The Ark and The Dove

Abortion Reduction Isn't Really Pro-Life

In articles covering Obama's meeting with the pope, much has been made of Obama's commitment to reduce the number of abortions. Take this passage from a Reuters piece:

President Barack Obama promised Pope Benedict on Friday that he would do everything possible to reduce the number of abortions in the United States, the Vatican said.

It sounds like a reasonable compromise position, right?
But what about the phrase "do everything possible to reduce the number of abortions?"
Is this really what the pro-life movement sees as the best direction for compromise?

Obviously, pro-lifers want the number of abortions reduced -- but a truly pro-life ideology is focused on the method of reducing abortions, not just the end numbers.

It's not just that we want to live in a society with fewer abortions overall -- we want a society that finds the very idea of an abortion so repugnant that it is not even a considerable option.

Let's consider some ways in which we might reduce the number of abortions without necessarily improving our society:

It's a pretty safe bet that the primary method of reducing abortions will most likely be artificial contraception. I've seen NARAL speakers try to publicly embarrass Catholic pro-lifer debaters by getting them hung up on the Church's views on the subject. Obama can appear to offer a compromising olive branch that he knows many pro-lifers will have to refuse. The egg will then appear to be on our face for being uncompromising, and people who are afraid to give up their artificial birth control will prefer to make the pro-choice compromise.

The problem with contraception is that it perpetuates the social attitudes that make abortion seem attractive. It separates sexuality from reproduction and it encourages partners to see each other as toys rather than people. You all know this already.

Perhaps another way to think of the issue is this:
If couples would have had an abortion if they had gotten pregnant are only avoiding abortion because they aren't getting pregnant, then they are still in a morally dangerous state. Our relationship with God isn't quite the same as our relationship with the law. I can't be arrested (thank goodness) for being willing to steal an ipod unless I actually make the attempt to steal it.
Jesus as explained to us, however, that God isn't quite so litigious -- we sin when we consciously, willingly, and unjudgmentally indulging a fantasy to sin. For God, unlike Yoda, it isn't a simple matter of doing or not doing. Our relationship with God is grounded as well in what we would be willing to do or what we would be desirous to do. Obviously, this isn't the same thing as temptation. That I am tempted to steal the ipod is not the same as being willing to steal the ipod if the chance came up. That is, I can feel a desire to steal, but there's another level to it -- one can desire or not desire to have that desire (and at this point I'm pretty sure I'm plagiarizing an article I just read on indulgences and detachment from sin).

For God, our desire to desire something that is illicit is itself an illicit desire and takes us away from him. It's kind of the reverse of Baptism by Desire. If we hope for God's mercy for those who would have followed him if they could have, then it seems logical that we must fear for the state of souls whose faith is without works--who merely avoid committing grave deeds because they are not given the opportunity.

I'm not saying that anyone who would have had an abortion given the opportunity is necessarily in a state of mortal sin. Still, if we agree to a compromise position -- if we promote a society that still puts some people in a position where they think abortion is an option, then we still bear responsibility for those people's choices. We'd still be promoting a culture of dehumanization and death -- we'd just be promoting a Culture of Death Lite. I'm not sure how well that will go over at our judgment.

Imagine you were on a jury hearing the trial of a terrorist/Nazi/orc/Sith Lord(choose your favorite proverbial bad guy) who was responsible for a truly heinous attacking resulting in 1,000,000 deaths. What kind of punishment should he receive?

Now, imagine it came out in the trial that his superiors initially planned the extermination of 2,000,000 people, but he was able to talk them down to 1,000,000. Are you going to lessen his punishment by half?

Should serial killers start using this plea? "Well, your honor, if you knew how many more people I could have killed but chose not to, you wouldn't be passing such a harsh judgment."

Let's try another scenario. Let's imagine that we haven't captured the bad guy. Some Islamic terrorist group is launching wave after wave of attacks, killing hundreds of people. Elections come up and a presidential candidate promises he will do everything possible to reduce the number of deaths from terrorist attacks. Upon election, he swiftly instates sharia law, and the number of terrorist attacks drop to almost zero.

He reduced the number of deaths, but would the society be better off?

My Spacebar Is Now Stuck in My Head...

after repeatedly banging...

Drudge linked to a Newsweek article with the following statement:

In truth, though, Obama's pragmatic approach to divisive policy (his notion that we should acknowledge the good faith underlying opposing viewpoints) and his social-justice agenda reflect the views of American Catholic laity much more closely than those vocal bishops and pro-life activists.

The page header for the article provocatively reads "Is Obama More Catholic than the Pope?"

I face this problem with adjectives all the time, and it's something of a curse within academic fields. In secular, anthropological terminology, reporters get confused by how they should use the adjective "Catholic." The article would seem to favor an interpretation in which the word "Catholic" describes some kind of collective, majority viewpoint among people identifying themselves as "Catholic." If most Catholics think X, then X must be a "Catholic" trait.

The problem is, of course, that when these Catholics think X, they aren't necessarily thinking it as Catholics. They are most likely thinking X as Americans, or as materialists, or as confused individuals.

This is an understandable enough definition if, say, you are trying to cordon off a field of study based on identity politics. You can waste whole classes just by asking students to try to determine where we should make distinctions between British and American literature, or what makes a feminist author, or whether there is such a thing as a gay text as opposed to a straight text. The reason this takes so much time is that there is no real authority to determine any of these cultural boundaries.

Not so with the Church. There is an authority to determine "mere Catholicism" if you will...but the problem here becomes tautological. People can't recognize the authority because they don't recognize the authority. Or is it that the don't because they can't?

I suddenly feel like I'm about to be launched into a Jim Henson skit...

UPDATE: I actually hadn't finished reading the article when I made this post. I just finished the article, and I can tell you that keys Z-M and the entire numpad are now permanently imbedded in my face. I'm sorry, Isabel, I think I just ruined our wedding pictures.

Here's perhaps the most aggravating line of the whole article:

That attitude has resulted in some heinous decisions. Most famously, in the lead up to the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" in 1968, an advisory body of theologians and laity empaneled by the pope advised that the church should reverse its position on birth control and concede that the issue should be a question for morality and for science. But authority—not truth, not love—prevailed: Pope Paul VI, listening to the advice of Wojtyla, disagreed with the majority of these advisers, who had voted 69 to 10 for change, fretting that to change this position would weaken his authority.

I'm sorry...just copying and pasting that has brought up some bile in my throat...I'm going to have to excuse myself from the computer...

Anti-Bachelorette Party

Isabel is currently down in MD having her Bachelorette Party...

So what will it be for me tonight then?

Star Wars movie marathon?
All-night gaming session?
Making a tent out of my bedsheets and reading comic books till the morning birds sing?

But first...dinner...maybe I'll make it a special occasion and get a whole footlong at Subway with extra pickles...

Introducing My New Auto-phobia!

This post is can probably be categorized under TMI.

Iran? Hello?

Is it just me or did the potential revolution in Iran suddenly disappear from the headlines once Michael Jackson died?

Sometimes it seems as though journalists are like undergraduates who fixate so much on the plot holes in a Shakespearean play that they completely miss what the play is really about...

-5 Charisma Modifier

I just read that the Presidential Approval Index has slipped to -5% (32% approve, 37% disapprove).

Now if the President has a -5% index when most of the media is in his pocket, can you imagine what his index would look like if journalists actually started reporting on him in a less slavish way?

Needed: Lawful Good Clerics

Given the rapid approach of my upcoming nuptials, I'm in the middle of thumbing through JP2's Familiaris Consortio. Early in the text, he discusses the dire need for wisdom in an age becoming overwhelmed with its own sophistication:

The following words of the Second Vatican Council can therefore be applied to the problems of the family: "Our era needs such wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized. For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser people are forthcoming.(17)

Mace-wielders rejoice, for your hour is at hand!

Indeed, we are in the Age of the Mage, are we not? It is the epoch of the magic user -- the Harry Potter -- where we praise intelligence for its awesome power and seek after impressive abilities. We want to be able to cast magic missles, but we don't always ask whether or not we should be casting it any given time.

A glimpse at the headlines on any given day show the loss of wisdom pretty clearly, and it seems as though most of the debates are between people claiming what we can do versus people asking whether we should.

The Choir Show

At my local parish, Mass pretty much always runs about one hour and fifteen minutes.
By my calculations, we could shave off at least fifteen minutes if we cut out choir performances. The choir could only sing for as long as it took for the priest to reach his chair, purify the vessels*, or do whatever else he had to do. We could also recite the Gloria rather than sing it (which would also probably increase the number of people praising God).

*Why do we talk about purifying the vessels when he wipes them down? It makes it sound as if containing the Body of Christ makes them impure

Out of Sight, Out of my Mind

Sometimes I think that my news-reading habits and my idle hobbies create some kind of perverse cycle.
The more I read the news, the more depressed I get. The more depressed I get, the more I goof off to take my mind off of the news. The more I goof off, the more guilty I feel. The guiltier I feel, the more I read the news to at least bear some kind of intellectual solidarity with those who are oppressed in the world...which makes me more depressed...and so on and so on...

Gearing Up

Downloading random .pdfs from Early English Books Online has got to be the early modernist's academic equivalent to level grinding on World of Warcraft.

I'm like a level 217 Orc Bibliographer now.