treated on a case by case basis: it might be true, and it might be slander. The latter is something I don't think we've done a good job of protecting ourselves from.

We start out by calling ourselves pro-life, to make evident the fact that our goal is orthogonal to the question of women's rights specifically, not opposed to it. However, I'm not sure we go far enough.

With the Alito confirmation hearings, Roe v. Wade had come up a lot, naturally, and where the Democrats had been unable to penetrate Alito's (and even Roberts', before) armor with direct attacks, they still succeeded in setting the tone of the debate (although not always in their favor, it turned out). Making it a question about simply women's rights at this level, in this stage of the game, would be too sophomoric to be taken seriously, I suspect, but making it sound more fundamental, like reproductive rights, or more personal (i.e. less the concern of the public), like abortion rights, still gets through most everyone's filters.

In fact, I'd say it informs everyone's filters. I can't tell you how many headlines I saw last month that used verbiage to the effect of supporting or not supporting abortion rights. Do you see what they've done? The baseline, the common denominator, is Abortion Rights, and whether or not someone supports them. Everything except a few undercirculated pro-life handbills and newsletters is framed in terms of abortion rights, as if they are an objective and proper thing in themselves, the default and natural result of a civilized society. The pro-lifer is not only fighting uphill (since, from what I can remember--I don't have any statistics handy but I'll be happy to check any reference you'd care to suggest--far more people support abortion in some form now than they did in 1973), but fighting on enemy territory. Pro-choicers generally get to set the tone and standards for the debate, so they get the home court advantage. We have to demonstrate that abortion is morally wrong and that it should be illegal; all they have to do is demonstrate that it's none of our business.

Naturally, they'll assume it's because they're right, and naturally we assume the contrary. If I may digress for a moment to comment on the sad state of modern journalism in general, I'd like to quote G. K. Chesterton: "Bigotry is the incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition." Sometimes I think half of what gets me upset about "abortion rights" is the tendency of some people who get in the fray to simply state and restate their position, rephrasing it to make it sound like they're addressing the challenges put to them by their opponents, but not really talking to them and explaining things at all; they're just talking, parroting themselves, as if incessant repetition will make us put down our foolish and arbitrary opinions. I wonder if they also raise their voices when talking to blind people.

One recent example I read--I know I'll sound biased to some, but it's the only recent one I happen to remember offhand--was a person saying he would not want his daughter to kill his grandchild, and another person responding with "That's why women's right to choose, to control her own body, to privacy, needs to be protected." No matter what the argument, no matter how tenuous the connection or ironic the parallel, it's always evidence that women's rights for whatever justifies an abortion are in danger, as if Roe protects both the right to choose an abortion and the right to choose life, which tends to be less than true in practice. This person earlier had been making all her points with the assumption that her opponents, the pro-life people, were only men (since, apparently, no lucid woman would be pro-life), which sort of brings me back to the point of my digression, which I'd gotten off of: no matter how certain you are that you're right, no matter how obvious you think the truth is to the people who disagree with you, remember that they're disagreeing with you for a reason, and it's probably not spite, and as a courtesy you should assume it's also not stupidity. If you don't assume everybody else is stupid, it will be easier for you to learn from them, even if they happen to be wrong.

In short, never assume your truths to be self-evident; repeating and rehashing them to sound vaguely like they apply to various and sundry thoughtful points. It doesn't further the discussion, and just makes you look like you're lazy and not paying attention. It's bad enough in a debater; I had to stop reading a certain mainstream media outlet because it's even worse in journalists, whose half-baked editorializing seems to pass for background and analysis on otherwise factual stories these days.

All right, now with my rant over....

At the risk of irony, while we keep hearing that abortion/choice is natural and moral, I'm not sure we make it clear enough why we're so up in people's grills about prenatal life issues. As a casual observer, most of the debates I see go along the lines of "We get upset because we see over a hundred thousand children killed, worldwide, every day" and "You're being ridiculous and sentimental; they're not people." Period. The inherent dignity of children is recognized as something we believe due to some personal flaw, but not as a potentially legitimate position by itself. While I don't expect to convert anyone by fiat, I would appreciate it if some respect came with the disagreement. After all, I can sympathize with a woman who doesn't want to have the child of, say, her own father; is the person who simply is a little more generous with his definition of personhood not even worthy of charitable pity? No, because we're religious nuts who blow up buildings (Do I need to specify abortion clinics?), right? Yet you still can't relate your carnage to ours for the sake of argument?

Private individuals, I suppose, could do so, but the demagogues can't afford to. I think they recognize the slippery slope before them. I am still a little shocked, though, by the folks who can look people in the eye, concede that we've got no objective reason to say personhood definitively starts no sooner than viability or birth, so it's both a person and a human from the moment of conception, and still say it's okay to kill him or her in certain situations, as if it were no different from war or the death penalty...which may not be the best examples. I guess some bizarre and revolting parallel can be stretched between a problematic pregnancy and a violent criminal at large, in some very narrow way, but it's a chilling proposition.

There it is again, though: to circumvent the moral question of killing a baby, whom many seem to agree for now is a human person, "human" and "person" are split into separate, independent categories when it comes to a baby who's unborn. Sometimes it's just presented as a "living organism" instead of an integrated and discrete human when the blob of cells perspective is shown to be rather weak. If I were more optimistic about people's ability to recognize the desperation of pro-choice pundits when they resort to taxonomies that have no place outside of a philosphy classroom, I'd be relieved, but I'm actually rather disturbed that they can come so close to acknowledging the real humanity of the unborn and still find a way to dismiss it. Maybe I shouldn't be, maybe it's harder for them than I realize. Quoth Kate Riordan recently of the Georgetown Independent, "Some would argue that the Morning After Pill is also destroying a life, and yet I have never seen someone march for zygotes." I submit Ms. Riordan is not trying very hard to find actual evidence to refute.

In our brave new world, or at least in the Netherlands, such attitudes might become acceptable, but for now I'm still a little relieved to see pro-choice demagogues at least changing the question, since the old arguments are proving to be about as logical as that which is behind Roe itself, which even pro-choice legal scholars acknowledge is not exactly normal jurisprudence. I think they realize that they can't take the moral high road on any but the most superficial and ephemeral grounds. That door was closed when it was admitted that abortion should be not only safe and legal, but rare. If it were a natural good, there would be no reason to discourage people from it, even medical complications, since serious complications are also relatively uncommon and with medical advances will decrease even further. If it were better for us to work to eliminate the demand in society for abortion, then at best abortion is a "necessary evil," a gravely disordered act, and if we're working to actually eliminate other disordered societal things like the death penalty and war and crime, whether we can eliminate some of these things completely or not, should we not work to eliminate this practice, as well?

Well, yes, but if we reach that conclusion, the pro-choice movement hardly has a leg to stand on; all they'd have is numbered days, trying to keep things safe and legal while the other social problems make it unimportant at the same rate at which it is made rare. Abortion is bad enough to discourage until you really want one, and not bad enough that it should be outlawed, or maybe no one is going to see the sense in that kind of proposition, so how can they defend themselves?

Well, perhaps they might have a few rusty tools left in the shed. To hear some of the pro-life rhetoric, one might think we believe every woman who goes in for an abortion does so with all the gravity of getting a flu shot or a new hairdo. I'm sure most of them weigh the issues carefully. What I'm not sure is if they're weighing the right issues. A significant fraction of abortions don't go to women who can't afford another mouth to feed; they go to women who already have relatively comfortable lives who can't bring themselves to make the sacrifices necessary for feeding another mouth. Sacrifices like not sending whatever children they may have to the best and most expensive school, having to drive a minivan for 100,000 miles instead of trading in a coupe or sedan every 2-5 years; in other words, sacrificing quality of life for life itself. Of course, it is just a fraction; expectant mothers who are really down on their luck are not few in number, but rest assured that they only choice they think is viable is the one promoted by the ones who have a vested interest in maintaining their lifestyle.

I recently read the following response--edited slightly to guarantee anonymity--to an assertion that if abortion is wrong, we (i.e., society at large, the government, as used below) shouldn't allow it, and if we're really killing babies, then abortion is wrong:

Please do not ask the question that way.

Very few abortions take place after viability, and those abortions are for health reasons. There is a difference between believing that abortions are "okay" and believing that a woman and her doctor, rather than state legislators, should make the decision.

Our concern should not be whether abortion is "okay" with us. It should be with who should make the decision.

This demagogue displays the cunning tactic, favored by forensic losers everywhere, of changing horses midstream. Note that this demagogue isn't even claiming anymore that controlling who lives and who dies is an objective good that is the bailiwick solely of women. It doesn't exactly look like the abortion shill thinks she's managed to prove it. She's now saying we shouldn't even be looking at the moral dimension at all; there is only the ethical concern of who gets to make a choice about a private matter.

Well, ya put that way...who would want the government breathin' down our necks like Dolomite?

I feel bad for people whose opinion of humanity is so negative and skewed that killing a child, actual or potential, is actually considered a humane solution to a problem that can only and will always result from the imperfect civilization we will always live in. Oh, I don't expect perfection this side of eternity, either, but I know we can do better. Real problems, including the mass execution of the unborn, are a tragedy. The promotion of Self, putting Self's right to choose an abortion above and beyond, unrelated to, our problems, is just sad.

Biology teacher fired for teaching Intelligent Design

Don't worry, another school picked her up, although she's doing it again, so who knows if she'll get to stay on this time.

Judging from the article I read, though (sorry, I no longer have a citation for you), I think she wasn't fired so much for teaching ID as she was fired for not teaching biology in her biology class. She claimed that there isn't much evidence for evolution, which is an opinion she certainly has a right to hold, and proceded to deconstruct the theory of evolution by such unassailable tactics as saying "We've never seen a cat evolve into a dog in the lab" and explaining how the scientific establishment, except for her, has been lying to the students their entire lives. Leaving evolution in shambles on the floor without apparently making an impartial case for any of the evidence that does favor continuous speciation, she then tells the class "I believe in intelligent design. I belive in creationism."

I don't care what you believe, ma'am, although the creationists might. I care that you're throwing out the scientific baby with what I think you believe is the bathwater of materialist dogma. I care that you're telling students to disregard nearly everything they've learned from the teachers who came before you without giving them the tools to judge for themselves that you're correct (or, in my opinion, not).

No wonder people think religion is anti-intellectual.

Neither sleet, nor ethics, nor dark of night, nor threat of law shall stop the culture of death on its appointed rounds...

Yikes.

Having found myself on the campus of the University of Illinois this afternoon, I passed a demonstration calling for the removal of Kathryn Waldyke, a physician at the McKinley Heath Center there on campus. They were not protesting the fact that she is pro-choice, or rather, not merely protesting for that fact alone. While I would share their hopes of a pro-life medical center--I wouldn't want my student fees supporting contraceptive/abortifacient services--I wouldn't expect it in a state school while Roe v. Wade is in force; they probably don't expect it, either.

Anyway, I only heard part of the spiel from the protester with the megaphone, but what I did hear was alarming. One student went in for a regular checkup, if I'm not getting my anecdotes mixed up, and without being asked Dr. Waldyke wrote a prescription for the morning-after pill with six refills, telling the student patient "If you don't need them, give them to your friends." Another time, an undercover student reporter made an appointment with Dr. Waldyke, and told her a story about the student's 15 year old sister who had, shall we say, an accident while having sex. The doctor agreed to prescribe Plan B to the sister, sight unseen.

You shouldn't have to be pro-life to see the problem here. In the United States, it's illegal to share your prescription drugs with someone else, and unethical to suggest you do so; and while it's not illegal in many states to write prescriptions without a thorough exam (I have talked to people who have called their doctor, complained of flu-like symptoms, and had the Rx faxed to a pharmacy so these people could save some trouble), it should never be trivialized, especially under such circumstances as what in most states (including Illinois) would be statutory rape. I am unaware of any report to the police on this matter, although I'm sure I am not in full possession of the facts.

I don't even know what else to say. I probably don't really need to add anything.