Fact-based criticism of the Benedict Option

Found this via Twitter. Good stuff with regard to why the Benedict Option would be no protection for the Faithful. Excerpt:

In any case, St. Benedict wasn't running away from an oppressive state. Had there been a state wanting to stamp out monasticism, he would have been a sitting duck. The Protestant rulers of Ireland found it extremely difficult to impose Anglicanism on the hearts of the people, but childishly simple to burn down the monasteries. Later there were secret seminaries, but even this had to wait for the persecution to move into a less militant phase.

St. Benedict is the wrong model; his was a capital-intensive approach to preserving learning and Catholic orthodoxy. We are going to need to be lighter on our feet. St. Edmund Campion and St. Oliver Plunket are the people to study. The exiled institutions, the secret printing presses, the underground Cathedrals, the network of trusted Catholics, and a resistance to torture.

A ghetto has a lot to say for it, for a beleagured cultural minority, but it requires at least a degree of cooperation with the civil authorities. The original 'geto' was the Jewish quarter in Venice: half protected space, half prison camp.

However I'm not sure he is entirely correct in predictions like the following:

Gay couples will demand to be 'married' in Church. Some priests will give them some kind of ceremony: some priests will refuse. The latter will be prosecuted for discrimination. It will be no protection to them to say they are not acting as agents of the state. It is not only agents of the state who are under the law. They are offering a service to the public: they should not discriminate. The difference between making a reasoned distinction between real and pseudo marriage, on the one hand, and homophobia, on the other, has already been collapsed by the courts in England.

There are presently some legal hurdles to a successful prosecution, at least in the UK, but those hurdles will come under intense pressure and, if the success of the so-called progressive agenda continues, they will disappear. Faithful priests will go to prison. On present trends, this will happen in the next few years.

Certainly we should prepare for the worst even as we hope for the best. I think a pretty good case can be made that the Sacrament of Matrimony "offered" by the Church is not something which has ever really been a "service offered to the public." There are quite a few hurdles to be cleared, and being opposite genders is only one of them. There's age, relationship—first cousins can't marry—status, etc. 

I don't know if that fact could be translated into a legal case in court. I actually think it would be great for a gifted Catholic lawyer to start quoting theological statements and canons of the Church on marriage in the civil courts, explaining at length why the Church teaches what it does with regard to marriage. That would be the perfect imitation of the martyrs, and it would drive the butt pirates and the demons they serve crazy.

Oh, SNAP!

Good news from the Catholic League with regard to SNAP, the professional victims group that cares oh, so deeply about abuse victims... provided a Catholic priest was the abuser.

SNAP, the professional victims' group, is salivating again. And no wonder: their latest 990 tax return shows they're in big trouble—their revenues are plummeting and they're operating in the red. So they badly need Anderson to grease them again. They are incapable of being shamed.

It would benefit everyone if these folks would be forced to get real jobs.

I was thinking: I suppose that it's perfectly possible that these people truly believed they had come into an infinite source of information and revenue when the scandal first broke. The concept that the number of perverts in the priesthood is finite, that bishops could clean house, that the bad bishops could be forced to clean up their acts—all foreign to them.

This makes too much sense

David Freddoso points out a no-brainer, a win-win-win, a common sense approach—whatever you want to call it—to save $54 billion on health care as proposed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. It's basically a tort reform approach, which means that Obama and most Democrats will automatically be against it since shutting off the money spigot to their big lawyer donors does not represent "change they can believe in". Excerpt:

The list of reforms that CBO considered includes:

• A reform of "joint and several liability." This means that instead of putting one "deep-pocketed" defendant on the hook for everything, each defendant would pay only his fair share according to his liability.


• A $250,000 cap on non-economic damages.


• A cap on punitive damages equal to $500,000 or twice economic damages, whichever is greater.


• A claw-back of money already recovered from insurers.


• A limit on the percentage of judgements and settlements that trial lawyers can pocket.

The CBO report cites studies that already show reduced Medicare costs in states where some or all of these liability reforms have already been implemented. The conclusion:

In the case of the federal budget, enactment of such a package of proposals would reduce mandatory spending for Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits program by roughly $41 billion over the next 10 years.

CBO says that the reforms would also increase tax revenues by $13 billion, as premiums drop and a greater share of employees' income becomes taxable take-home pay. The bottom line for the federal government is $54 billion over ten years, including $11 billion this year.

Obamacare's Gifts to Lawyers

Rowan Scarborough goes over details of the gifts both by the absence of certain things and the presence of others. First, under absence:

The biggest gift of all is what is not in the bill.

There is no tort reform, no limits to malpractice law suits that drive up medical and insurance costs and force insecure physicians to order excessive tests.

There are no caps on what state juries can award in medical malpractice cases for economic lost, or for the hard-to-calculate pain and suffering. This means lawyers hold on to their free rein in suing doctors and medical plans.

To Democrats, no tort reform makes good politics. The Washington Examiner reports trial lawyers have donated three-quarters of a billion dollars to political campaigns the past two decades -- the vast, vast amount of which went to Democrats and their party. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, has gotten $54,000 in campaign funds this year alone from trial lawyers and their employees.

Conservatives and Republicans have been calling for tort reform for years, so this is just one more example of the lack of bi-partisanship in this atrocity. BTW, Barack and Michelle Obama are both lawyers. Here are some of the "gifts" which will provide the trial lawyers with new opportunities to bring cases:

According to a Republican analysis, here are the legislative gifts to trial lawyers:

• Section 151. Imposes new mandates on insurance companies and the employers who buy their plans, providing lawyers new grounds to sue in federal court.

• Section 153. Establishes a new whistleblower law so the employees of insurance companies can file suit if they believe they were retaliated against. In theory, a person fired for incompetence could retaliate against the company by claiming whistleblower status.

"If some one gets demoted they can claim they were about to bring a complaint," said a Republican congressional staffer. "It gives them another ground to sue a company."

• Section 132. Sets up an appeal process for a patient denied a claim or benefit by an insurance company. The third-party independent arbiter would hear the appeal and issue a ruling.

H/T Red State.

Bill O-Reilly on the John Adams Project

Our Texas correspondent, J-Carp, send me this link regarding this alarming and developing story.

...[T]he John Adams Project, a group of subversive Americans affiliated with the ACLU who are sneaking around taking pictures of CIA agents who may have interrogated captured al-Qaida guys in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack.

This insidious outfit believes the CIA tortured casually and the U.S.A. is a “human rights violator.”

After taking the surreptitious photos, the Adams Project then passes them on to lawyers representing incarcerated terrorists, hoping that an accused man will, in turn, accuse a CIA agent of torturing him.

This nasty business is now being investigated by the Justice Department, but the Obama administration has kept very quiet about it and, strangely, so have the media.

Very few newspapers have reported on the John Adams Project, and there is something quite disturbing about that.

Remember Valerie Plame? She was the CIA operative publicly exposed by columnist Robert Novak in an Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction controversy.

After that happened, the left-wing media went wild with indignation. How could anyone name a CIA person, thereby putting him or her in danger?

The New York Times was on fire over the story. But when faced with the facts about the John Adams Project, the Times buried the story on page A-20.

By exposing CIA agents to accused terrorists and their lawyers, the John Adams Project is obviously putting lives in jeopardy.

This is a thousand times worse than the Plame affair, which saw top Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby convicted of a felony while the press largely celebrated.

But where is the coverage of the Adams story? Where is President Obama on the issue? Why are these people being allowed to terrorize the Central Intelligence Agency?

Meanwhile, the real John Adams is turning over in his grave. Here's liberal lawyer Nina Ginsberg spouting the standard "everyone-in-the-CIA-except-Valerie-Plame-is-evil" line:

Teddy Bear Messages

Found this CL piece by Kiera McCaffrey from a little over a year ago. The whole thing is spot-on and useful reading, but the paragraph which caught my eye describes the performance art equivalent to what I've termed the "Kevlar Sentence" which JohnMcG should receive credit for identifying. Viz:

Another group, Healing Alliance (formerly known as Linkup), turned to Jeffrey Anderson to educate them about effective lobbying techniques. Those gathered at the 2003 annual meeting of the victims' support group were instructed by the lawyer-turned-showman that teddy bears are the key to influencing elected officials. He told them that, should an advocate call on a legislator who is not in his office, the advocate only needs to leave one of the stuffed toys with a staffer in order to turn a missed opportunity into a successful appeal: "You tell them it represents the innocence of a child—the innocence that's been stolen—and I guarantee they'll remember you."

So that's what the prosecutor needed to bring to court to nail Michael Jackson. Teddy Bears!

Maybe as the funding, popularity and relevance of these bigoted groups continues to dwindle they could begin the ceremonial nocturnal burning of kerosene-soaked teddy bears in priests' yards so it's guaranteed that Catholics "remember" them.