Hitchcock on the Unhinged "Catholic Right"

Via Christopher at Catholics in the Public Square comes this scathing article by James Hitchcock about the neglect of the pro-life movement on the part of fanatical Catholic paleo-cons like Joe Sobran and Paul Likoudis.

I guess I should warn you that you aren't going to like this piece if you hate Bush, idolize Pat Buchanan or think Rick Santorum is a puppet of the insidious Masonic/Neocon conspiracy.

Hitchcock penned the very readable Recovery of the Sacred which I found to be one of the most balanced accounts of the introduction of goofiness into the Catholic liturgy during the sixties and seventies. Needless to say I read the whole thing in one sitting, and I enjoin upon you to do likewise, nonetheless here are some of my favorite passages to serve as teasers.

After a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court upheld a federal law regulating partial-birth abortions, Sobran (May 3) acknowledged that a Republican defeat in 2008 would be bad for the pro-life movement, but he blamed that likely outcome primarily on the President himself. A week later he praised the pro-abortion Democratic Senator Joseph Biden as "someone who takes his faith very seriously" and announced that, although the office of the presidency "ought not to exist," he found Biden to be a trustworthy candidate.

By the way, these people are mostly big secessionists. Anyway, Sobran advocated voting Democratic in 2006 with an Obama-like "change is good" justification since he didn't like the invisible neo-conservatives who were running congress. Then, lo and behold....

A month after the [2006] election (December 7), Sobran lamented that "just when many were hoping for relief as the Age of Bush begins to wind down," Democrats were talking about reintroducing the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. After having said practically nothing on the subject during the campaign, Sobran at last acknowledged that "the Democrats will now have more to say about the direction of the federal judiciary," as though that had not occurred to him before.

What, did he think that the Democrats were going to give obeisance to the combined subscriber lists of the Remnant and the Wanderer who helped them beat the Republicans? Yeaaaaaaaah! Meet the new boss, Joe!

The economist Rupert Ederer has asserted (December 7) that there is an authentically "Catholic" position on such issues as trade, tax, and monetary policies: "We need to recognize that there are Ten Commandments, not one or two. Along with the Fifth Commandment (murder of the innocent) and the Sixth Commandment (against sodomy) there is also the Seventh, about stealing (depriving the working man of his just wages), and the Eighth, about lying (a devastating war based on lying)." His exhortation repeated the familiar liberal accusation that pro-lifers care only about the unborn and are preoccupied with sexual behavior rather than with justice, and it also used the common liberal Catholic ploy of equating absolute moral principles with prudential judgments about particular situations, a ploy that is the basis of the "seamless garment" by which some Catholics justify support for abortion by weighing it against the policies of the welfare state.

(digressive point: isn't the 6th commandment about more than sodomy? not the first thing my mind jumps to, but YMMV....)

And not just equating prudential judgements with formal doctrine but reversing the order to make them more important...

There is an obvious but unacknowledged internal conflict here, in that Sobran espouses a minimalist view of the state, according to which almost every project that government undertakes does nothing but harm, yet at the same time seems to justify voting Democratic, in order to punish Republicans who have betrayed authentic conservatism. Rao (The Remnant, September 15) has used the same ploys, accusing pro-lifers of being indifferent to the death of "live innocent babies" in the Near East, and, in a breathtaking slight-of-hand, reversing the traditional relationship between formal doctrine and prudential judgments, treating the decrees of Vatican II as highly debatable but any kind of statement by the Holy See about the Near East (although not necessarily about other issues) as infallible. He charged that conservative Catholics "seem eager to hop on board any aircraft available to aid Israel that can be guilty of no wrong, no matter who it bombs and how it does so" and, despite positing the existence of a "Catholic teaching" about the Near East, accused the Vatican of failing to condemn "imperialist warmongering" out of cowardice and a fear of losing American money.

Falling back on the old standby of "it's all Israel's fault." Lastly...

Hard-core conservatives tend now to hearken back nostalgically to the days of Barry Goldwater, ignoring the fact the Goldwater turned out to be fanatically pro-abortion, as well as very liberal on most other social issues, something that gives pro-lifers little reason to want to be "true" conservatives. Sobran's way of dealing with the life issues can then be seen as the conservative counterpart to the liberals' "seamless garment"-an attempt to persuade pro-lifers to transcend their "narrow" outlook and support a wider agenda.

To be fair, Goldwater set the stage for Ronald Reagan who famously endorsed him and who converted to the pro-life cause as many other Republicans did at the time. But this is an example of why I'm not a "hard-code conservative" or, according to some of my readers, a "true" conservative at all. (Maybe I'm a... Konservative?) I would still rather see George Allen and Rick Santorum in the Senate. And Link Chafee for that matter... here's a quiz: Is Sheldon Whitehouse pro-life or pro-choice? Clue: he's a Democrat Senator from Rhode Island.