Church Teaching on Families and State

I mentioned several weeks ago that I'd signed up to get these emails everyday to help me study the catechism. I've been doing pretty good at it, just missed a few days. The service uses the popular YOUCAT version which is based on the official catechism. I thought I'd post the two for today, questions 369 and 370.

Why are families irreplaceable?
Every child is descended from one father and one mother and longs for the warmth and safety of a family so that he may grow up secure and happy. The family is the basic cell of human society. The values and principles that are lived out in the small circle of the family are what make solidarity in the life of larger society possible in the first place.

---

Why should the State protect and promote families?
The welfare and future of a State depend on the ability of the smallest unit within it, the family, to live and develop. No State has the right to intrude on the basic cell of society, the family, by its regulations or to question its right to exist. No State has the right to define the family differently, for the family's commission comes from the Creator. No State has the right to deprive the family of its fundamental functions, especially in the area of education. On the contrary, every State has the duty to support families with its assistance and to ensure that its material needs are met.

These point segue with something else I've been studying in Vatican II's DECREE ON THE APOSTOLATE OF THE LAITY, written by Blessed Paul VI. Excerpt:

17. There is a very urgent need for this individual apostolate in those regions where the freedom of the Church is seriously infringed. In these trying circumstances, the laity do what they can to take the place of priests, risking their freedom and sometimes their life to teach Christian doctrine to those around them, training them in a religious way of life and a Catholic way of thinking, leading them to receive the sacraments frequently and developing in them piety, especially Eucharistic devotion. While the sacred synod heartily thanks God for continuing also in our times to raise up lay persons of heroic fortitude in the midst of persecutions, it embrace them with fatherly affection and gratitude.

 Yes. Truly a prophet.

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option values

Think of it: these Pentecostals were better off in the USSR than in America, because American freedom led to extreme decadence.

The Benedict Option solution to the decadence of freedom

UPDATE (as they say): If you ever wondered how, in addition to putting a strikingly incomprehensible image from Shutterstock into every post, Rod Dreher makes the robot brains of search engines believe he's written something long and profound, here's one way he goes about the stretch:

UPDATE 2: Reader Pikkumatti writes in the comments

It takes a special kind of sick bastard to publicly state, from the comfort and safety of his own leisurely life, that it is harder for Christians to live in the best place and time in history for the pursuit of freedom and virtue, than under one of the most murderous and soul-deadening regimes in history. This is an insult to all of us, and to the heroes who suffered through the Soviet regime. Dreher would better spend his time reading Gulag Archipelago than on his self-promoting booklist that he'll likely use to pump out yet another trite autobiography.

A recent homily made the point that, if you think it's hard to evangelize here in today's culture, imagine how much easier you have it than the early Christians in Rome did, yet they built the Church anyway.

And it is especially odd for someone who trumpets his religion at every opportunity to mislead on the nature of sin. The mere lack of opportunity to commit a particular sin does not necessarily make one virtuous.

UPDATE 3: Another reader, also named Pikkumatti, adds:

Here's how Christians in the Soviet Union were "better off" than they are in the US today:

The punishment for being a Christian in the Soviet Union was just as severe as the punishment for murder. There were two groups of laws under which believers were prosecuted. The first was for religious activity specifically, such as breaking one of the anti-religious laws. The second was for political or civil crimes, in­cluding “parasitism,” “hooliganism,” “slandering the Soviet system,” and “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Christians had to endure frequent searches and fines, harassment that was made serious by repetition and by the low incomes of those harassed. They were of­ten fired from their jobs, demoted to menial positions, and exiled or banished, usually to northeastern Russia. Those who were arrested could be held up to one year before a trial as the State “gathered evidence.” They waited in overcrowded cells infested with rats, lice, and bedbugs, sometimes in filthy water up to their ankles. Many Christians endured interrogations and torture by the KGB, including threats of castration, the elec­tric chair, prison, confinement to a psychiatric hospi­tal, and harm of family members.

Yes, that piece recounts stories of the Christian heroes who persevered in their faith while in the Gulag, whether they survived or not. But as I said, it is an insult of the highest order to those heroes and to Americans who built and maintained this Nation to assert that "Pentecostals were better off in the USSR than in America".

UPDATE 4: An additional comment adds this useful point:

And might I add, there is a special lack of self-awareness for someone who constantly tells his readers about the most minute details of his own medical issues (along with a reference here and there to his Ambien use) to state:

We have worked so hard as a culture to minimize pain, and to train ourselves to think of comfort and pleasure as our birthright, that we have left ourselves and our children vulnerable to this addiction. This false religion of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is part of the package.

Dreher has truly been blessed to have lived without severe physical pain (certainly if he had, we would have read about it ad nauseam by now), or to have someone close to him in severe physical pain (sorry, Ruthie). Regardless of the cause, whether cancer, debilitating back pain, pain from major surgery, you name it -- pain relief is a blessing and a mercy to those who suffer. Yet Dreher feels free to insinuate that there is moral weakness in those who treat pain (and, by implication, those who seek relief from pain) is another brutal insult.

Answers for Kemetica

In a previous thread, our new commenter Kemetica posed a few questions:

My point was that those who oppose SSM must be very clear on what it is that they want:
Just to be allowed to dissent (e.g. a clerk doesn't have to file an SSM marriage license) because of conscience?
To be allowed to refuse gays service for arguably expressive activities (e.g. cakes and photos and flowers)?
To be allowed to reject any service to gays in any context (e.g. housing)? 
To eventually be able to ban SSM?
To eventually be able to ban domestic partnerships? 
To eventually be able to reinstitute the closet?

My answers are a bit too long to be conveyed in a comment in that thread, not to mention that the comments are taking off in a different direction from Keith's original post, so I'm answering them in this new post.

But to answer fairly, I'll need to reframe the questions differently. Actually, they fall into two separate questions.

1.  "To eventually be able to ban SSM?" 

The short answer is:  unquestionably yes.

As I discussed here, IMO and under current equal protection law, a State can have a perfectly rational basis for establishing a special status for one-woman-one-man committed relationships (i.e. marriages).  To rehash briefly, biology matters in that men and women are different in ways that complement each other -- and that complementarity not only results in procreation, but indeed has shown through history to be the basis of stable and prosperous societies.  A State can (and should) recognize the importance of these facts, as based in biology, by favoring such arrangements.

Secondly, under our constitutional system, a State may, through its duly elected legislature, choose to define marriage to extend to same sex arrangements.  I don't think they should, but under our system they can. But the electorate and their representatives ought to be permitted to work out this question one way or the other, so that those who are disappointed by the result can at least respect the process. But if the Supreme Court rules that a State cannot define marriage as one-woman-one-man, that process is taken away from the electorate -- rather than settling the question, preventing the question from being settled  See the political effects of Roe v. Wade if you don't believe me.

2.  Why should you not be compelled, under penalty of law, to offer services to those selected by the State?

On the questions about "rejecting service" and the like, your questions are framed incorrectly IMO.  What you are asking is why the State shouldn't compel any business to offer their services to those identified by the State.

Here's where I'll earn some libertarian points, maybe.  IMO, the starting point should be:  no person shall be compelled, under threat of law, to perform services to anyone who he or she do not want to, unless there is a damn good reason.

As I mentioned here, race is a damn good reason.  We fought a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of our citizens lost their lives over this issue, and we have express constitutional amendments on this issue.  And MLK showed us why racial discrimination is contrary to reason and God's laws.

I would pose that there are few other "damn good reasons" to compel businesses, under penalty of law. Preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation falls short of a damn good reason, IMO.  And as Keith mentioned, the market and social stigma can provide excellent motivations in this regard.  Few businesses will turn away willing customers -- and if some do for illegitimate reasons as judged by the consuming public, competition will take care of the issue.

But in any case, the law should never require one to violate one's religious tenets (facilitating sin) in order to comply with the law.  We must not entertain a regime, as we have now with Obamacare and in the Indiana situation, in which the approach is to enact and enforce such a law, with the possibility that waivers or exemptions may be granted for religious reasons.  No -- a law requiring compliance by violation of religious tenets is an unjust law, and "an unjust law is no law at all" (St. Augustine).

Does this mean that a homeowner renting out a room or half of a duplex via AirBnB can choose not to rent to practicing homosexuals so as not to facilitate sin?  Of course.  Does this mean that a Muslim restaurant can require men and women to sit in separate rooms if required by their flavor of Islam?  Sorry, but it means that too.

There you go.  Have at it. Convince me of my error.

Just saying

Here's a guy who supports so-called Same-sex Marriage and Arizona SB 1062. Reading through it, it seems like he lives in Happytown, USA where we can all just git along fine, garsh-dangit, if we just try real hard. But he makes good points. And it's interesting to me that a Cato Institute dude like Ilya Shapiro, i.e. probably not a social conservative, can have a supportive view of a bill supporting religious freedom instead of grumpily ceding the argument like Douthat and others. Is this because some of these people like the concepts of religion and morality but wince at the word freedom? And are these types only focusing on how freedom may be misused instead of how it makes a good people great by allowing them to practice religion without fear?

New book by Samuel Gregg: Tea Party Catholic

This will probably irritate all the right people. Here's the pitch on the Amazon page.

Over the past fifty years, increasing numbers of American Catholics have abandoned the economic positions associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and chosen to embrace the principles of economic freedom and limited government: ideals upheld by Ronald Reagan and the Tea Party movement but also deeply rooted in the American Founding. This shift, alongside America’s growing polarization around economic questions, has generated fierce debates among Catholic Americans in recent years. Can a believing Catholic support free markets? Does the Catholic social justice commitment translate directly into big government? Do limited government Catholic Americans have something unique to contribute to the Church’s thinking about the economic challenges confronting all Catholics around the globe?

In Tea Party Catholic, Samuel Gregg draws upon Catholic teaching, natural law theory, and the thought of the only Catholic Signer of America’s Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton—the first “Tea Party Catholic”—to develop a Catholic case for the values and institutions associated with the free economy, limited government, and America’s experiment in ordered liberty. Beginning with the nature of freedom and human flourishing, Gregg underscores the moral and economic benefits of business and markets as well as the welfare state’s problems. Gregg then addresses several related issues that divide Catholics in America. These include the demands of social justice, the role of unions, immigration, poverty, and the relationship between secularism and big government.

Above all, Gregg underlines how economic freedom’s corrosion in America is undermining the United States’ robust commitment to religious liberty—a principle integral not only to the American Founding and the life of Charles Carroll but also the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. As a creative minority, Gregg argues, limited government Catholics can help transform the wider movement to reground the United States upon the best insights of the American Experiment—and thereby save that Experiment itself.

Should be interesting.

Too many rights?

Who is allowed to have "too many rights"? Not Christians serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, that's for sure. Bill Donohue explains in his piece about how the Obama Regime opposes a Religious Liberty amendment in a National Defense Authorization Act. Excerpt:

When it comes to those who elect to mutilate their genitals in transgender surgery, we are told they can’t have too many rights. When it comes to suspected Muslim terrorists, we are told they cannot have too many rights. When it comes to pre-teen girls seeking to get birth control pills behind their parents’ back, we are told they cannot have too many rights. But when it comes to the religious rights of the Armed Forces, we are told they already have too many rights.

Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage

Highlights from David Mamet's excellent article

Please read this entire article. David Mamet is a really good writer, and stating that fact is sort of like saying that Mozart was a really good composer. Mamet brings his writing brilliance to the topic of gun rights versus gun control policy and ties it philosophically to the big picture of individual rights and freedoms versus overbearing government. I'm merely going to excerpt highlights here with short commentary.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

Any one using the phrase "one-size-fits-all" to describe wrongheaded, liberal, big-government policy immediately scores check marks on the good rhetoric clipboard. People who switch from being on the left to being on the right, like Mamet and others such as David Horowitz, realize that the enshrinement of egalitarianism eventually hurts everyone, even those they claim to be trying to help. As soon as you realize that one size does not fit all, you are on your way toward the individual rights camp.

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”

Ah, yes, the kind of diversity the left thoroughly dislikes, the kind which has components of intellect and will involved and not just one based on skin color or other accidental features. Diversity based on viewpoints and knowledge and reasoning capabilities—in other words, diversity based on essential human qualities—is the only really interesting kind to people interested in fixing real societal problems. One person likes the city, another likes the country, one likes to work outdoors, another prefers office work, one likes a steady paycheck, another likes to trade options, etc. Is there any way for democratic society to deal with such diversity of opinions other than absolute freedom on these non-moral issues? Of course we have seen the left espouse intolerance of actual diversity of thought for years now—one quick example. Mamet includes churches as beneficiaries of this type of essential diversity; St. Paul appears to concur.

The Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach them that power corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George. The American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of power: “He has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made Judges dependent on his will alone … He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat out their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has] fundamentally altered the forms of our government.”

This is a chillingly familiar set of grievances; and its recrudescence was foreseen by the Founders. They realized that King George was not an individual case, but the inevitable outcome of unfettered power; that any person or group with the power to tax, to form laws, and to enforce them by arms will default to dictatorship, absent the constant unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and their severe untempered insistence upon compliance with law.

I don't have much to add to this observation. Except maybe... BOOM.

Many are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their opposition comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.

Two good points. These 2 million instances of good news gun stories are pretty much unreported unless you read NRA magazines and other pro-gun publications. One reason has to do with the liberal agenda of the media, but another I believe is the non-newsworthiness of the "incidents" to the reporting industry. For example, something like a burglar hears a shotgun pump action and falls out of the first floor window and runs usually doesn't make for good copy, especially if the would-have-been victim isn't photogenic. Whereas an accomplished athlete named Plaxico has a gun accident and it's national news. It's what they can use to sell soap and underwear that creates newsworthiness. "If it bleeds it leads" explains why normal excessive drinking and idiocy on the part of celebrities doesn't make headlines as well as the effective defensive use of firearms which doesn't produce a corpse or a drastic injury of some sort.

Walk down Madison Avenue in New York. Many posh stores have, on view, or behind a two-way mirror, an armed guard. Walk into most any pawnshop, jewelry story, currency exchange, gold store in the country, and there will be an armed guard nearby. Why? As currency, jewelry, gold are precious. Who complains about the presence of these armed guards? And is this wealth more precious than our children?

Apparently it is: for the Left adduces arguments against armed presence in the school but not in the wristwatch stores. Q. How many accidental shootings occurred last year in jewelry stores, or on any premises with armed security guards?

Why not then, for the love of God, have an armed presence in the schools? It could be done at the cost of a pistol (several hundred dollars), and a few hours of training (that’s all the security guards get). Why not offer teachers, administrators, custodians, a small extra stipend for completing a firearms-safety course and carrying a concealed weapon to school? The arguments to the contrary escape me.

We are all for that.

Don't forget to take the snap poll while you're reading Mamet's piece. It was 84-16, in the right direction, last time I checked. That's encouraging.

"The Forgotten Heroes of America"

Never forget.

Sign the Petition: Free Our Health Care Now!

Great news! Last time I posted on this about a month ago, there were about 100,000 signatures. Now there are over 650,000! People are not taking this lying down.

If you haven't already PLEASE SIGN! I'm putting a link at the top over on the right sidebar. Ask all your friends and family members to sign this as well; send them an email.

One Man's Bug Is Another Man's Feature

Rod Dreher has a semi-thoughtful piece about why many people have decided that newspapers are worthless. He provides several plausible explanations of what may be contributing factors to the demise of the Newsrag Industrial Complex.

But what struck me was this part:

What I'm thinking about this morning is what happened at my place yesterday. Julie decided she wanted to get rid of a particular piece of furniture we had. She put an ad on Craigslist Dallas. Within minutes, she'd sold the thing. When the purchaser who bought it showed up later to pick it up, we talked about the virtues of Craigslist. I told her that the problem with Craigslist was that it meant people didn't have to buy classified ads anymore -- which really hurt my industry.

"You work for the newspaper?" she said. "Um, we don't subscribe. Sorry! I miss the ritual of reading the morning paper with my coffee, but given that you can get the same information online, my husband and I figured that was one expense we just couldn't afford anymore."

She was clearly an educated woman, and was embarrassed to admit what she'd just admitted. But it is what it is.

So what was Craig Newmark supposed to do when he got the idea for Craigslist? I suppose he could have said to himself, "Gee, I could create a really efficient service that would help people buy and sell things and save them hard-earned dollars. But that would mean news execs would have to smoke cheaper cigars. So ix-nay on the ist-lay."

Presenting Craigslist as a "problem" which is "embarrassing to admit" that you use seems to indicate an extremely one-sided way to look at the world. The only reason the newspaper corporations have become enormously successful is by providing products and services to people which are in demand. In a sense, they created the model of selling subscribers to other corporations by way of advertising, the internet companies just perfected it. They had all these big "annuities" rolling in for years because they were the only game in town, not because their copy was so great.

This post is partially in response to people who often question why many of the readers here and I have "picked on" Rod Dreher so much. But this seems to be a reverse of the argument against Wal-mart, i.e., Wal-mart is seen coming in to the small village flexing is gigantic muscles and putting the little business owners out in the street or running hair salons and Kung Fu schools. Newmark describes his website as a "happy accident" and yet the insinuation here is that he is playing Wal-mart against the "little guys" represented by all these huge media corporations? It just doesn't make sense. Newmark says in that interview that he turned down venture funding many times; everything about Craigslist cries out "Small is beautiful". Can that be said of the big media corporations which consume forests to deliver a Sunday paper which is so full of advertising that an old granny can barely lift it?

I can see the point of the anti-Wal-mart fanatics and their ilk about how they "unfairly" leverage economies of scale. But if anything, getting beaten by Craigslist just highlights the stupidity of Old Media which should have jumped into the internet full force in the mid-nineties. It also maybe helps break the capitalism-only-helps-the-fat-cats narrative, and presents a "problem" for those who cling to that canard.

And the odds that Rod's wife will stop using Craiglist are about the same as the odds that my wife will stop using Craigslist. Extrapolating from her use of Craigslist they'll probably be putting Wal-mart out of business at some point.
Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage

La Shawn on the (un)Fairness Doctrine

La Shawn gets it; the simplest and best way to discern the motives of the left is to look on that ol' list of capital sins, in this case, envy. Excerpt:

It's funny how liberals manage to find a "right to privacy" to slaughter unborn babies and a "civil right" for two men to marry each other in the Constitution but ignore the explicit right to free speech, no matter how unpopular or "intolerant" the speech.

Gaudium et Spes et Walmartum

Good piece by Father Robert Sirico on Free Economies and the Common Good. Excerpt:

When we speak of the idea of the common good, we need to also be open minded about the political and juridical institutions that are most likely to bring it about. The answer is not to be found in the "commonality of goods" but in the very institutions that the socialists worked so hard to discredit. Let me list them: private property in the means of production, stable money to serve as a means of exchange, the freedom of enterprise that allows people to start businesses to pursue their dream, the free association of workers that permits people to choose where they would like to work and under what conditions, the enforcement of contract that provides institutional support to the idea that people should keep their promises, and a vibrant trade within and among nations to permit the fullest possible flowering of the division of labor. These institutions must be supported by a cultural infrastructure that respects private property, regards the human person as possessing an inherent dignity, and confers first loyalties to transcendent authority over civil authority. This is the basis of what we call freedom and results in what we call the common good.

His conclusion is powerful, and worth noting, bold emphasis mine:

Let me close with a declaration that by the standards set forth in the first writings of the early socialists, we are all entitled to call ourselves socialist, if by the term we mean that we a devoted to the well being of all members of society. The means to achieve this ideal is the matter of dispute. It strikes me that the means to achieve this is not through the central planning by the state but through freedom itself. St. Thomas Aquinas had an axiom: bonum est diffusivum sui. The good pours itself out. The good of freedom has indeed poured itself out to the benefit of the whole of humanity.

Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage