tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3283017376105134762024-03-13T11:46:32.191-04:00Ethics, Culture, & PolicyPAUL ADAMS -
Ideas, arguments, and musings about ethics in relation to culture, religion, and public policyPaul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.comBlogger779125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-43298567760904167912015-01-02T19:27:00.002-05:002015-01-03T08:12:55.097-05:00Happy 2015! Some musings on looking back, around, & forward<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Paul Adams</div>
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I am not much given to optimism, neither the “unscrupulous”
kind so brilliantly exposed by Roger Scruton, nor the complacent kind that
assumes all is already well as it is. The first deplores present evils, it is
true. It calls for revolution and the rule of an enlightened, progressive elite
or party. But then, after its victory, all will be well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it turns out not to be, as
inevitably happens, that will be the fault of reactionaries or traitors in the
party itself. The revolution devours its own young. The second kind of
optimism, proclaiming that we already live in the best of all possible worlds –
a view with which many pessimists will concur - underestimates both the need
for and possibilities of change.</div>
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The unscrupulous optimist foments dissatisfaction, even an
indignation addiction, if not moral panic, in order to motivate social change.
The solution always involves expanding state power over civil society, ever
more control and coercion of families, churches and communities of conscience,
businesses and markets. There ought to be a law, the offended and outraged cry.
The informal sources of care and control, safety and order in families and
communities, must be replaced by bureaucrats and professionals.</div>
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So what to make of this past year? It was a year besmirched
by a rising tide of vocal and violent anti-Semitism in Europe and on American
campuses; of religious persecution, kidnappings, beheadings and enslavement in
the Middle East and Nigeria, with the control by ISIS (staggeringly
underestimated by Obama as a junior team version of Al Qaeda) of territory the
size of Great Britain. We witnessed the fall into lawlessness and violence of
some African-American communities, with police use of force provoking riots,
looting, and the destruction of economic life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NYPD, at the time of writing, is on a slowdown that is close
to a strike in response to the murder of two officers in New York and the
failure of the mayor there to support the police. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The destruction of marriage by liberal elites through the
courts, egged on by media and academia, continues apace, as the sexual
revolution and the raising of unprecedented millions of children without one or
either of their own parents continued to wreck the lives of whole communities
where father absence was the norm.</div>
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There is much to lament even without the bogus indignation
of statists who want the state to increase its management of the economy in
order to impose its version of a more equitable distribution of resources, to
restrict freedom of speech, religion, and conscience, and to impose on campuses
ever more restrictions on what can be thought, said, and done while denying due
process and assuming guilt.</div>
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But let us not lose sight, in our addiction to indignation, of
the fact that 2014 was a year in which health and longevity improved worldwide,
dire poverty continued its steep decline as capitalism, for all the continuing
distortions of cronyism and corruption, lifted average living standards
worldwide. War became less frequent and less violent, rates of murder and
violent crime plummeted, and racism and discrimination declined (with the major
exception of resurgence of the ancient prejudice of Jew hatred, now often in
liberal disguise, in Europe).</div>
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In a <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/campus-sexual-assault-real-imagined">column</a> on campus sexual assault: real and
imagined,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anne Hendershott cites a government
study that flatly contradicts the narrative of rampant sexual assault on campus
that feeds the moral panic used by other government agencies and
indignant-liberal media to call for ever tighter control of campus life by
government and through its agencies of faculty, staff, and students. The study,
<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/gateway-to-dc/campus-sexual-assault-under-fresh-scrutiny-after-new-survey-shows/article_8ea64e9d-5dbc-532f-b04d-39465ee20aa5.html"><span style="color: #0335c0; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 17.0pt;">released last month</span></a><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 17.0pt;"> by the
Bureau of Justice Statistics</span>, shows that the</div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 17.0pt;">…rate of
rape and other sexual assault over the past two decades was 1.2 times higher
for non-students of college age than for students on college campuses. In fact,
campus sexual assault has actually declined from 9.2 per 1,000 college students
in 1997 to 4.4 per 1,000 in 2013. Far from being a site of violence, the study
found that female college students are safer from sexual assault while in
college than at any other time in their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Hendershott describes how the promoters of panic have
pilloried and denied platforms to anyone who questions their bogus statistics –
yet another example of social liberals’ seeking to close the American mind to
rational or open debate. </div>
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So the threats to freedom – political, economic, and
cultural – are real and serious. But let us not be panicked by the purveyors of
moral panic into statist solutions that make matters worse and undermine civil
society. Nor should we be discouraged from doing what can and needs to be done
to strengthen families and communities, to resist terrorism, and to eradicate
poverty worldwide and remove the obstacles to the poor’s use of their
creativity and initiative to improve their condition.</div>
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Happy 2015!</div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-29045559293757085742014-12-06T08:09:00.000-05:002014-12-06T08:12:23.992-05:00Outstanding speech by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks | Former Chief Rabbi of the UK and the Commonwealth addressing the Vatican Conference on Complementarity of Man and Woman<br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-3554812852121204192014-12-02T09:16:00.000-05:002014-12-02T09:16:30.773-05:00Muslim leaders face a dilemma - by James Schall SJ<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Can Muslim leaders condemn the terrorism of ISIS without endangering their own lives and the integrity of the Qur’an?</span></h1>
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<a class="navLink1" href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/James_Schall_SJ" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">James Schall SJ</a> | 2 December 2014</div>
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Recently I saw a series of colored photos of the execution, beheading, crucifixion, or shooting in the head of numerous Christians in Iraq or Syria by members of the Islamic State. I have seldom seen anything so gruesome. It was so revolting that I had to stop looking at them. But that reaction was probably exactly what those photos were designed to accomplish. “These are the things that will happen to you soon enough” was the implied message. The Archbishop of Mosul warned pretty much the same thing of the West after he helplessly watched his people and church destroyed.<br />
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We are told that such “incidents” are works of “extremists” and “terrorists”, as if people do these things just for the sake of doing them. Yet, they have a clearly thought-out purpose, based on a known principle seen to be of the highest worth, in this sense, in the name of Allah. For many, the only way to cope with such realities is to deny their immediate possibility or even their fact.<br />
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The <em><a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-wraps-up-turkey-trip-with-refugee-meetings-1417357501" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">Wall Street Journal</a></em> reported the following item: “Speaking to journalists during his return flight (from Turkey), the Pope said that Muslim leaders should issue a global condemnation of violence by Islamist extremists. But, he added, ‘no one can say that all followers of Islam are terrorists, any more than you can say that all Christians are fundamentalists.’”<br />
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Needless to say, that passage deserves attention.<br />
First, it would indeed be very encouraging if Muslim leaders could gather to condemn their own “extremists,” if that is what they are. It is striking that the Bishop of Rome is the one to call such leaders to do what seems, to most people, to be their own obvious duty.<br />
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The question is, however: Can Muslim leaders (whoever might qualify as a Muslim “leader” in a religion with no central authority) really make this condemnation without endangering both their own lives and the integrity of the Qur’an itself? Many writers have pointed out that the relative silence of Muslim leaders before such scenes of persecution and terror is not primarily because they too are not sometimes horrified. The reason is theological. They know that the Qur’an does not condemn violence in the pursuit of its religion. It sometimes approves it; it sometimes disapproves it.<br />
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Further, Muslim leaders may not be much interested in dealing with outside calls for them to do what others see as their duty. “Muslims believe that Islam is the ultimate and definitive revealed religion,” Samir Khalid Samir SJ wrote. “They believe that the Qur’an includes true Judaism and authentic Christianity. Muslims are convinced that Jews and Christians falsified their own Scriptures. For Muslims who believe that they already have the full truth, there is very little to gain or to learn through inter-religious dialogue” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586171550/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1586171550&linkCode=as2&tag=mercatornet-20&linkId=QMSLXL6PJVTBB4MX" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">111 Questions on Islam</a>, 213). The very notion of “dialoging with the Qur’an or subjecting it to scientific criticism is itself a form of blasphemy.<br />
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The Pope has, in any case, presented the Muslim leaders with a very curious dilemma. If they, as Muslims, condemn the “terrorists”, they risk violating the Qur’an’s specific wording. If they do not, they are held to be complicit in the atrocities. In either case they lose. So they avoid taking a principled stand on the basis of their own tradition. Muslim leaders also know that they are themselves targeted if they seem to criticize the Islamic State which claims to be the authentic understanding of Islam.<br />
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Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Muslim leaders did “condemn” such violence. On what grounds would they do so? This question involves the integrity of the Qur’an, the bedrock of the religion. A Pakistani Christian couple was recently murdered for supposedly burning two of its pages. If the leaders condemned religiously motivated violence on the grounds of reason, however, that itself would imply the existence of some authority higher than the Qur’an. That would undermine all those many passages in the Qur’an that contradict each other and make the book seem incoherent. That concern is why Muslim philosophers devised a system that could maintain that both sides of a contradictory can be true. Generally, when one passage in the Qur’an is contradicted by another, the one later in time takes precedence. But both passages are retained.<br />
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The issue of the unity of the Qur’an has been resolved within Islam itself by what is in effect voluntarism, often known as the two-truth theory or Averroism. This position means that Allah is not bound by the principle of contradiction. That principle would presumably undermine his all-powerfulness. Thus, he is free to change the meaning of right and wrong, good and evil by his will. This position means that a condemnation by Muslim leaders of violence would threaten the integrity of the Jihadist tradition that constituted the basis of Muslim expansion in the first place. Basically, it means that the essence of God is not <em>Logos</em>, truth, but <em>Voluntas</em>, will.<br />
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The other side of Pope Francis’ comment is also worth reflection. He noted that not all people within a religion necessarily follow the tenets of the religion. Christians sin, too, he keeps telling us. Thus, not all followers of Islam are “terrorists”, but evidently some are with good conscience.<br />
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The question here is which group is more in tune with the Qur’an, those who reject violence or those who do not? And who decides? The so-called “terrorists” think they are following the Qur’an. They condemn as heretics those who do not engage in violence, especially at a time when it seems to them possible rapidly to expand Islam into a lethargic West. Again, no authority within Islam itself can resolve this dilemma. Therefore, both positions are valid.<br />
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Yet, to relate “terrorists” to Christian fundamentalists seems quite unusual. I suppose one could call the so-called “terrorists” to be “fundamentalists”, though often they are supported by the most sophisticated Islamic philosophers of modern times. But do any Christian fundamentalists advocate terror? Do not most of them believe about 95% of what the Pope himself believes? Are they not ecumenical brothers? Surely the Pope did not intend this implication that Christian fundamentalists were “terrorists” or anything like them. Not all fundamentalists are alike; it depends on what one is fundamental about.<br />
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On the other side, however, do not many peaceful Muslims sympathize with the “terrorists” when they succeed? Was there not widespread rejoicing in the Muslim world after 9/11? But the Pope’s point is well-taken. Why are Muslims themselves so reluctant to condemn the atrocities we are beginning to see if we would look at them? In this sense, the Pope might justly ask: “Why is there so little coverage of these atrocities, these persecutions in the rest of the world press and media? Part of it is because certain strands of modern thought have made “fundamentalism” the only public crime, because it is the major force that opposes its agenda on life and family issues. In this sense, fundamentalism, Catholicism, and Islam are all three seen as enemies of modern liberty, the liberty that, like all voluntarism, denies any order, either natural or supernatural, in human things.<br />
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This examination of will-based regimes, in fact, is the line of thought that Benedict XVI spelled out in his “Regensburg Lecture.” Islam, fundamentalism, and liberalism all need <em>logos</em>. What they too often have in common is <em>voluntas</em>. What we see being worked out in both the West and in Islam is what happens when <em>voluntas</em> reaches full power. The Western and Islamic versions seem to reach the same ends by different routes. Both Allah and the Leviathan claim the power to make what is wrong right, and what is right wrong. Once the mind is made up on such principles, there will be men who strive to put it into effect. This striving is what we see in both Islam and in the West. The voices that speak for <em>Logos</em> are rare. Implicitly, this silence about <em>Logos</em> is what the Pope was trying to reverse.<br />
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<em>Rev. James V. Schall SJ taught political science at Georgetown University for many years. He is the author of numerous books.</em></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">- See more at: <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/muslim_leaders_face_a_dilemma#sthash.junMzCqA.dpuf">http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/muslim_leaders_face_a_dilemma#sthash.junMzCqA.dpuf</a></span></h1>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-1241796047514674782014-11-05T11:21:00.000-05:002014-11-05T21:57:32.174-05:00Conscience, Social Justice, and Abortion - Paul Adams<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Longer than my usual post, by far, longer even than the conference paper of which this is an extended version.<br />
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DRAFT</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Conscience,
Social Justice, and Abortion</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Paul Adams<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">ABSTRACT<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Many see abortion as a
matter of social justice, but differ on what "social justice" means.
The same is true of conscience. This paper analyzes the concepts of
conscience and social justice as they relate to each other and to social work
involvement in abortion decisions. It proposes that conscience and social
justice are necessary to each other and to good practice. Both need to be
understood in relational, not individualist-statist terms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Introduction<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">No
provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which
protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil
authority.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(Thomas
Jefferson to New London Methodists, 1809)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
the gulf has grown in recent decades between the traditional Judeo-Christian
orthodoxy and the secular state in matters of life, death, sex, and marriage,
the question of conscience and conscience protections and exemptions in law has
become pressing.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Livelihoods, careers, charitable organizations and activities, and whole
communities have been put at risk in the interest of imposing measures that
require many Christians and others to violate their consciences. Such coercion
of conscience by the state is sometimes justified in the name of social
justice.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn3" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unfortunately,
there is as much confusion about the concept of conscience as about that of
social justice. Conscience, rightly understood, is, no less than social
justice, </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">inherently
relational, rooted in community, and directed beyond the self. It is moral
belief applied to conduct, conveys a claim to truth, implies accountability, is
a restraint on power, and is inseparable from personal integrity.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn4" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
As such, it is, like social justice, key to a healthy republic and civil society,
to expanding and protecting the rich associational life that occupies the
social space between individual and state. Some identify with social justice,
while some emphasize conscience, as if the two were in opposition. Both
perspectives frame issues in terms of the rights of individuals and the role of
the state, neglecting the intermediary groups and institutions of civil
society. One sees the world in individualistic terms, the other collectivist,
but both in relation to the state and each as opposed to the other. So, it
seems individualism stresses conscience at the expense of social justice and
collectivism does the reverse. On the contrary, rightly understood, conscience
and social justice illuminate and reinforce each other and both are necessary to
a</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> democratic pluralist society.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">1. Social Justice and Abortion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Though the term is seldom defined, social justice may be
approached in at least two main ways. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In one, it is a desirable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">state
of affairs</i> by comparison with which existing situations are deemed unjust
because they fall short of an ideal, whether of equality or nondiscrimination.
In the second sense, social justice is rooted in the tradition of justice, the
cardinal virtue that inclines people to give others their due. Justice as
virtue is the steady and lasting willingness to give to others what they are
entitled to. Social justice is a subvirtue of the virtue of justice, social in
two ways. It is the virtue, first, of working in association with others and,
second, of working together for the common good. It is social both in its form
and its aim.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
first view is common – it is the only sense evident in social work’s official
literature, where the cardinal virtue of justice and indeed all mention of the
virtues are startlingly absent. Many critics, above all Hayek and recently
Patrick Burke, regard this, the prevailing view of social justice, as
incoherent, inherently unjust, and inclined to a state-centered and even
totalitarian view of society and social policy.</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn5" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
second view sees social justice as a virtue to be understood, not in opposition
to the cardinal virtue of justice, but as an aspect or subvirtue of it. It is a
modern form of general justice or legal justice as understood in the classical
tradition of justice, the greatest of the moral virtues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This tradition of the virtues has been
central to ethics from Aristotle to Aquinas to the American Founders to current
scholars of virtue ethics. This understanding of justice and social justice has
been strikingly absent from the professional ethics of social work (which looks
instead to Kantian deontology shorn of the virtues) for more than fifty years.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
this paper, I look at the issue of abortion from both perspectives as each
informs our understanding of conscience, the state, and civil society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the first sense, we may ask whether abortion is ever or could ever be just. As
an act, it involves the intentional termination of a human life, one with his
or her own DNA and principle of existence who, absent accident or deliberate killing,
will grow in time to become an infant, child, adolescent, and adult. Every one
of us is alive now because we went through that human developmental process
from unborn baby to adult. The denial of this simple and evident truth depends </span><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">heavily on euphemism.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The act of abortion becomes in this discourse part of the
“full range” of “reproductive health care” or of meeting “reproductive health
needs,” although it is anti-reproductive, it is not (except in rare cases)
about health, it is seldom remotely definable as a medical need, and it
terminates care (and life) for one of the two patients involved. (In obstetrics
textbooks, traditionally, the physician is said to have two patients, the
mother and her unborn baby. Abortion by definition is never safe for one of
them.) This strategy of obscuring the reality of what is taking place through
bland medical metaphors and descriptions is endemic to the discourse of
abortion advocates, who talk of removing biological material or tissue rather
than causing the death of the tiniest and most vulnerable persons among us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Indeed as Brennan (2008) shows, “much of the success of
the death culture depends upon the corruption of language in the form of
dehumanizing stereotypes imposed on the victims and euphemisms designed to
disguise what is done to them” (p.xv). The medical term “fetus,” is never used
when a mother is invited to see her baby’s ultrasound image or listen to her
heartbeat, only when abortion is under discussion. As philosopher John Finnis
(2010) recently argued, “The word ‘fetus’ is offensive, dehumanizing and
manipulative.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Proponents of abortion rights say they are not
pro-abortion, but “pro-choice,” as if the taking of innocent human life were a
matter solely for the person responsible for the care of that life to decide.
It is as if I were to say that I am not pro-slavery but simply defend your
right to choose to buy and own slaves should you decide to do so. A law that
upheld that right would not be neutral or pro-choice, but pro-slavery. (On the
impossibility of state or legal neutrality in such grave moral matters, see
Sandel, 2009.)</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
we widen the lens to look at abortion as a social phenomenon and a matter of
social justice in the first sense, we see a distribution of the practice that
affects populations unequally. Most deaths by abortion are of girls, producing
in some countries an enormous discrepancy in live births and demographic
distortion that has justly been labeled gendercide. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
addition to this discriminatory impact in terms of sex, we also find that the
practice falls disproportionately on certain racial and ethnic groups. To cite
just one well-known statistic, </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;">In
2012, there were more African-American babies killed by abortion (31,328) in
New York City than were born there (24,758), and the black children killed
comprised 42.4% of the total number of abortions in the city.</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn6" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;"> Similarly, “although whites
outnumber blacks in Mississippi by nearly 2-to-1, 71.67% of the babies aborted
in Mississippi are black, while 26.6% are white.”</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn7" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;"> Some African-American leaders
have described this racial disproportion as “black genocide.” There is a
similar disparity between classes, so that lives of unborn babies of poor
mothers disproportionately end in abortion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is an argument made from this perspective of social justice to the effect that
abortion disproportionately benefits women who are poor and of color and that </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">efforts to restrict abortion will have no
effect on underlying economic factors. Instead, argue Dehlendorf, Harris, and
Weitz, since such restrictions “will only result in more women experiencing
later abortions or having an unintended childbirth, they are likely to result
in worsening health disparities.”</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn8" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
version of a public health approach raises questions about the relation of
dramatically increasing abortion rates, especially among poor women and those
of color, to the sexual revolution in all its aspects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I take this up below in relation to the
coercion of conscience as the new sexual and moral orthodoxy became the official
state ‘religion.’ Suffice it to say here that fruits of the sexual revolution –
unprecedented increases in nonmarital sex in all its forms, of cohabitation, nonmarital
births, paternal abandonment of women and children, divorce, contraception, and
abortion – are expressions of a profound cultural change that devastated poor
and minority families but cannot be reduced to economic causes. Contraception
and abortion have not limited these changes but facilitated them. With the
disappearance - first in poor African-American communities and then extending
across races and into the middle class - of the “shotgun marriage,” is one
expression of the delinking of sex and marriage and both from children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">Marriage as an obligation and expectation for men who
father children outside it </span><span class="PageNumber1"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">gave way</span></span><span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"> to the ubiquity of cohabitation, abandonment, divorce,
and single parenthood in poor communities. Marriage was no longer the
institution that structured and stabilized relations between the sexes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abortion increased dramatically, along
with universally available contraception, as it rendered pregnancy and
childbirth choices of the mother about how to use her body, and so implicitly, her
and not the father’s responsibility. Far from protecting women and their
children from the unwelcome results of sexual activity, abortion shifted the
economic terms of sex in favor of men, with deadly and devastating effects for
women and children.</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn9" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Looking
at abortion from the second social justice perspective shifts the focus from
the statistics of this miserable state of affairs to the moral collapse
underlying them. In the understanding of social justice proposed here, society
will not be just unless individuals are virtuous. Political and economic
structures in themselves cannot produce individual virtue. Nor can they provide
the love and support that humans, as naturally social, “reciprocally indebted”
“dependent rational animals,” need and for which the human heart longs.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn10" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
This is the claim of the whole of the central Christian tradition from
Augustine and Aquinas to the present. Its roots lie in the Christian
understanding of the human person, of human dignity as derived from our
creation in the image and likeness of God. It draws on the ancient Greek
understanding of the cardinal virtue of justice. In this classical
Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, justice is rooted in natural law and what is
objectively necessary for humans to flourish as they order their lives
together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
this tradition, justice and natural rights are, as Feser says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[S]afeguards
of our ability to fulfill our moral obligations and realize our natural end. It
follows that anything which tends to frustrate our ability to fulfill those
obligations and realize those ends violates our rights and amounts to an
injustice.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn11" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></span></sup></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So justice is the cardinal virtue by which, as a matter of
habit and will, we give others what is due them. As Aquinas defines it,
following Aristotle and Cicero, justice is “the habit whereby an individual
renders to each one his due (ius) by a constant and habitual will.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn12" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
If we frustrate the ability of another to fulfill her moral obligations </span><span class="PageNumber1"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">–</span></span><span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">
say to worship God (which implies the right to religious freedom, as the
American Founders argued) or to preserve her life or that of her child </span><span class="PageNumber1"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">–</span></span><span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> we
act unjustly. <span style="mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How
do we get from this classical concept of the virtue of justice to social
justice as a virtue? Feser continues:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And
if that which frustrates this ability [to fulfill our moral obligations] is not
merely the actions of a particular individual or group of individuals, but
something inherent in the very structure of a society – in its legal code, its
cultural institutions, or the tenor of its public life – then what we have can
meaningfully be described as a social injustice. In particular, any society whose
legal framework fails to protect the lives of its weakest members, whose
popular culture is shot through and through with a spirit of contempt for and
ridicule of the demands of the natural law, or whose economic structure makes
it effectively impossible for a worker to support himself and his family with
his wages, is to that extent an unjust society, a socially unjust society.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn13" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]--></span></sup></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Social justice, then, can be defined as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">virtue that inclines individuals to work
with others for the common good</i>. It is justice in directing the virtues to
giving others their due, and social in a double sense.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn14" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]--></span></sup></a> First, it
aims at the common good rather than what is due another individual (as in the
commutative justice that inclines one to equitable exchanges between individuals).
Second, it involves joining with others to achieve a common purpose that
individuals cannot achieve on their own. In that sense, it is the virtue of
association, the virtue par excellence of civil society.<span style="mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By this understanding, ours is a profoundly
unjust society, a socially unjust society, not least in that its “</span><span style="color: #151515; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">legal framework fails to protect the lives of its weakest
members.” This failure is not simply a matter of individual actions but inheres
in the very structure of society, in its legal framework, its sexual and social
mores, in what John Paul II called the “culture of death.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[transition needed]: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">laws, professional bodies, etc. that coerce
citizens into violating their deepest convictions, that compel degrading
performance, thwart their meeting their moral obligations are socially
unjust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They harm moral integrity,
etc. (see below on harm of compelling violation of conscience)<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Social
justice, in this sense, is not primarily about the claims of individuals on the
state, or the state’s enforcing transfers of resources from some individuals to
others. It is rather about how people work together in civil society, in the
space between individual and state, for the common good. When people organize
to end grave, dehumanizing evils like slavery, racism, anti-semitism, or
abortion or to transform the culture that sustains them, they exercise the
virtue of social justice. They develop and safeguard <span style="color: #151515;">our
ability to fulfill our moral obligations and realize our natural end. They
stand in a proud and progressive tradition that opposed such evils and saw
resistance to them as a duty of conscience, even in the face of coercion from
the rich and powerful, even by means of the law and the courts, the whole
repressive apparatus of the state.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">2. The Threat to Liberty of Conscience<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Have
progressives abandoned the liberty of conscience?” asks legal scholar Robert K.
Vischer.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn15" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Noting actions of the American Civil Liberties Union to block conscience
protection regulations for health care providers from being implemented and
that other progressive groups that “trumpet their commitment to defending an
individual’s moral integrity against government incursions were curiously
silent” about rollbacks of those protections, Vischer observes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We’ve come a long way from the times when ringing defenses
of conscience were provided by progressive heroes such as Jefferson, Thoreau,
and Gandhi. The former Democratic governor of Wisconsin justified his veto of a
conscience bill for health care providers on the ground that “you’re moving
into very dangerous precedent where doctors make moral decisions on what
medical care they provide.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn16" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="margin-left: 0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Among
those progressive associations that have switched in recent years from
defending conscience rights and protections to casually dismissing them, the
National Association of Social Workers (NASW) stands in the forefront.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn17" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Indeed, no other profession gives shorter shrift to conscience or has so little
regard for the conscience rights and protections of its own members.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
threats to conscience and religious freedom confronting Christian social
workers and other health professionals have become more evident </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">and </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">pressing in the United States,
Canada and Europe in recent years. A flood of writing about the subject covers
everything from individual legal cases involving students, employees, and
businesses across the United States to the HHS mandate and the hundred plus
lawsuits against it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Here
I will limit myself to developments most directly linked to social work and
related practice (such as counseling) and to the threat posed to conscience by
the very way in which the social work literature frames its discussion of
conscience exemptions and conscientious objection. My primary but not exclusive
focus will be on threats to liberty of conscience of individual practitioners
rather than, as in the case of the HHS mandate, their employers. I want to
suggest that the usual way of framing conscience issues in current debates, as
matters of individual rights enforced or limited by the state, is inadequate
and to propose a different, more complex, but far from new way to think about
the options and ethical obligations of professionals in contested areas, where
expanding state coercion of conscience conflicts most sharply with moral
conviction or religious faith. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Threats<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Christians,
Jews and others in social work and related fields who adhere to the
Judeo-Christian tradition in matters of life, death, sex and marriage face
threats to conscience at every level. As George argues,<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn18" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
the secular-liberal orthodoxy in these areas aims not at tolerance of religious
orthodoxy or pluralism, but to build a monopoly in the public square.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
2009 Julea Ward was dismissed from her counseling program at Eastern Michigan
University after she sought to refer rather than treat a potential client who
was seeking counseling about a homosexual relationship. The university’s
insistence that Ward needed “remediation” to help her abandon her beliefs about
homosexual behavior and act against her conscience led to her dismissal from
the program and resulted in a series of university and judicial hearings and
appeals. In January 2012, the United States Court of Appeals of the Sixth
Circuit<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn19" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[19]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
ruled in Ward’s favor and in June 2012, the Michigan House passed Bill 5040,
known as the Julea Ward Freedom of Conscience Act, prohibiting religious
discrimination against college students studying counseling, social work, or
psychology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
its review of ten social work education programs, the National Association of
Scholars found many examples of the coercion of student consciences,<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn20" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[20]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
legitimated by a constrictive and unwarranted reading of the NASW Code of
Ethics. The cases involved requiring students to advocate and lobby for
positions to which they were opposed in principle and as a matter of
conscience. Again and again, we find students coerced into a morally degrading
performance that requires public avowal of belief contrary to their own
convictions, conscience, and faith.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
issue of coercing the conscience of professionals in the health and helping
professions has come to the fore in recent years as a result of the discovery,
invention, or promulgation of new rights in matters of life and death, sex,
marriage, and family. Behaviors that were illegal or socially stigmatized for
millennia have been declared legal and become rights. </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This has
expanded the options for those who wish to engage in these behaviors. But what
is optional behavior for clients or patients rapidly becomes mandatory for
professionals in the form of participation or collusion in the newly permitted
behavior. An argument for tolerating certain behaviors has become a case for
intolerance – of those who refuse to be personally or professionally complicit
in them.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn21" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[21]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
more than two millennia, physicians have sworn by the Hippocratic Oath not to
engage or collude in practices like abortion, euthanasia, or assisted suicide.
In the wake of the egregious violations of the Hippocratic ethic by Nazi
physicians, the World Medical Association’s 1948 Physician’s Oath affirmed “I will
maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception, even
under threat.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn22" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[22]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
The legally binding United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the 1959 UN
Declaration of the Rights of the Child affirm the rights of the child before as
well as after birth.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn23" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[23]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>With
astonishing speed, legal protections of children before birth have been swept
away in both letter and spirit. UN officials have been attempting to pressure
sovereign member states to establish abortion as a legal right.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn24" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[24]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><sup>
</sup><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Far
from resisting these threats, professional associations have revised the
Hippocratic and other oaths to eliminate the prohibitions on killing – whether
through abortion, euthanasia, or assisted suicide. They have transformed their
own professional ethics from codes forbidding abortion and other
life-terminating measures to come close to making direct or indirect
participation in them a requirement of professional practice.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn25" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[25]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
recent years, the threat to conscience rights has widened beyond abortion and
the duties and conscience rights of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists to
areas in which social workers are more directly and routinely involved. Here I
focus on abortion because it is a key matter of conscience, involving as it
does the intentional taking of innocent human life and because, if the case for
conscience protection cannot be made in this case, it cannot be made anywhere.
I will argue that it is also a key matter of social justice, not only because
it disproportionately deprives of life the most vulnerable, girls, and
African-Americans, but also because it involves an attack on civil society, on
the structures that mediate between state and individual. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The attack on
religious liberty has become increasingly bold and blatant in recent years. The
HHS mandate requiring all employers, with narrow exceptions, to provide
“insurance” coverage of abortifacients (abortion pills), contraceptives, and
sterilization, threatens the religious freedom of all Catholic and many other
Christian employers and organizations. As I write, news is emerging that the
State of California is imposing, by regulatory fiat, the requirement that all
health insurance plans must provide coverage of elective abortion as part of
“basic health services,” a term it says it misinterpreted for 40 years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Now California’s
Department of Managed Health Care “has ordered all insurance plans in the state
to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not Plan B. Not
contraceptives. Elective surgical dismemberment abortion.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn26" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[26]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
This mandate appears to be, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Federalist</i> says, “</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">in blatant violation of federal law that specifically
prohibits California from discriminating against health care plans on the basis
that they do not cover abortion.”</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn27" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[27]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;"> What is remarkable is
that the State went ahead anyway and that major insurers like Kaiser Permanente
are complying with it. How those progressives will respond who, like the Obama
administration, claimed to support religious freedom but not Hobby Lobby
-because it is a for-profit corporation, not a religious employer, and in any
case Plan B was, not, they claimed, an abortifacient anyway – remains, at the
time of writing, to be seen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">3.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Conscience<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Among
the health and helping professions, social work stands out for its opposition
to conscience exemptions for its own members. More than two-thirds of
respondents in Sweifach’s study<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn28" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[28]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
believed that laws protecting some health care providers should not be extended
to social workers. In contrast, and despite ongoing attacks on conscience
exemptions within the professions, other fields give more weight to
professional judgment and discretion in choosing whom to serve and how to serve
them. The American Pharmacists Association recognizes an individual
pharmacist’s right to conscientious refusal.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn29" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[29]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
The AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics states that “[a] physician shall, in the
provision of appropriate patient care, except in emergencies, be free to choose
whom to serve.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn30" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[30]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
According to the American Nurses Association,<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn31" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[31]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
nurses have a right to refuse to participate in a procedure, but the
conscientious objection must apply to the procedure, not the patient. Lawyers
also assert the right to refuse representation in cases they consider morally
repugnant, though they seem not to have the right to exclude whole categories
of clients, such as men in divorce cases.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn32" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[32]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
social work, by contrast, the tendency is to address the conflict in ways
similar to that of the Eastern Michigan counseling program – treat or exclude
the practitioner. Tellingly, Sweifach cites the NASW code of ethics insistence
on the social worker’s primary responsibility to promote the well-being of
clients, as though the practitioner’s judgment of that matter were necessarily
subordinate to the client’s: “Commentators explain that when clients’ behaviors
and practices conflict with a social worker’s personal morals or religious
beliefs, the social worker may be in need of peer support, supervision, or
values clarification training to responsibly serve clients.”<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"> <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn33" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[33]<!--[endif]--></span></a></span></span>
Conscience is thus reduced to “personal values,” and the professional as moral
agent to a cipher.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
part, the failure of professional organizations like NASW to protect the
conscience rights of their members is justified by an implicit rejection or
belittling of the very concept of conscience as traditionally understood. In
its place we find a contrast of public (or professional) and personal “values.”
Here values have no intrinsic authority or foundation beyond being the
subjective opinions or beliefs of those who hold them. If this is so, then why
should the personal opinions (values) of a practitioner not be subordinated to
those of the state that licenses and funds the professional or institution? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Much
social work literature on the subject frames issues of conscience in this way,
as a conflict between personal and professional values. Sweifach gives several
examples from the literature as well as himself framing the issue of conscience
and conscientious objection in those terms.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn34" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[34]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
For example, Linzer (1999) suggests that “in conflicts between personal values
and professional values, the professional is duty-bound to uphold professional
values. Upholding professional values represents ethical action.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn35" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[35]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
According to this view, it is ethical, in these circumstances, to act against
your own conscience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
Christian social workers come under increasing pressure to cooperate with (what
they consider) evil in the name of professional duty, the question of
conscience becomes correspondingly urgent. Statements from NASW, its executive
director<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn36" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[36]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
and its Legal Defense Fund,<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn37" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[37]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
make it clear that their professional organization will not defend the
conscience rights of members when policies they support are involved. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Opponents
of conscience exemptions give little or no weight to the gravity of requiring
someone either a) to act against their conscience or b) to leave their
profession or be denied admission to it and hence to its schools. But the
choice to act against your conscience can never be right. It is to choose to do
what you believe to be wrong, and in the case of abortion, gravely wrong. For a
Christian, it means to put your immortal soul in jeopardy; for a Catholic
Christian, it means to excommunicate yourself from your Church and its
sacraments. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
its hotly disputed Opinion #385, entitled “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal
in Reproductive Medicine,” the Committee on Ethics of the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists takes the position that pro-life physicians
must refer patients seeking an abortion to other providers, must tell patients
in advance of their views though not explain or argue for them, and must in
emergency cases involving the patient’s physical or mental health, actually
perform abortions. It treats conscience as one value among others, which means
it can and should be overridden in the interest of other obligations that
outweigh it in a given circumstance. That is, not only the hospital or clinic,
but also the individual physician, is called upon to override the physician’s
conscience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
prevalent idea of conscience, implied by this opinion and most of the social
work literature, minimizes its claims by treating it as only one thing among
others that the practitioner must take into account in deciding how to act.
Conscience becomes a matter of personal values that must be left at the office
door when duty calls. At least, as it is put in one formulation, professional
duty trumps personal conscience. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
this account trivializes the very concept of conscience and renders it
incoherent. It runs counter to the traditional understanding of the term,
according to which conscience is the supreme and final arbiter for an
individual’s actions precisely because it represents the agent’s best ethical
judgment all things considered. All things here must include considerations of
what the agency or the state or professional codes of ethics tell us our duty
is. It could never be right to act against one’s own conscience. It is hard to
see how a notion of conscience as one value among others from which a
professional should choose could be other than incoherent. On what ethical
basis could such a choice be made? What is to be counted after everything has
been counted?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Not
only has the Nietzschean term “values” become a rhetorical device for
subjectivizing and relativizing moral discourse, but conscience itself has
become “the ghostly inner voice telling an individual what he or she should or
should not do.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn38" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[38]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
When conscience is conceptualized as a faculty of the individual, its claims
too readily become detached from judgments of practical reason about the right
thing to do. McCabe draws the contrast with the older Catholic tradition:
“Aquinas does use the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conscientia</i>,
but for him it is not a faculty or power which we exercise, nor a disposition
of any power, nor an innate moral code, but simply the judgment that we may
come to on a piece of our behavior in the light of various rational
considerations.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn39" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[39]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Conscience
in this view is not subjective opinion, a matter of autobiography, but involves
knowledge and judgment, and is thus open to rational inquiry. It is not a
conversation stopper, like the subjective preference for vanilla over chocolate
ice cream. As Moreland explains, “A person is said, then, to act in accord with
a good conscience with truthful knowledge, which, in turn, habituates one into
the cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, fortitude, and especially
prudence.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn40" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[40]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
For Aquinas and the Catholic tradition, conscience – applying the general
principles of practical reasonableness to specific circumstances – is closely
linked to the classical virtues (above all prudence) acquired by experience and
habituation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We
thus ought to follow our conscience not because it is a uniquely authoritative
autonomous inner voice but because it is, all things considered, our best
practical judgment of right action. It is a necessary but not sufficient
condition of acting well. As Anscombe puts it in her justly renowned critique
of “Modern Moral Philosophy,” “a man’s conscience may tell him to do the vilest
things.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn41" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[41]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Karl
Jaspers gave the example of a young German concentration camp guard he met in
hospital at the end of WWII – the man’s conscience tortured him still because
he let a Jewish boy escape instead of doing his duty of rounding him up and
sending him to the gas chamber.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn42" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[42]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Our conscience is our last defense against cooperating with evil in the name of
duty, but conscience can itself be wrong and direct us to do evil. We must both
follow our conscience in all matters and also form our conscience well by
following reliable authorities and the advice and models of prudent persons. As
Anscombe – in unpublished notes for a lecture – explains the dilemma,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If you act
against your conscience you are doing wrong because you are doing what you
think wrong, i.e., you are willing to do wrong. And if you act in accordance
with your conscience you are doing whatever is the wrong thing that your
conscience allows, or failing to carry out the obligation that your conscience
says is none. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There is a
way out, but you have to know that you need one and it may take time. The way
out is to find out that your conscience is a wrong one.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn43" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[43]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
social work and other health and helping professions, we do wrong both when we
act against our conscience and when we follow a badly formed conscience into
evil actions or failures to act, thinking they are good or morally neutral. The
wrong in the second case is not that we followed our conscience, but that we
failed to form our conscience correctly. We are obliged, as John Paul II says
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Veritatis Splendor </i>(1993), both to
inform our conscience and to follow it. We can be at fault at either stage. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">4.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Preferences
and Obligations<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Whether
conscience is treated as one factor among several to be taken into
consideration or as a subjective, non-rational inner guide or faculty, it
appears reasonable in either case to reject or minimize its claims in policy
and law, even when a religious motivation is claimed. For the late political
philosopher Brian Barry, conscientious objections based on religious belief are
simply preferences.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn44" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[44]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><sup>
</sup>He asks why some, namely religious, preferences should be privileged in
law or policy over others. Why should the state bend over backwards to
accommodate the preferences of a minority? Why should laws be crafted so that
individuals and their associations will never be unnecessarily coerced into
violating their consciences? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
Melissa Moschella summarizes the argument (that she proceeds to rebut) advanced
by the editors of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New York Times </i>and
many others, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[O]pposition
to the [HHS] mandate seems like an attempt to impose Catholic views about
contraception on the rest of the society, or an unjustified request for special
treatment. Why should a minority of Catholics ... determine public policy for
the entire country? Yes, the government could provide free access to
contraceptives without conscripting employers to do it for them through their
health plans, but why should we bend over backwards to adapt our policies to
the religious or moral sensibilities of a minority?<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn45" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[45]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No
one claims that the conscience of a given individual or group always trumps
other considerations in policymaking. A conscience, even one that is shaped by
binding religious obligation, may be badly formed and contrary to moral truth,
as when a religion requires its members to offer human sacrifice or kill
nonbelievers. In those cases, the common good requires that such believers be
coerced into violating their consciences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
the moral integrity of persons is itself constitutive of the common good.
Absent an absolute necessity to coerce the consciences of some in order to
protect public order and the rights of others, the common good also requires
respecting the claims of conscience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
blurring of the distinction between preferences and obligations is one aspect
of the trivialization of conscience in much discussion on these issues. As
Moschella argues, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[T]here is
a world of difference between a law that makes me do something I don’t want to
do, and a law that makes me do something I have an obligation not to do.
The former is an annoyance, the latter an assault on my moral integrity. I may
not want to follow the speed limit, but that doesn’t give me a claim
to be exempted from the law. On the other hand, if I believe that killing
animals is morally wrong, no law should force me to serve meat in my business’s
cafeteria, or give my employees gift certificates to a steakhouse, even if
encouraging people to eat more high-protein foods would promote public health.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn46" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[46]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Here we might add that there is also an
important difference between my deciding whether or not to meet my religious
obligation to attend Mass on Sundays or have my sons circumcised and the
state’s compelling me to do or not to do so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
Moschella argues, “laws that forbid individuals to act in accordance with the
dictates of their consciences place a burden on those individuals that differs
not only in degree, but in kind, from the sort of burden involved in forbidding
someone to act in accordance with mere preferences, however strong.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn47" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[47]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Such laws distribute the burdens and social benefits of social cooperation
unequally. It is a difference in kind of burden imposed, not merely one of
degree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We
may see this by looking at the notorious precedent created by Antiochus IV
Epiphanes in the second century B.C. The tyrant required his Jewish subjects to
eat pork and food sacrificed to idols and not to perform circumcisions. Those
who refused to violate their consciences in this way “were to be broken on the
wheel and killed.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn48" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[48]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
The edict imposed a radically different burden on observant Jews than on
others. It was a gratuitous act of forced submission, a brutal assertion of
secular power against a people of faith. As Paulsen puts it, the story remains
“a remarkable two-thousand-year-old parable about tyranny and conscience, about
cram-downs, accommodations, deception, and adherence to principle.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn49" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[49]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Like the HHS mandate, it was an unnecessary cram-down, a case of a government
insisting “on vindicating its authority and overriding religious conscience for
its own sake – purely for the symbolism of power prevailing over conscience.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Conscience’s
sources lie outside ourselves, in communities and families that form them. Its
claims are intersubjective and accessible in ways that personal preferences
(say, for vanilla over chocolate ice cream) are not.</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn50" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[50]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">5.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Redefining
Religion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An
important element of the current assault on religious freedom is the
administration’s effort to redefine the place of religion in public life by
reducing religious freedom to freedom of worship. The HHS mandate promotes a
false but prevalent idea of religion as a private and marginal activity, the
practice of which involves only co-religionists. Thus the state takes it upon
itself to redefine religion, and to do so in ways that exclude essential
elements of Christianity and other universal religions from their beginnings.
The mandate’s exemption covers only religious organizations that have a
religious function as defined by the state and that serve primarily
co-religionists. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>From
this perspective, put bluntly by the British Equality and Human Rights
Commission Chief, Trevor Phillips, religious beliefs end “at the door of the
temple.” For Catholic Christianity, the duty to evangelize non-Christians and
to serve the poor, sick, homeless, prisoners, widows and orphans – both
Christians and non-Christians – is not an optional add-on to the free exercise
of religious faith. It has been a corporate, not just individual,
responsibility of the Church from the very beginnings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Conscience and Duty<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
argument against conscience exemptions for health care and social service
professionals (physicians, nurses, social workers) is typically framed as a
conflict between an individual’s (or institution’s) right to decide what
services or treatment it will provide and patients’ rights to treatment, which
are said to imply a duty to treat. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
client’s right to treatment, to a full range of services, may be linked to
professionals’ willingness to provide them, especially in rural areas. As the
chair of the ethics committee of the American College of Obstetrics and
Gynecology put it, the “reproductive health needs” of women should trump the
moral qualms of doctors.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn51" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[51]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
(Here I leave aside the tendentious way in which advocates of abortion,
contraception, and sterilization – where these are not medically indicated –
describe these interventions as part of “reproductive health care,” although
they are anti-reproductive, seldom have anything to do with the health of
either mother or child, and in the case of abortion involve by definition not
care but killing one of the patients.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
this discourse, the personal is contrasted with the professional, the idea
being that a professional has a duty to provide whatever services are legal and
demanded by clients. The conscience of the professional is invariably given
short shrift and subordinated to the supposed rights of the client to
treatment. I say “supposed” because it is not clear how the legal right to have
an abortion, for example, in itself gives anyone a legal right to demand its
provision, let alone legally obliging anyone else to carry it out or pay for
it. In a shift characteristic of contemporary rights discourse, a right to
freedom from state interference (a “right to privacy”) is transformed into a
claim on public provision.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn52" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[52]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
response to the conflict between conscience and the newly defined duties
supported by the new moral orthodoxy is to say fine, if you cannot in
conscience meet the expectations and duties of the profession, leave it or
choose a different line of work. This may indeed be the only option facing
conscientious individuals where no accommodation is made. Conscience also
trumps career.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Exclusion
from their professions of physicians, nurses, social workers, and pharmacists
who adhere to the traditional Judeo-Christian religious orthodoxy and the
closing down of institutions that respect life and adhere to Hippocratic ethics
has practical consequences. But my argument here against exclusion does not
depend on the empirical reality that religious professionals and institutions –
for example, Catholic and other Christian physicians, nurses, social workers,
and pharmacists as well as hospitals and clinics – play an important role in
the American health care system. Their exclusion would involve a tremendous
loss of talent, knowledge, skill, aptitude, and dedication for the healing
professions. It would also substantially reduce health care, child welfare, and
social services of all kinds and therefore the access of patients and clients
to such services. The argument here, rather, is that the coercion of conscience
of professional health care and social work providers is morally corrupting for
the profession concerned and its practitioners and damaging to civil society. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is a sharp difference between allowing and requiring the professional
participation of members. Mandating such practices pressures those members who
adhere to religious orthodoxy into morally degrading performances, professing
and acting on beliefs contrary to those they hold as a condition of entering or
remaining in their chosen profession. This is corrupting for the profession
that requires such violations of conscience and for those who submit to them.
The moral integrity of persons, and so of its associations and their members,
is itself constitutive of “human and community well-being,”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn53" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[53]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
the promotion of which social work claims as its purpose. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">7.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Moral Agency of the Practitioner<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
idea that if an action is legally permissible and demanded by a client, the
social worker (or other health professional) has the duty to provide or
participate in providing the requested service itself represents a fundamental
shift in the balance of rights and powers between professional and client. It
strips the professional of her full moral responsibility and reduces her to a
kind of machine or robot that delivers what the customer demands. The
professional’s right and duty to use her judgment about what is required or
indicated or morally permissible in the situation is stripped away in favor of
a kind of client “empowerment” that radically disempowers, even dehumanizes the
professional. The practitioner is reduced to a kind of vending machine, like
those increasingly found in college dormitories with the function of dispensing
contraceptives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Opponents
of conscience clauses and exemptions sometimes pose the matter in terms of the
desire by professionals who are religious to impose their personal views or
morality on clients or patients. This is a misunderstanding. None of the case
for conscience exemptions has anything to do with imposing my will on the
client. Patients and clients have an uncontested moral right to informed
consent and informed refusal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
this is not the issue. The client may find abortion morally permissible and it
is certainly legally permissible at present in the United States. I respect the
client’s right under law to decide to have an abortion and will not condemn,
moralize, or argue with her. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My
right not to participate in what I believe is grave wrongdoing does not imply
or depend on a right to impose my belief on the client. “Conscientious
objection,” as Pellegrino says, “implies the physician’s right not to
participate in what she thinks morally wrong, even if the patient demands it.
It does not presume the right to impose her will or conception of the good on
the patient.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn54" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[54]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
question whether someone’s right to engage in a behavior entails an obligation
on anyone else’s part to assist her in the process has important implications
for all professionals, but especially those supposed to be helping or healing
their clients. For any professional from any faith tradition or none, such a
legally mandated obligation is a serious threat to their conscience and as
such, to their humanity as moral agents. The issue, which applies to lawyers
and physicians no less than social workers, is only in part whether a
professional is obliged to treat or serve anyone who seeks her services.
Harpaz, discussing the 1997 ruling of the Massachusetts Commission Against
Discrimination (“MCAD”) that a woman lawyer could not refuse to represent men
in divorce actions under the state’s public accommodation statute, shows that
the issue of compelled service or representation is not simple or confined to
the health and helping professions.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn55" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[55]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
social workers, as for priests, it is common to serve clients whose behavior
the practitioner finds morally repugnant. The challenge to conscience arises
not from the requirement to serve – or not to discriminate against – a
particular kind of client, but from the expectation in certain cases that
practitioners will act against their own judgment and collude or participate in
what the practitioner determines is wrong or harmful, or simply because the
client demands it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
question is wrongly put in the form of whose conscience counts, the client’s or
the professional’s. No one can be bound by someone else’s conscience. The
professional remains a moral agent, not a robot or vending machine, and so is
responsible for following his or her own practical judgment about what is the
right thing to do, all things (including the client’s wishes) considered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Licensing and Professionalism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Another
aspect of the opposition to conscience exemptions is a novel view of
professional licensing, one that further squeezes the scope of civil society,
the social space between individual and state. In this view licensing,
traditionally justified in terms of protecting the public by ensuring the
competence of practitioners, becomes a process whereby professionals are
transformed into public officials. If the state decides to recognize same-sex
marriage, then its public officials – for example, those who issue marriage
licenses – are bound to issue those licenses to whomever the state decides is
now qualified under its rules. Licensing of professionals, insofar as it
transforms the practitioner into a public official obliged to do the state’s
bidding, in effect becomes a process, not of safeguarding professional
discretion while protecting the public, but of deprofessionalization. Social workers,
among the least secure in their professional status, are to that very extent
less inclined to defend the scope and legitimacy of their own professional
judgment and discretion against tendencies to subordinate them to
bureaucratic-state or client demands. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is an analogous process through which the state, by providing most of the
funding of voluntary social service agencies like Catholic Charities, turns
them into agents of the state. Far from being a strength of civil society, of
an institutional pluralism that protects the structures that mediate between
state and individual, such agencies become vehicles for increasing the reach of
the state. Rather than allowing for alternative visions of the common good in
the associations that people with differing religious and moral commitments
build over generations, the state weakens civil society and becomes absolute
sovereign of all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Social Justice, Civil Society, and the
State<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
coercion of Christian consciences, then, is a threat not only to individual
practitioners but also to the institutional pluralism that lies at the heart of
subsidiarity, social justice, and American democracy. From this perspective, it
is wrong to reduce matters of conscience to the state’s protection of
individual rights, whether of consumer against provider, or professional
against employer. Conscience is not simply a matter of individual rights or
individual autonomy vis-à-vis the state and civil society. It is inherently
relational. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
case for the relational dimension of conscience, in contrast to an emphasis on
individualist rights talk and on the autonomous self, is persuasively made by
Vischer, who seeks to recapture the concept of conscience as shared knowledge.
He argues,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There is a
clear need to recapture the relational dimension of conscience – the notion
that the dictates of conscience are defined, articulated, and lived out in
relationship with others. Our consciences are shaped externally, our moral
convictions have sources, and our sense of self comes into relief through
interaction with others. By conveying my perception of reality’s normative
implications, my conscience makes truth claims that possess authority over
conduct – both my own and the conduct of those who share, or come to share, my
perception.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn56" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[56]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<br /></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This argument has at least two important
implications. First conscience is not simply an internal oracle, with only
biographical interest, like a preference in ice cream flavors. It implies
shared knowledge and truth claims about right action. And it binds those who
share that knowledge and accept those truth claims. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
shaping of our consciences is a matter neither of individual nor state, but of
the subsidiary associational life that mediates between them, especially church
and family. These are sources of conscience formation, communities of
discernment, and venues for expression. “When the state closes down avenues by
which persons live out their core beliefs – and admittedly, some avenues must
be closed if peaceful coexistence is to be possible – there is a cost to the
continued vitality of conscience.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn57" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[57]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
this respect, Catholic social teaching offers a sharp contrast to the Hobbesian
picture, in which “the sovereignty of Leviathan is absolute, so subsidiary
units of the social order – churches, groups, smaller units of government –
exist merely at the sufferance of the sovereign.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn58" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[58]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the current attack on religious freedom and conscience, we see the relentless
imposition of a new state orthodoxy and a growing intolerance of dissent on the
part of subsidiary associations – even, in Canada, imposing the new sexual
morality on the curricula of private religious schools and homeschooling
families.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
issue of conscience, then, needs to be understood not only in terms of the
rights of individuals, who must look to the state for relief or protection, but
also and especially in terms of the scope for a rich associational life that
subsists in tension with both individual and state. A commitment to freedom of
conscience, properly understood, “should underlie our legal system’s reluctance
to restrict the independence of the myriad associations that make up the vast
space between person and state.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftn59" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[59]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="BodyA">
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<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"> This is an expanded version of the
paper delivered at the annual convention of the North American Association of
Christian Social Workers, Annapolis, MD, November 6-9, 2014. It draws
substantially on the chapter on conscience in the forthcoming book by Paul
Adams & Michael Novak,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Social
Justice: What It Is, What It Isn’t</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> See
Robert P. George, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Clash of
Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis</i> (Wilmington, Del.: ISI
Books, 2002); and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conscience and Its
Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism</i> (Wilmington, Del.:
ISI Books, 2013).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> See,
for example, the blogsite <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Medicine and Social
Justice </i></span><a href="http://medicinesocialjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/conscience-clauses-have-become.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://medicinesocialjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/conscience-clauses-have-become.html</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> See
Stephen L. Darwall, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Second-Person
Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability</i> (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2006); Joseph Ratzinger, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On Conscience </i>(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007); Charles
Taylor, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sources of the Self</i>
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robert K. Vischer, <i>Conscience
and the Common Good: Reclaiming the Space Between Person and State </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">(</span>New York: Cambridge University
Press. 2009).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Thomas Patrick Burke, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Social Justice: Is It Just?</i> London &
New York, Continuum Publishing Group, 2011.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;">City of New York City,
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Office of Vital Statistics, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Summary of Vital Statistics 2012 City of New
York, Pregnancy Outcomes.</i></span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/sites/default/files/documents/Pregnancy%20Outcomes%20%20NYC%20Health%202012.pdf"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.cnsnews.com/sites/default/files/documents/Pregnancy
Outcomes<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NYC Health 2012.pdf</span></a></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"> CNS News, February 25, 2014 (</span><a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/mississippi-72-babies-aborted-are-black"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">http://cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/mississippi-72-babies-aborted-are-black</span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;">), citing CDC data at http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/Abortion.htm<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"> C. Dehlendorf, L.H. Harris, &
T.A. Weitz, “</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Disparities
in abortion rates: a public health approach,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Journal of Public Health</i>, 103 (10), October 2013.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="FootnoteText1">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-ansi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">See
George A. Akerlof, Janet L. Yellen, & Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of
Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States, Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 111, n. 2 (May 1996): 277-317. George A. Akerlof, “Men Without
Children,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Economic Journal, Royal
Economic Society</i> 108, n. 447 (March 1998): 287-309; </span><span style="color: #151515; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Alexandra Killewald,
“Reconsiderations of the Fatherhood Premium: Marriage, Coresidence, Biology,
and Fathers’ Wages,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Sociological Review</i> 78, n. 1 (February 2013): 96-116; Alexandra Killewald
and Margaret Gough, “Does Specialization Explain Marriage Penalties and
Premiums?”, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Sociological Review</i>
78, n. 3 (June 2013): 477-502; and also Nicholas W. Townsend, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Package Deal: Marriage, Work, and
Fatherhood in Men’s Lives</i> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). See
also the resources and data supporting the video on The Economics of Sex, at
the Austin Institute for the Study of Family & Culture, <a href="http://www.austin-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/V10-Resource-Guide.pdf">http://www.austin-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/V10-Resource-Guide.pdf</a>.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="FootnoteText1">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></span></span></sup></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #151515; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">Alasdair MacIntyre, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues</i>
(Chicago: Open Court, 1999).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="FootnoteText1">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></span></span></sup></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Edward Feser, “Social Justice
Reconsidered: Austrian Economics and Catholic Social Teaching” (Hayek Memorial
Lecture delivered at the 2005 Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn, Alabama),
accessed December 5, 2013: </span><a href="http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/socialjustice.html"><span style="color: #000099; font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/socialjustice.html</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="FootnoteText1">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]--></span></span></sup></a><span lang="ES" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: ES;"> Thomas
Aquinas, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Summa Theologiae</i> II-II, q.
58, a. 1.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="FootnoteText1">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]--></span></span></sup></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Feser, “Social Justice Reconsidered.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="FootnoteText1">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]--></span></span></sup></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Paul Adams & Michael Novak, Social
Justice: What It Is, What It Isn’t (forthcoming); Michael Novak, “Defining
Social Justice,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">First Things</i>
(December 2000). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Robert
K. Vischer, “The Progressive Case for Conscience Protection,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Public Discourse</i> (March 9, 2011),
accessed March 18, 2014: </span><a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/03/2915/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/03/2915/</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Ibid.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> See,
for example, E. Clark, “Spring, and Danger, in the Air,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">NASW News</i> 57, n. 5 (May 2012); NASW Legal Defense Fund, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Social Workers and Conscience Clauses</i>
(Washington, D.C.: National Association of Social Workers, 2010). </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
George, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Clash of Orthodoxies</i>.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[19]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="FR">Ward
v. Polite et al</span></i><span lang="FR">. </span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">See </span><a href="http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0024p-06.pdf"><span style="color: #000089; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0024p-06.pdf</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[20]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
National Association of Scholars, “The Scandal of Social Work Education”
(2007), accessed March 18, 2014: </span><span style="mso-field-code: "HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.nas\.org\/articles\/The_Scandal_of_Social_Work_Education\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022";"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.nas.org/articles/The_Scandal_of_Social_Work_Education</span></span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[21]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> George
Cardinal Pell, “Intolerant Tolerance,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">First
Things</i> (August/September 2009), accessed March 18, 2014: </span><span style="mso-field-code: "HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.firstthings\.com\/article\/2009\/08\/intolerant-tolerance\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022";"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/08/intolerant-tolerance</span></span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[22]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
World Medical Association, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Declaration of
Geneva Physician’s Oath</i> (1948), accessed March 18, 2014: <span style="mso-field-code: "HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.cirp\.org\/library\/ethics\/geneva\/\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022";"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-family: Times;">http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/geneva/</span></span></span><span style="color: blue;">. </span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[23]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> R.
Joseph, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Human Rights and the Unborn Child
</i>(Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2009).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[24]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> P.A.
Tozzi, “Vatican Tells United Nations to Quit Pressuring Countries to Legalize
Abortion,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">LifeNews</i> (<span class="aqj">November
28, 2008</span>), accessed March 18, 2014: </span><span style="mso-field-code: "HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.lifenews\.com\/int1003\.html\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022";"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.lifenews.com/int1003.html</span></span></span><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[25]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists [ACOG], “The Limits of
Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine,” ACOG Committee Opinion, n. 385
(November 2007); Christopher Kaczor, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thomas
Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love: Edited and Explained for Everyone </i>(Ave
Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2008).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Lucida Grande";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[26]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Casey Mattox,
California Orders Churches to Fund Abortions—Or Else,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Federalist</i>, October 22, 2014, </span><a href="http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/22/california-orders-churches-to-fund-abortions-or-else/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/22/california-orders-churches-to-fund-abortions-or-else/</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[27]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[28]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> J.
Sweifach, “Conscientious Objection in Social Work: Rights vs.
Responsibilities,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of Social Work
Values & Ethics</i> 8, n. 2 (2011).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn29" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[29]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
American Pharmacists Association, “Code of Ethics for Pharmacists” (1994),
accessed March 18, 2014: </span><a href="http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #000089; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.pharmacist.com/code-ethics</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn30" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[30]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
American Medical Association, “Code of Medical Ethics” (2012), accessed March
18, 2014: </span><a href="http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #000089; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics.page?</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn31" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[31]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
American Nurses Association, “Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive
Statements (Silver Spring, Md.: American Nurses Publishing, 2001), accessed
March 18, 2014: </span><a href="http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #000089; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/EthicsStandards/CodeofEthicsforNurses/Code-of-Ethics.pdf</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn32" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[32]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> L.
Harpaz, “Compelled Lawyer Representation and the Free Speech Rights of
Attorneys,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Western New England Law
Review</i> 20, n. 20 (1998): 49-72, accessed March 18, 2014: </span><a href="http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1247&context=lawreview"><span style="color: #000089; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1247&context=lawreview</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn33" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[33]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Sweifach, “Conscientious Objection in Social Work.”</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn34" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[34]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Ibid.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn35" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[35]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> N.
Linzer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Resolving Ethical Dilemmas in
Social Work Practice</i> (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999), 28.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn36" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[36]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Clark,
“Spring, and Danger, in the Air.” </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn37" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[37]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> NASW
Legal Defense Fund, “Social Workers and Conscience Clauses.”</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn38" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[38]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> M. P.
Moreland, “Practical Reason and Subsidiarity: Response to Robert K. Vischer,
Conscience and the Common Good,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal
of Catholic Legal Studies</i> 49, n. 2 (2011): 320, accessed March 18, 2014: </span><a href="http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #000089; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.stjohns.edu/academics/graduate/law/journals_activities/catholiclegalstudies/issue/49_2</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn39" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[39]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Herbert McCabe, “<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Aquinas on Good
Sense,”<i> New Blackfriars </i>67, n. 798 (October 1986), quoted in More</span>land,
“Practical Reason and Subsidiarity,” 322.</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn40" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[40]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Moreland, “Practical Reason and Subsidiarity,” 322.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn41" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[41]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe</i>, ed.
Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic, 2005), 170.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn42" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[42]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> See M. Pakaluk and M. Cheffers, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Accounting Ethics . . . and the Near Collapse of the World’s Financial
System</i> (Sutton, Mass.: Allen David Press, 2011).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn43" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[43]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Elizabeth Anscombe, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Human Life, Action
and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe</i>, 241.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn44" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[44]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> See
Brian Barry, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Culture and Equality: An
Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism </i>(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2001).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn45" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[45]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Melissa Moschella, “Taking (Conscience) Rights Seriously,” <i>Public Discourse</i>
(June 11, 2012), accessed March 18, 2014: </span><span style="mso-field-code: "HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.thepublicdiscourse\.com\/2012\/06\/5603\/\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022";"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/06/5603/</span></span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn46" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[46]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Ibid.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn47" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[47]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Ibid.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn48" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[48]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> 4
Maccabees 5:3.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn49" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[49]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Michael Stokes Paulsen, “Obama’s Contraception Cram-down: The Pork Precedent,” <i>Public
Discourse</i> (February 21, 2012), accessed March 18, 2014: </span><span style="mso-field-code: "HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.thepublicdiscourse\.com\/2012\/02\/4777\/\0022 \\l \0022sthash\.gbY3yEUM\.dpuf\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022";"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4777/#sthash.gbY3yEUM.dpuf</span></span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn50" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[50]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Vischer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conscience and the Common Good</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn51" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[51]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
“Last-Minute Conscience Rule Grants Protection to Abortion Objectors,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bioedge</i> (January 2, 2009), accessed
March 18, 2014: </span><a href="http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8433"><span style="color: #000089; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8433</span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn52" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[52]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> See
Hadley Arkes, <i>Natural Rights and the Right to Choose </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">(</span>Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn53" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[53]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Council on Social Work Education, “Educational Policy and Accreditation
Standards.”</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn54" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[54]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Edmund
Pellegrino, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Philosophy of Medicine
Reborn: A Pellegrino Reader</i>, ed. H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. and F. Jotterand
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 299.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn55" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[55]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Harpaz, “Compelled Lawyer Representation and the Free Speech Rights of
Attorneys.”</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn56" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[56]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Robert
K. Vischer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conscience and the Common
Good</i>, 3.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn57" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[57]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Ibid.,
4.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn58" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[58]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Moreland, “Practical Reason and Subsidiarity,” 325.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#_ftnref" name="_ftn59" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[59]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Vischer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conscience and the Common Good</i>,
4.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-83876535994757780032014-10-13T13:27:00.001-04:002014-10-13T19:42:10.322-04:00Ruthless Misogyny: Exploiting and Erasing Women<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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LGBT activists have a range of strategies for discrediting women who question their goals. </div>
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<a class="navLink1" href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/Rivka_Edelman" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: small;">Rivka Edelman</span></a><span style="font-size: 12px;"> | 13 October 2014</span></div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">- See more at: <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/ruthless_misogyny#sthash.IgeqOLBl.dpuf">http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/ruthless_misogyny#sthash.IgeqOLBl.dpuf</a></span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Janna Darnelle’s recent essay, “<a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/breaking_the_silence_redefining_marriage_hurts_women_like_me_and_our" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">Breaking the Silence: Redefining Marriage Hurts Women Like Me—and Our Children</a>,” reveals what is behind the heartwarming pictures of gay families from a mother’s point of view. As someone who was raised by a lesbian mother, I would like to weigh in. I will comment not only as a former child who was once all smiles in those pictures, but also as an academic, a woman, a mother, and a feminist.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Darnelle’s essay struck a nerve and went viral. It is not surprising that, within a few hours, LGBT activists had taken up arms against her. Keyboard warriors manned the ramparts. Soon, the usual thugs took up their clubs and pitchforks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For those of you who avoid the subterranean landscape of online same-sex parenting debates, it is useful to be introduced to Scott “Rose” Rosenzweig, a virulently misogynistic LGBT activist. As soon as Darnelle’s essay was published, Rose went into action, darting from the blog <a href="http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2014/09/gay-man-realizes-he-shouldnt-have-entered-an-opposite-sex-unionso-no-same-sex-marriage-for-anyone.html" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Good As You"><em>Good As You</em></a> to <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2014/09/has-gay-marriage-harmed-this-writer-and-her-children.html" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="other sites">other sites</a> in <a href="http://www.slowlyboiledfrog.com/2014/09/witherspoons-latest-victim-claims-that.html?m=1" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="an effort">an effort</a> to destroy her personally. (Rose’s obsessive internet commenting has attracted attention at <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2008/05/a_scott_rose_by_any_other_name.html" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="other news outlets">other news outlets</a> as well.) Darnelle’s ex-husband even weighed in. A helpful fellow, he left her personal information in the comments section of several activists’ blogs, including her full legal name.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Janna Darnelle wrote under a pen name in order to protect her family. Unfortunately, her ex-husband’s comments helped Scott Rose embark on a campaign of harassment and intimidation. As I will discuss below, Rose was not content to confine his character assassination to the internet; he has also contacted Darnelle’s employer in an attempt to get her fired.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Readers will recall that Darnelle’s essay discusses her divorce from her ex-husband and her struggles as a single mother to provide a sense of family. Although her conclusions are controversial, her story is well-written and articulate. Sadly, the hate-driven response from extremist LGBT activists and bloggers confirms what many women are beginning to realize. While these activists laud the ex-husband for “living his truth,” they hold women and children in such contempt that they refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Janna’s account of her difficult experiences as a mother. Although they purport to represent the disadvantaged, certain wings of the LGBT-rights movement function as all-white men’s rights groups. In our contemporary climate, these men are allowed to do great harm to women and children with impunity.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Erasing and Exploiting Women</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">On the most superficial level, what Darnelle described could have parallels in a heterosexual divorce. In most cases, a woman’s standard of living drops significantly after a divorce, while men’s goes up significantly. So, in that sense, there was nothing surprising in Janna’s story: the judge favored the husband, who had a steady high income.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The bloggers and activists who comment at <a href="http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2014/09/gay-man-realizes-he-shouldnt-have-entered-an-opposite-sex-unionso-no-same-sex-marriage-for-anyone.html" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Jeremy Hooper’s Good as You blog">Jeremy Hooper’s <em>Good as You</em> blog</a> have used this judge’s decision to suggest that Darnelle was an unfit mother. Darnelle’s piece did not give details about the family’s custody arrangement, but I have confirmed that the mother has 60 percent custody of the children. This indicates that she has not been found to be “unfit” in any way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The “unfit mother” trope is very important, because it helps justify taking women’s children, eggs, or the use of their uteri. Darnelle is right. Many families headed by gay male couples are built upon exploitation of women. Practically speaking, Scott Rose and his compatriots have formed a men’s rights group that seeks to use women as breeders. These egg donors and surrogate mothers supply infants for a bustling market full of same-sex couples, for whom reproduction is naturally and biologically impossible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In the name of equality, groups such as <a href="http://www.glaad.org/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="GLAAD">GLAAD</a> (which employs <a href="http://www.glaad.org/blog/jeremy-hooper-named-advocates-40-under-40-list" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Jeremy Hooper">Jeremy Hooper</a> as a consultant) have pushed through gender identity laws that have legally erased women. The term “woman” now legally can refer to the way that a man chooses to identify himself. Once women have been erased legally as a group and as individuals, it is not hard to erase “mothers.” This lends support to the practice of using one woman’s eggs and another woman’s womb to supply children for gay male couples, obscuring the concept of motherhood and making it seem dispensable.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A Guide to the Playbook of Extreme LGBT Activists</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The publication of Janna Darnelle’s story led to a spate of blog posts full of vitriol, calling her “<a href="http://www.slowlyboiledfrog.com/2014/09/witherspoons-latest-victim-claims-that.html" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="a pitiful creature">a pitiful creature</a>,” accusing her of mental instability, and questioning her very existence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">With the help of her husband’s comments, Scott Rose set off to dig up and publicize as much personal information as possible about Darnelle, such as high school graduation and real estate records. Rose has harassed Darnelle with threatening messages. He has even contacted Darnelle’s employer, leaving this message on the company’s Facebook page:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is a COMPLAINT against […], an executive assistant in […]. Under the nom de plume of “Janna Darnelle,” […] has published a horrifying, defamatory anti-gay screed on the website “Public Discourse.” The first problem would be that she is creating a climate of hostility for eventual gay elders and/or their visiting friends and relatives. The second problem would be that in the screed, she comes off as being unhinged. Her public expressions of gay-bashing bigotry are reflecting very poorly on LLC.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sadly, all of this conforms to a predictable pattern of attack. If you study the routine that plays out whenever extreme activists like Scott Rose decide to take someone out, you will see seasoned patterns. Four steps comprise their usual character assassination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">First, they call the individual a liar and say the person’s existence cannot be verified without more data about him or her. Second, once they have such data, they write to the person’s employer to get him or her fired or professionally destroyed. Third, if they cannot get the person fired, they go after the family members. Fourth, if they cannot turn the person’s family against him or her, they blast endless broadsides against the person, trying to make him or her feel afraid or unsafe at all times.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">They have a bag of rhetorical tricks as well. Learn these.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>Soft derails</strong>: “What about straight divorces, adoptions, and blended families?” Such asides are meant to distract and create false equivalencies. The fact is, every single family headed by a gay male couple had to take another person’s child. In order to accept this, one must accept that men have the right to use women’s bodies and buy their children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>Shocking derails:</strong> “Look at all the bad parents that are heterosexual.” The existence of such parents, while tragic, does not give men the right to harvest eggs from women, to use them as breeders, or to take their babies and children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>Appeal to emotion:</strong> “We want children; what should we do?” This tries to make people feel guilty or shame them into handing over poor women to be used by rich men. My response: I have not asked you to solve my problems, have I? You can’t demand society legislate a special subclass of women to be<a href="http://breeders.cbc-network.org/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="used explicitly as breeders">used explicitly as breeders</a> so you can feel happy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>Born this way biology:</strong> “Do not live a lie; be true to yourself.” This tactic becomes another erasure of women. In this scheme, we are asked to accept that men’s biology matters. A man who is attracted to other men could not possibly be asked to stay with his wife, because he is biologically fated to be attracted to other men’s bodies. Yet, simultaneously, we are told that women’s biology—especially their biological bonds with their children—are of no importance. Despite the scientific evidence of maternal and fetal bonding during pregnancy, and despite the long histories of women who have suffered lifelong grief because their babies were taken from them, we are expected to think of women as breed animals and to believe that men have the right to raise other people’s children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">You want to marry a man and you are a man? Society does not owe you women’s children, women’s eggs, or women’s bodies.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">They Can’t Silence Us Forever</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In writing this piece, I know that I risk being labeled a bigot. Like Janna Darnelle, I will probably have to endure a whole host of misogynistic terms. I’ll be called crazy, unhinged, laughable, bitter, fat, old, and ugly. In other words, I am just a woman who dares to say rich privileged white men do not have the right to women’s bodies and body parts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Male sexual pleasure has been a protected industry for both gay and heterosexual men for ages. By and large, the industry exploits women and children. Now we have a new industry: surrogacy, or the commercial-industrial uterus. How very progressive. And at the same time, how very old and predictable.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/ruthless_misogyny#sthash.IgeqOLBl.p0zFbouF.dpuf</span></div>
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<em>Rivka Edelman is a visiting professor of literature and writing. She has published widely under a different name. She is also a feminist, a children’s rights activist, and an active member in the network of adult children raised in LBGT households. This essay was originally published at <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/10/13867/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">Public Discourse</a> and has been republished with permission. </em></div>
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Incest and pornography: more similar than we think</h2>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-72067821634294115132014-09-25T08:57:00.000-04:002014-09-25T09:01:24.778-04:00How we justify a market in children<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Third-party reproduction inexorably leads to violations of human rights.</span></h1>
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<a class="navLink1" href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/Rickard_Newman" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">Rickard Newman</a> | 25 September 2014</div>
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<a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;"><img height="41" src="https://img.skitch.com/20120314-8xn6ydt9m97knf1a7uix2fg5y3.jpg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; vertical-align: middle;" width="490" /></a><br />
Third-party reproduction is a prism for violations against humanity. IVF and the sperm trade launched a wicked industry that now includes abortion, eugenics, human trafficking, and deliberate family fragmentation.<br />
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Last month, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/04/world/asia/thailand-australia-surrogacy/index.html?iref=allsearch" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="news">news</a> broke about an Australian couple that, after commissioning a Thai surrogate in the creation of twins, <em>left </em>the male twin in Thailand due to his diagnosis of Down syndrome. According to the surrogate mother, when they got the diagnosis, they wanted her to abort, but she refused, carrying the child to term and naming him Gammy. They also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anIzhkAMUmQ" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="demanded a refund">demanded a refund</a>. It has furthermore been revealed that the Australian father spent several years in jail for <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-10/baby-gammy-father-denies-threat-to-twin/5661242" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="twenty-two convictions of child sex offenses">22 convictions of child sex offenses</a>. The little girl, baby Gammy’s twin, is still in his care.<br />
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Later this fall, the UK’s Department of Health will be <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2714321/NHS-fund-sperm-bank-lesbians-New-generation-fatherless-families-paid-YOU.html" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="launching a national sperm bank">launching a national sperm bank</a> to “meet demand,” using £77,000 in public funds to effectively subsidize fatherlessness. British women can reduce their child’s father to the conveniently assorted drop-down menu categories of ethnicity, eye color, hair color and education level with just the click of a mouse.<br />
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The fertility industry and now legislators are saying “Love is all that matters” and that these children should be grateful that they are so “wanted.” With high rates of infertility and delayed parenthood, almost everyone knows someone who has suffered from involuntary childlessness. While sympathy is due to those who experience this painful struggle, the popular script that veils the inherent evil of third-party reproduction is based on three grave moral errors: materialism, relativism, and consequentialism.<br />
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<strong>Materialism: “I Have the Right to a Child”</strong><br />
If people are really just things, it is reasonable to assume that those who want the things will take good care of them, while those who <em>don’t </em>want the things are more likely to abuse or neglect them.<br />
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Say there is a very lucky teenager whose parents give him a car for his 16th birthday. The teenager is happy about it for a while, but soon enough he neglects to maintain it and wrecks it beyond repair through carelessness and irresponsible behavior. Another teen is not as lucky when it comes to cars. There are no relatives willing or able to bestow such a gift. This person wants a car more than anything else in the world, so he saves for years and even starts an online fundraising campaign to meet the price tag of the car. He proclaims his desire for this item and promises to always and forever take care of it.<br />
Which character do you feel is most entitled to the car and would be a better steward of such a valuable item? What if <a href="http://www.gofundme.com/mvc.php?route=search&term=surrogacy" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="we switch the car for a child">we switch the car for a child</a>?<br />
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Desire equals good stewardship, goes the logic, because it is often true in the context of <em>material things</em>. And when it is not, the worst thing that we end up with is a broken, abandoned <em>thing</em>. But things come from factories, and <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/02/11620/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" title="people come from other people">people come from other people</a>, specifically their mother and father by way of God’s generosity. Removing people from the source of their creation has severe consequences.<br />
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When the baby boomers put themselves and their children on the pill faster than they could say “birds and bees,” we inherited both the logic and the mindlessness of the pill. People invert the right <em>not</em> to have a child and conclude that there is also a right <em>to </em>have a child. The result is a marketplace for the commoditized human being. <a href="http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/07/07/sherri-shepherd-baby-surrogate-divorce-lamar-sally/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Disposable when unwanted, purchasable when desired.">Disposable when unwanted, purchasable when desired.</a><br />
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<strong>Relativism: Morality Defined by Desire and Intent</strong> <br />
We are asked to believe that no particular family structure is better than any other. In our culture, there is often not even an understanding of the principle and fact that <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201310/which-familial-reality-best-predicts-child-abuse" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="kids do best">kids do best</a> when raised by their <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/10/10996/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" title="married biological parents">married biological parents</a>.<br />
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Following Stockholm Pride week, I read an <a href="http://www.aftonbladet.se/ledare/ledarkronika/jonnasima/article19304463.ab" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="op-ed">op-ed</a> in one of Sweden’s most prominent media sources advocating the redefinition of parenthood. The article was written by a 33-year-old woman and reflects a growing view:<br />
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Today it is just the one who gives birth and accounts for the sperm, who is the child’s legal mother and father. The other parent must apply for adoption. It not only reflects an ancient view of parenthood, but also creates an unsafe situation for the new family.</blockquote>
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Children’s best interests must continue to be paramount. But why must there be a defining line of two parents? If more adults are prepared to take parental responsibility, it’s just something positive.</blockquote>
People are creating their own moral criteria. Five parents are better than two. Two rich dads are better than one single mom. One single mom who <em>really</em>wants a child is better than two biological parents accidentally getting pregnant. It is heartbreaking to hear women facing infertility justify their use of different reproductive services. <em>Egg donors don’t matter, it’s the woman who gives birth that is the real mother. Gestational carriers don’t matter, it’s the woman who passes on her genes who is the real mother. </em>Or more bravely, <em>neither the egg donor nor carrier matters, it’s the woman who raises the child alone who matters. </em>Collectively, motherhood itself is degraded.<br />
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To understand this mindset, we need to back up a little. People in their 20s and 30s witnessed the breakdown of the family firsthand. Their parents gave up on each other, opted out of marital and parental responsibilities, and left our generation hurt and confused about love. The new solution is that anybody who wants to be a parent should be allowed to be a parent. Intent conquers biology, desire triumphs over nature.<br />
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But what if donor-conceived people <a href="http://www.americanvalues.org/search/item.php?id=25" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="express">express</a> their feelings, <a href="http://anonymousus.org/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="share">share</a> their painful stories, and come to different conclusions? Shouldn’t their testimonies be a valuable guide? The counterargument is usually, “All children have problems growing up!” This is followed by an example of a child who grew up in a nuclear family who had issues, or somebody who grew up without a father who went on to become <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26379534" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="president">president</a>. Anecdotal exceptions puncture every moral principle. There is no absolute truth, our interlocutors imply, just opinions and different perspectives.<br />
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<strong>Consequentialism: The Ends Justify the Means</strong><br />
Yet most people will often admit a certain gut feeling telling them that third-party reproduction is not quite right. But since the noble goals are to remedy a type of suffering and to create healthy children, they are willing to look the other way.<br />
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And if concerns do surface, the born children are often used as human shields to block any potential criticism of the practices. Indeed, this year Louisiana’s Gary Smith gave state representatives photos of his two children born via surrogacy in an effort to <a href="http://theadvocate.com/home/8569329-125/surrogacy-debate-returns" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="prove the legitimacy">prove the legitimacy</a> of the practice and legalize commercial surrogacy in Louisiana. State reps who otherwise would have voted against the bill said, <em>how am I supposed to vote against Gary’s kids?</em><br />
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In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/10-Books-That-Screwed-World/dp/1596980559" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help"><em>10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help</em></a>, Benjamin Wiker concludes that modern Western history is full of people who have devoured humanity in an attempt to <em>save</em> humanity. In fact, the grander the vision and the more beautiful the goal appears, the greater the temptation is to do the most horrific things.<br />
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Marx, Hitler, and Margaret Sanger all dreamed of a world where mankind would be free from disease and social ills, but in their attempts to get there, millions suffered and died. Today, we overlook the abortive, eugenic, inhumane, and family-fragmenting effects of third-party reproduction, letting ourselves be dazzled by the images of smiling commercially conceived kids.<br />
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The utopian vision is a world in which the individual can have sex and babies with all the perks of pleasure and <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/03/4628/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" title="genetic immortality">genetic immortality</a> but without any risks or sacrifices. A world where individuals may defy nature itself whether limited by age, partner status, or sexual orientation, to have the perfect children of their choice.<br />
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How many more people must be sacrificed, physically and emotionally, before we understand that this utopia too is unachievable? Baby Gammy is not the first and will not be the last tragedy that results from a marketplace that buys and sells children.<br />
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<em>Rickard Newman is the Director of Family Life, Pro-Life & Child and Youth Protection in the Diocese of Lake Charles. He is also the Campaign Manager of </em><em><a href="http://anonymousus.org/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="The Anonymous Us Project.">The Anonymous Us Project.</a> This essay has been republished with permission from <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/08/13701/" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">Public Discourse</a>, a MercatorNet partner site. </em></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold;">MORE ON THESE TOPICS</span> | <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/tag/commodification+of+human+life" style="color: #333333; font-size: 0.8em; text-decoration: none;" title="commodification of human life">commodification of human life</a>, <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/tag/IVF" style="color: #333333; font-size: 0.8em; text-decoration: none;" title="IVF">IVF</a>, <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/tag/rights+of+the+child" style="color: #333333; font-size: 0.8em; text-decoration: none;" title="rights of the child">rights of the child</a>, <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/tag/surrogacy" style="color: #333333; font-size: 0.8em; text-decoration: none;" title="surrogacy">surrogacy</a></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-83371028432084018652014-08-26T16:31:00.000-04:002014-08-26T20:59:52.185-04:00Woody Allen and the Buffered Self - Fr. Robert Barron<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It was Samuel Johnson, in his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes," who used the phrase, "To point a moral or adorn a tale." D.H. Lawrence quoted the line and pointed out that often the (author's) moral pointed one way and the tale another (think of the famous example of Milton's Paradise Lost). "Never trust the author, trust the tale!" says Lawrence. Fr. Barron makes a similar point about Allen, his bleak vision, and his art: Don't trust the <i>auteur</i>, trust the film!<br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-44958346848516421512014-08-15T18:53:00.001-04:002014-08-15T20:26:31.035-04:00Aliens in Our Own Land: Persecution of Christians and Western Indifference - Dwayne Ryan Menezes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Can Christians ever be victims of genocide? asks Professor <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/08/forgetting-the-christians">Mark Movesesian over at First Things</a> magazine. Not only President Obama and his people, but also Condoleeza Rice and policy elites more widely seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the world's most persecuted major religion. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute reported that Rice's response to her attempts to draw the attention of the Bush Administration to the plight of Iraq's Christians was that assistance to Christians by the United States would appear sectarian. <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/edwest/2013/12/britains-refusal-to-defend-christians-in-the-middle-east-is-shameful/">Britain's failure </a>to defend the persecuted Christians in the Middle East has also been shameful.<br />
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When I posted a link to Movesesian's article on my Facebook page, my friend Dwayne Ryan Menezes, who is a director of the new London think tank, <a href="http://www.hscentre.org/">Human Security Centre</a> and head of its Religion and Politics division, responded with this deeply moving and personal comment. Dr. Menezes' research interests are in Christianity in the non-Western world and Christians from the non-Western world in the West. Here he tells a story, too little understood in the West, about the meaning for Christians in many lands beyond the West of the embarrassed silence of Christians in face of anti-Christian persecution. It is a hostile, politically correct multiculturalism that is as insensitive as possible to persecuted minorities where these do not fit the dominant narrative.<br />
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This postmodern secularist pose of Western elites approves of every culture but its own, and values, in the name of diversity, every religion except those at the heart of its own culture and civilization, Christianity and Judaism. What Dwayne experienced in India, where he was born into a Catholic family of Indo-Portuguese descent, was rejection as a living reminder of empire, an attitude mirrored in the post-Christian, anti-Christian West, where he and others like him saw no support. "All we saw was the post-Christian garb of the West, a cultural hemisphere where Christians had been crushed into silence, embarrassment or apathy."<br />
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Here are his observations:<br />
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<b>Aliens in Our Own Land: Persecution of Christians and Western Indifference</b></h2>
by Dwayne Ryan Menezes<br />
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The fear of 'appearing sectarian' or 'showing favouritism' is the poorest, the weakest and the most appalling excuse for not speaking up for a persecuted group in a distant land that happen to share your beliefs.<br />
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During the wave of intensified persecution of Christians in India in 2008, I had to head to Ottawa and Washington to get people to even listen to my concerns. It was only later - once the overseas Indian Christian diaspora was mobilised into action - that the West took some notice.<br />
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I shall never forget how despondent and frustrated I used to feel as the sole Christian in my school in India for 10 years. Throughout my childhood, you were accepted, but only to a point, and only so long as you surrendered to the expectations of the majority on the minority.<br />
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I shall never forget how it felt to be treated as an alien in one's own land, where I was expected to defend everything the West did as if being Christian made me its Ambassador, all while the same West appeared so removed from my plight, so beyond my reach, and so embarrassed and reluctant to come to my defence.<br />
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I will never forget the year 1999. I was 14 when the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two boys were burned alive by a mob of 50 or so in Manoharpur, Orissa, while they were sleeping in their vehicle. His two boys - Philip (10) and Timothy (6) - were only a few years younger than me. I saw them in my dreams that night, their little hands tapping the window of their locked vehicle, summoning me to do something.<br />
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I remember the pain and confusion I felt in my 14-year-old heart when I saw people celebrating their demise and warning other Christians that the same fate would befall them. I remember some of my best friends remarking scornfully the next day, "You've still gone back to school? Haven't you learnt a lesson? Why don't you go back to Rome or London or Lisbon, wherever it is that you come from?"<br />
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I would have left, had I happened to have come from any of those places, but what could I do as one born into a Roman Catholic family in India of Indo-Portuguese descent? The West didn't want me, if at all they knew "my kind" existed. The Indians didn't want me, for they saw "my kind", quite literally, as the last, but living, vestiges of the empire. There I was: an alien in every land, a stranger to every people.<br />
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Perhaps there were people (like yourself) and organisations (like Christian Solidarity Worldwide) then who did indeed stand up for Christians like me, but how was I - a child born in distant India - supposed to know? All we saw was the post-Christian garb of the West, a cultural hemisphere where Christians had been crushed into silence, embarrassment or apathy.<br />
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If you are born a Muslim in India, you can at least tap into some sort of transnational Muslim community that is visibly and vocally attentive to your concerns. If someone in Denmark publishes a cartoon that Muslims find offensive, Muslims in lands as far as India will rise up in uproar. There is a sense of collective honour and collective responsibility, at least within some transnational sectarian communities.<br />
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We must not stigmatise Muslims for their transnational and trans-ethnic solidarity; we must learn from their example. We must put Christian teachings into practice, see (and not just call) ourselves a global 'community of the faithful', have a sense of transnational solidarity and responsibility, and set a 'Christian' example of how to respond to the challenges the most vulnerable among us face: a response borne in dignity, peace, love and humility.</div>
Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-37495240026821927352014-08-13T07:54:00.003-04:002014-08-13T07:57:51.291-04:00Chinese State Theology: Caesaropapism Lives - in China<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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WEDNESDAY, 13 AUGUST 2014<br />
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<span style="color: black;"><b>Chinese State Theology</b></span></div>
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BY <a class="navLink" href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/Marcus_Roberts" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; color: #666666; font-size: 11px; text-decoration: none;">MARCUS ROBERTS</a></div>
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Why on Earth would an officially atheist country’s ruling class decide to create a new theology? Furthermore, why on Earth would anyone listen to what that ruling class had to say? The answers to those two questions: to buttress their authority and because their people have to listen to what they say on fear of severe penalties, may give you a hint as to which country we’re talking about. Yes China! The Communist Party controlling China has decided that <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/12213" style="color: #2371b8; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">spying on the menstrual cycles of its citizens</a> is no longer enough, now it is going to pronounce on theodicy, the problem of consciousness and the whether it is holy because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is holy. According to <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/china-establishes-new-christian-theology-control-its-christian-population-1652372" style="color: #2371b8; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">the International Business Times</a>:<br />
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<em>“The [Chinese] government will create a “Chinese Christian Theology” to guide the practice of Christianity in the country, the China Daily reported Thursday. Although the government has yet to provide any details into what this new theology entails, its purpose is clear: Speaking to China Daily, Wang Zuo, director of the State Administration of Religious Affairs, said, ‘The construction of Chinese Christian Theology should adapt to China’s national condition and integrate with Chinese culture.’”</em></div>
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I always thought that Christianity was universal and that the state should have little to say about Christian practice, but I suppose Caesaropapism has a long history. I think the importance of this attempt at a new theology is that the Chinese government is worried about an “unguided” Christianity, a religion that is claiming more and more Chinese adherents:<br />
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<em>“Since relaxing prohibitions on religious faith in 1982, the Chinese Communist Party now recognizes five official faiths: Protestantism, Catholicism, Taoism, Buddhism and Islam. Because much religious faith remains underground, it is difficult to establish the precise number of worshippers in China. But a 2007 survey estimated that 31 percent of the country’s population, a number exceeding 400 million people, practiced a religious faith of some kind. Each religion has an organized, government-sanctioned hierarchy that is headquartered in Beijing and under the direct supervision of the Chinese Communist Party.”</em></div>
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There have been other attempts that the government has taken over the years to ensure that religious belief is according to the government’s rules:<br />
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<em>“In 2007, Beijing passed a law prohibiting Buddhists from reincarnation. (The government has thus far not revealed whether there have been any violations.) In Tibet, government minders have replaced monks as supervisors of Buddhist temples throughout the region, reversing a long-standing policy.</em></div>
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<em>In the far-western Xinjiang region, whose 9 million ethnic Uighurs practice a mild form of Sunni Islam, Beijing limits permission of Muslims to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, while in July China banned fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. And this month, in Karamay, the local government said residents wearing Islamic clothing, and men wearing long beards, could not legally board city buses.”</em></div>
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It will be interesting to see what the Chinese government approved theology ends up looking like and to what extent it is followed by the various Christian denominations in China. Quite frankly I’m not surprised at the attempt to “de-fang” Christianity. The trouble for a totalitarian dictatorship is that the state is not able to tolerate a competitor for people’s affections and faith. Especially a competitor that presumes to judge the actions of the state and its officials according to a universal moral precept that isn’t that espoused by Marx, Lenin and Mao. The attempt to defang may be a bit late however:<br />
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<em>“Still, in a country where Web searches for Jesus far outnumber those for President Xi Jinping, Beijing may have a major challenge on its hands.”</em><br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-74442555162134637292014-07-28T11:22:00.001-04:002014-08-09T13:21:58.492-04:00An African woman’s “Thank-you” letter to Meriam Ibrahim<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The great news of Mariam Ibrahim's arrival in Italy filled me with so much joy and elation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The images of this graceful and beautiful African woman, babe in hand, stepping out of the plane was a sight to behold especially after her unspeakable pain and suffering in the Sudanese prison.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So I thought I should, in a very simple letter, write down my reflections and thoughts of gratitude for this resilient daughter of Africa whose freedom is being celebrated by the entire world today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On behalf of all African women, I thank you Meriam Ibrahim, for showing the world the indomitable courage that is at the core of authentic femininity. I say this because your pain and persecution were tied so firmly to your femininity. And so your triumph was a most powerful witness to life, to motherhood, to marriage, to love and to faith.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You are indeed a true picture of faith and virtue, a true symbol of strength and resilience. You are, in my humble opinion, a real woman of substance, an African woman of substance and your story fills my heart with courage and audacity in my own vocation to defend our African culture of life,marriage, motherhood, faith and family, no matter how difficult, no matter how shameful and no matter how painful for me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For under intense persecution, you refused to deny your Christian faith. Under the threat of the extremists, you stood as a witness and a martyr. Under the pain of incarceration, you would not deny your husband or renounce your marriage. Under the heavy shackles of prison you still had the strength and defiance to give life , to give birth. Under the certainty of a death sentence you had the determination to nurse your precious little baby.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By your powerful example, the world has come to witness the resilience of a young African woman who in the worst conditions bore heroic witness to the virtues of faith, marriage, and motherhood. Your unspeakable struggles in the last few months have been a most radiant ray of light that has pierced through the darkest clouds to contradict a modern world that is telling us that faith means nothing, that religious freedom is not all that important, that marriage is whatever we want it to be, that motherhood should be a choice we make under the most conducive situations, that our babies should only be born at the most convenient of times.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You, my African sister, have become a lightening rod to the radical feminists of our times who repudiate and denigrate every virtue that you epitomize . </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Within your body, you have borne the marks and scars of a true Christian, a wife, a mother and a martyr, and in this way you have shown us what it means to be an empowered and liberated woman, and I'm glad to say it is certainly not what the western radicals and ideologues are telling us. They try to tell us that for African women to be empowered, they need to be "sexually liberated", selfish, individualistic and fiercely autonomous, but you Meriam , by your own example , have taught us that the liberated African woman is the woman who is free to live and practice her faith, love her husband , and protect her children (born and unborn). A liberated woman is a woman of faith and family. This is the truth that must be spoken throughout Africa. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Today, the world watched you as you breathed the fresh air of freedom and as you made your first stop, not at the Whitehouse, but rather at the House of St Martha (Casa Santa Marta) which is also the house of the Holy Father Pope Francis. Instead of the presidential handshake that many others would have craved first, you chose the papal handshake. And instead of the political reception you chose the apostolic benediction for you and your family. You chose the Pope over the POTUS! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You are a woman of great wisdom and strength and indeed Africa raises, praises and celebrates you. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We rejoice with you and for you. We rejoice that you are free at last. And out of our rejoicing,</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I pray that more women (from our Africa and from every corner of the world) will reflect deeply on your experience so as to emulate you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I pray for women of faith to rise up and bear courageous witness even to the point of martyrdom. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I pray for women who are pregnant to choose life for their babies at all cost.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I pray for women who are wives and mothers to stay true to their vows and vocations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I pray that beyond our global rejoicing, we would be adorned with even a portion of the heroic virtue of Meriam Ibrahim's authentic feminism purified and forged in the fiery crucible of religious persecution.</span><br />
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<em>Reproduced with the kind permission of the <a href="http://www.cultureoflifeafrica.com/2014/07/an-african-woman-gratitude-to-mariam.html" style="color: #006683; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">author</a>: Editor</em></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-63822564261596164532014-07-23T11:13:00.001-04:002014-07-28T11:37:51.056-04:00Jewish births “Trending Upwards” in Israel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a class="navLink" href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/Marcus_Roberts" style="color: #666666; line-height: 12px; text-decoration: none;">Marcus Roberts</a><span style="line-height: 12px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 12px;">| 23 Jul 2014 |</span><span style="line-height: 12px;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 15px;">With the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza showing no signs of abating, despite the best efforts of the UN Secretary-General, I thought that </span></span><a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/The-Human-Spirit-Israeli-Jewish-women-and-demography-360700" style="color: #006683; line-height: 15px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">this piece from the Jerusalem Post</a><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 15px;"> dealing with Israeli demography was interesting and challenged many assumptions that I had. The author is Barbara Sofer, a Jerusalem writer who serves as the Israel director of public relations for Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. She makes some interesting personal observations in the course of explaining her interview with one Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli ambassador. Sofer explains that the conversation took a turn that she was not expecting:</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em>“I expect us to discuss Diaspora-Israel relations, but instead we talk mostly about babies – who is having them and why.</em><br /><br /><em>When it comes to Middle East demography, Ettinger maintains that most of us have our facts backwards. We’ve become so accustomed to thinking we’re sitting on a demographic time bomb that will implode when Jews are outnumbered, that we’ve failed to follow the latest statistics.</em><br /><br /><em>Indeed, Ettinger’s ideas are counterintuitive for all of us who have long believed that the demographics of our region are pitted strongly against us.”</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em></em>As Sofer acknowledges, there is a perception that demography is against the Jewish population and that in time there is a danger that Jews living in the Middle East will lose the “fertility race” to its Muslim neighbours, not all of whom are well disposed to the Jewish State. I used to think as much <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/12599" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">until I wrote about this last year</a>. But Israeli Jews are very different from their Western world counterparts when it comes to fertility. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em>“According to Ettinger, from 1995 to 2013, the annual number of Israeli Jewish births surged by 65 percent – from 80,400 to 132,000. In 2013, the Jewish fertility rate was 3.04 births per woman – and trending upwards. It’s 3.04 births when both spouses are Israeli-born, no matter where their parents were born.</em><br /><br /><em>‘Trending upwards” is the operational term here. There are many factors, including population age, which are important in predicting future population growth or shrinkage. But, taking all these factors into consideration, the Jewish population is growing fast, and will grow even faster.”</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In contrast, the Muslim birth rate is declining:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em>"A CBS report earlier this year, citing UN estimates, shows there’s been a drop in family size among Muslims throughout the region. The most fertile Arab nation, Jordan, has a projected 2035 fertility rate of 2.41 children. Israeli Muslims are projected to decline from 3.37 to 2.71. This is consistent with the greater education and urbanization.</em><br /><br /><em>Says Ettinger, ‘Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is currently higher than any Arab country, other than Yemen, Iraq and Jordan, which are rapidly declining. The Jewish population is also growing relatively younger, which bodes well for Israel’s economy and national security.’”</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em></em>But why is this? Why are Israeli Jews bucking the first world trend and why is their fertility rate increasing? Sofer states that’s Ettinger denies that is solely down to the haredim, the ultra-orthodox who make up about 12% of Israel’s total population (<a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/12599" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">we’ve noted this before</a>).</span></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Ettinger names the following factors: a sense of the collective and community patriotism; attachment to religious, cultural and historical roots; and optimism.”</span></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This last point is one we’ve alluded to before on this blog. If societies and populations are confident and optimistic about the future, then they are more likely to want to share that future with future generations. Conversely, when societies lack confidence, when populations cannot think of a reason why they would want to propagate their existing culture through a new generation and when individuals are too hedonistic to have children, then you see a declining birth rate. Like we see in most of the western world. Sofer agrees:</span></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Optimism is the answer that resonates for me. Despite the many challenges of living here, the low-frills lifestyles in contrast to the members of the OECD whom we lead in fertility, we believe in the future and want to share it with a new generation.”</span></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But so many would point to Israel’s intermittent wars and its almost daily dangers of battle, rocket-fire and kidnappings. Israelis live in a country where certain neighbouring groups do not recognise their state’s right to exist. What is there possibly to be optimistic about? Well, maybe Israeli Jews recognise that something worth living for is the only thing worth dying for. And a homeland for many Jews is something to preserve and to hand on to a future generation. Is that what we in the West are missing? Something we want to hand on to our children? Something worth having children for? </span></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-34001186994669286802014-06-22T12:14:00.002-04:002014-06-22T12:15:30.798-04:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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St. Thomas More, pray for us and for religious freedom.</div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-91172888051144839382014-05-11T10:45:00.000-04:002014-05-17T10:04:30.080-04:00When We Lose the Sense of Sin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Paul Adams<br />
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I
was reading a piece on Huffpo about how <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-e-wyer/men-and-grumpiness_b_5266944.html">men turn grumpy</a> at 70, sort of like
adolescents turn moody and recalcitrant in the first years of puberty, for
hormonal reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would have
been depressing – not least for my poor wife, who lives both with a querulous
septuagenarian and a truculent teen. Except, says the author, there are five
stages of male grumpiness extending across the whole range of life from
adolescence to dotage. That put it all in perspective, I suppose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">While
on that page I noticed a link to another Huffpo article about how the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/06/miss-kay-_n_5275010.html">DuckDynasty matriarch</a>, Miss Kay, had forgiven the Duck Dynasty patriarch, Phil
Robertson for the way he had treated her in the early years of their marriage
nearly half a century earlier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
story is a familiar one – at least for Christians – of sin, repentance,
forgiveness, and conversion of life, and a couple sticking it out through the
process and very happy they did so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Huffpo
told the story more or less straight, at least compared with other liberal
postings of the “gotcha!” kind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But the hundreds of hateful comments that followed made up for Huffpo’s
restraint. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Representative
are these responses:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">*Why is it that these Christian values fools that keep telling
the rest of us that we are wrong for not believing in "their" ways
& teachings time & time again always the ones caught cheating &
breaking their own code?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">*So I guess this makes him a hypocrite and she is another
enabler. Typical Christian behavior!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">*Such hypocrites.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Not all comments were of
this kind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The charge of hypocrisy
was common, but some pointed out that to have sinned, repented, and changed
your life to conform to what you consider God’s will does not make you a hypocrite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rtyEBu_HGRc/U3dsOmzXCrI/AAAAAAAAAao/5HhUa_dYq0Y/s1600/hypocrite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rtyEBu_HGRc/U3dsOmzXCrI/AAAAAAAAAao/5HhUa_dYq0Y/s1600/hypocrite.jpg" height="400" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">As one reader says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">*Just in case you don't know:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">hyp·o·crite [hip-uh-krit] <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">1.a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious
beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially
a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">He WAS an alcoholic and he DID commit adultery. Past tense.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">I am struck by the gulf of
incomprehension between the Christian and anti-Christian commenters. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story of a sinful man repenting,
being forgiven, converting his life to follow God is thousands of years old and
repeated many times in Old and New Testaments, from David to Matthew, Paul and
countless others. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">And yet it is
incomprehensible to the gotcha crowd who relentlessly judge those they accuse
of judging. None of the anti-Christian commenters offers a shred of evidence
to show that either Miss Kay or her husband of nearly 50 years is “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a person who pretends to have virtues, moral
or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually
possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">It is said that saints –
men and women of heroic virtue – are those most aware of their own sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any Christian who examines his
conscience knows he sins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When
asked to describe himself, Pope Francis – no drunk or adulterer – said simply,
“I am a sinner.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We all depend on
God’s infinite mercy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Of course, there are
hypocrites among Christians who, like the Pharisees of old, pretend to have
virtues they don’t possess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
that is not the charge of the gotcha crowd in this case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The charge they make is that Phil
Robertson once struggled with alcoholism and committed adultery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this, if you are a Christian, they
imply there is no forgiveness, no repentance, no conversion of life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And those like Miss Kay who do forgive
are “enabling” behavior that no one claims has actually occurred for decades.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">So how do we understand
people who acknowledge neither sin nor repentance nor forgiveness?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">One part of the gotcha response
seems to be hatred of those who try to live virtuously, with God’s help, and
who thereby seem to be a living condemnation of the moral state of those who
don’t even try.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">But what does it mean not to
try?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not that the
anti-Christians recognize such a way of framing the problem. They don’t. They
do not have even the sense of sin in the first place. The whole idea of living
virtuously implies that one holds oneself to standards that for most of us do
not come easily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Virtuous habits
are acquired through practice and lost through disuse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We aim for virtue but often fall short
of our own standards and principles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">This, the classical and
Christian understanding, implies that there is a moral truth about what is good
and what evil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What repels so many
anti-Christians, I think, is that they have no grounds for discriminating between
good and evil except what they actually choose to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Hume, they believe that reason is passion’s slave, the
rationalization of whatever we choose to do and how we choose to live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the boo-hooray ethical emotivism
that has no grounding for morality beyond feelings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Better in this view to
rationalize and justify what we actually choose and do than to try to aim
higher and risk failing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even
aiming for virtue seems like an intolerable judgment on those who do not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Better to escape the charge of
hypocrisy by not having beliefs and principles that one’s actions could
belie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One cannot fail to live up
to standards one doesn’t have or that do not differ from whatever one does –
not because one is saintly but because one’s standards adapt to what one chooses.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">For America’s founders,
the liberal republic could not survive such a moral climate. Democracy depended
on the virtue of the citizens. Human flourishing for humans and human
communities depended, as for other animals, on our living according to our
nature and purpose, as Aristotle and Aquinas argued. It was not a matter of
will and power, the remaking of our selves and our laws according to our carnal
or other desires.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moral truth had
an objective basis in our nature and destiny as humans. If there was no truth,
one could not speak truth to power. Moral relativism and subjectivism become
the path to tyranny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
“dictatorship of relativism,” as Benedict XVI called it, leads ineluctably to
the tyranny of the state and the squeezing out of civil society, the family,
the intermediary groups, the mediating structures that are key to democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as
Robert Reilly says in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Making-Gay-Okay-Rationalizing-Homosexual-ebook/dp/B00JL0PK50/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399819082&sr=8-1&keywords=robert+reilly+making+gay+ok">new book</a>, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“turned Aristotle’s notion of Nature on its head. Aristotle
said that Nature defined not only what man is but what he should be. Rousseau
countered that Nature is not an end—a telos—but a beginning: man’s end is his
beginning, or, as Allan Bloom expressed it, “there are not ends, only
possibilities.”<a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/the-gaying-of-america/reilly-cover-graphic-2"><span style="color: #323232; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></a></span></div>
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<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">Like many proponents of the
sexual revolution today, Rousseau had a particular hatred for that most
constraining of institutions, the family that he considered artificially
constructed. He called for the education of children to be taken from the
family and given to the state. As Reilly puts it, “Once society is atomized,
once the family ceases to interpose itself between the individual and the
state, the state is free to transform the isolated individual by force into
whatever version of ‘new man’ the revolutionary visionaries espouse.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">Rousseau’s influence is everywhere today. Recall
the Obama campaign ads featuring “Julia,” who from cradle to grave was nothing
more than a ward of the state and the family is no where present, not even when
she wants to have a baby.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">But as Austin Ruse puts it
in <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/the-gaying-of-america/reilly-cover-graphic-2">his review</a> of Reilly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">...old nature is a powerful thing, and nature tied to conscience
is practically unassailable, certainly unassailable without powerful
justifications, rationalizations, and as it turns out, the embrace and
celebration of society. Aristotle wrote, “Men start revolutionary changes for
reasons connected with their private lives.” Disputes over homosexual acts or
abortion or divorce or contraception or fornication immediately become personal
and this is precisely because they are so personal….</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;"></span><span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">Reilly says the insistent
voice of conscience must be muffled in favor of persistent sinning. The sinner
does this through internal justification and rationalization and the further
insistence that the sin be accepted and even celebrated by society at large.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">How strong, then, the hatred
those celebrants of vice feel for those who see the behavior in question as
wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How loud the cries of
hypocrisy when those self-acknowledged sinners fall, give in to temptation. And
how they redouble their efforts to use the power of the state to enforce
recognition of vice as virtue, and to crush those who dissent in the name of an
intractable reality that is not simply a matter of will and power.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #323232; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-size: 26.0pt;">*NOTE: This blog has taken up the concept and current rhetorical use of "hypocrisy" in several <a href="http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/search?q=hypocrisy">earlier posts</a>.</span></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-3200131230515497092014-04-29T14:02:00.002-04:002014-05-11T11:52:31.318-04:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Michael Novak Recalls the Good Humored John XXIII and the Polish Pontiff Who Called Him a Friend</h2>
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Tells ZENIT Why Joint Canonization Made Sense</h3>
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Michael Novak, former ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, theologian, and author of some 30 books, including "The Open Church" and "Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative" spoke with ZENIT in Rome days before this weekend's canonization.</div>
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An eyewitness to Vatican II, who was both given one of the last wedding blessings by John XXIII and who was publicly called a friend by John Paul II, Novak shared with ZENIT his thoughts about the two popes and the canonization.</div>
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Novak: The linking of the popes makes better sense of them both, than one by one.</div>
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<strong>ZENIT: What is the reason behind having a joint canonization? It's said that Poles are unhappy with JPII being canonized on the same day as John XXIII.</strong></div>
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At the end of John XXIII's time as pope, his work was left very undone. Some were even speculating about a Vatican III. Once Benedict XVI was asked: "What's the full meaning of Vatican II?" He responded: "We won't know, as the fruits of the council take time to develop."</div>
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This is very true and is evidenced by the fact that no other country or great organization has had a re-enactment of the council, in the sense that they took the initiative to reinvent themselves. We cannot name another institution that is or has effectively done this in the same way that the Catholic Church did through Vatican II.</div>
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The questions raised by the decisions reached by the decrees were incredibly far reaching and forward looking. It's true that 50 years were needed to come to a common understanding of what happened.</div>
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<strong>ZENIT: Many say the joint canonization could be seen as a sign of continuity between the Popes and the council. Could you explain your view on this?</strong></div>
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Novak: Yes, as I said in my book "The Open Church," John XXIII 'opened the windows of the Church' when he announced there would be a Second Vatican Council. He knew better than to consult with the Roman Curia, which had been described in this way: "Popes come and go, but the Curia lives forever." He just announced the Church needed this council and will be having it, whether the Curia liked it or not.</div>
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Vatican II was a tremendous event which advanced the Council of Trent. It announced a new era of the Church which, after John Paul II, Benedict XVI was about to build on in a very scholarly way and Francis would build on in a very populist way.</div>
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<strong>ZENIT: In what ways did John Paul II himself carry out the fruits of the council?</strong></div>
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Novak: John Paul II took the initiatives of John XXIII and 'rounded them out,' completing them and making them international. By 'rounded out,' I mean he did something unimaginable in the way he carried out the council's decrees. No one had any idea what he was thinking. </div>
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If someone would have predicted that the wall would come down, they would have locked him up. This is a testament to Wojtyla who, effectively did the impossible, in crumbling communism, in a roughly 11 year time frame.</div>
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He changed the contours of the world, traveling, more than any pope ever had. He showed the Church structure is not a pyramid, it's concentric rings, which were visible during his travels, at which he would be on an altar surrounded by bishops of the region and hemisphere. John Paul introduced this to the world.</div>
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<strong>ZENIT: Tell us about the "The Open Church." With your personal account of being present at Vatican II, could you give some insight to the persons who would like to know more about John XXIII?</strong></div>
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Novak: John XXIII was so wonderful. He was known as the smiling pope. He was very easy-going, kind, warm, and friendly. He enjoyed a good joke and laughed often. He had that personal touch that people see in and love about Pope Francis today. He was not all puffed up about himself.</div>
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<strong>ZENIT: Can you please give an example of this humorous and playful side of the Italian pontiff?</strong></div>
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Novak: Yes, once, when walking with a journalist in the Vatican gardens, he was asked whether he knew how many people worked at the Vatican. He joked saying, "about half."</div>
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<strong>ZENIT: How else were John XXIII and Pope Francis similar?</strong></div>
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Novak: They were both pastors of the Church. They possessed that warmth. They fall into the category of someone with whom you would like to have a coffee or cigar with.</div>
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John XXIII had "opened the windows of the Church" with Vatican II and brought an "aggiornamento," meaning it brought the Church to today. Yet, he was aware, like how Francis is, that sometimes there are 'winds.' Not everything that comes in through the open window is good. There are noxious fumes. Likewise, not everything of today is good. </div>
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<strong>ZENIT: What aspect of John XXIII and John Paul II's relationship is important to this canonization?</strong></div>
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Novak: The council that John XXIII proposed brought the Church together and nailed down clear, positive statements of faith built around prayers of the Church. This allowed for the evangelization, which John Paul II brought to fruition.</div>
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April 27, 2014) © Innovative Media Inc. Reposted here from Zenit with permission.</div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-72943232318372478402014-04-08T11:14:00.000-04:002014-04-08T11:17:34.255-04:00"This new power grab by the State to redefine a centuries-old institution" - and the mob mentality promoting it<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">TUESDAY, 8 APRIL 2014</span><br />
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BY <a class="navLink" href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/caroline_farrow" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; color: #666666; font-size: 11px; text-decoration: none;">CAROLINE FARROW</a></div>
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Recently I appeared in the audience of BBC’s Question Time in my home town of Brighton after a friend asked me to take their place at short notice.<br />
When Marilyn Barmer stood up and nervously asked whether the first gay marriages due to take place in the city in the next 24 hours were a necessary piece of legislation, the temperature in the auditorium plummeted, the warm glow of good-natured yet passionate debate replaced by a glacial hostility.<br />
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I have never before experienced such a palpable and visceral sense of contempt and dislike, despite having debated the issue a number of times inside a TV studio or on the radio with LGBT advocates.<br />
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While I’ve come in for a hefty amount of online abuse and insults over the years and at times been shocked by some of the sentiments expressed, I have at least been able to emotionally distance myself.<br />
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Words can have a powerful impact but at the end of the day that’s all they are -- a stream of invective from those suffering from a sense of inadequacy in one or several areas of their lives, who should not be given any headspace.<br />
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Fed up with the shallow and saccharin sentiments of love that were lacking in intellectual rigour emanating from the panel and the on-screen love-in between Tory MP Justine Greening and Labour MP Dianne Abbot about how wonderful it all was, I raised my hand when David Dimbleby asked whether or not anyone agreed with the questioner.<br />
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As the host focused his attention upon me, asking me to refute specific allegations of homophobia, I did my best to add a fresh perspective to the debate from the point of view those who did not wish to see marriage redefined.<br />
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But when the audience jeered in response to the simple statement of fact that every single child had a biological mother and father, I knew that I was fighting a lost cause.<br />
The audience were not listening to what was being said; even a great debater such as George Bernard Shaw would not have won them over.<br />
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Afterwards both Roger Helmer and Lord Simon Wolfson, two of the guest panellists, kindly congratulated me on my courage.<br />
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Surely I thought, speaking my mind on a TV show wasn’t particularly brave. Yes, the aggression was unnerving, not least when Dimbleby began to unexpectedly interrogate me, but as we are living in a free and democratic society we should all be able to speak in the public square without fear of repercussions.<br />
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Sadly however, freedom of speech comes with a price. While filing out of the studio, someone approached me to tell me I was ‘absolutely disgusting’.<br />
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Another group of people spat at me. I was swiftly identified on Twitter by Dr Evan Harris and gay columnist Benjamin Cohen and the insults flowed.<br />
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My crime? Stating that marriage was a child-centric institution and that children have a right to be brought up by their biological parents, where at all possible.<br />
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Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell is still not satisfied that same sex marriage legislation goes far enough is now calling for a<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/03/31/uk-gay-rights-activist-says-gay-marriage-still-segregation" style="color: black; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> repeal of the marriage law. </a> Stonewall are calling for homophobia to be eradicated from <a href="http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/03/28/ruth-hunt-we-must-celebrate-equal-marriage-whilst-looking-ahead-to-what-is-still-to-be-done/" style="color: black; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">‘churches and homes’.</a><br />
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What does this mean in reality? Are the thought police to be sent into churches and homes to enforce the new orthodoxy that anyone who does not support the new State definition of marriage is to be censured and made to see the error of their ways?<br />
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A new Cinderella law seeks to prosecute parents who do not show their children enough emotional affection.<br />
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Will the State define as emotional cruelty ideas that are not commensurate with their own vision of perfect parenting?<br />
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Will parents who homeschool or refuse to condone the new definition of marriage be deemed guilty of emotional cruelty or causing harm?<br />
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There is legitimate concern that this new power grab by the State to redefine a centuries-old institution will have a serious impact on freedom of speech and religions. Being spat at is the least of our worries.<br />
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<em>Caroline Farrow writes from the UK where she has participated in a number of media debates on family issues. This article first appeared in <a href="http://conservativewoman.co.uk/2014/04/tues-caroline-farrow-spat-at-after-bbc-question-time-for-defending-the-age-old-meaning-of-marriage-welcome-to-the-new-barbarism/" style="color: black; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Conservative Woman</a> and is reproduced here with permission.</em><br />
* The BBC Question Time referred to is<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYifOx-cu-Y" style="color: black; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> here</a>, and the question about gay marriage begins at 38 minutes in.<br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-8164277910604498372014-04-06T21:25:00.003-04:002014-04-06T21:58:42.994-04:00The link between family structure and poverty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/Nicole_m_King" style="font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Nicole M. King</a><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> | 7 Apr 2014 | </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="color: #6a2924; font-size: small;">From MercatorNet</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/health/project-to-improve-intellect-of-poor-children-led-to-better-health-too-research-finds.html?utm_source=World+Congress+of+Families+and+The+Howard+Center+for+Family%2C+Religion+%26+Society+Members&utm_campaign=6012f08a47-NFNR_Nordic_Country_Rethinks_Divorce&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4b0ced8706-6012f08a47-342040565&_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff; letter-spacing: 0px;">New York Times recently highlighted a study</span></a> that seems to show promising results for a specialized-care program for children born into poverty.<br />
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In 1972, researchers in North Carolina began tracking two groups of babies from poor families. In one group, “the children were given full-time day care up to age 5 that included most of their daily meals, talking, games and other stimulating activities.” The other group received baby formula, but no other form of interaction. The full study <a href="http://worldcongress.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=71b5ff0a93830214b96a42bf6&id=89913a42d6&e=51fb21d183"><span style="color: #0433ff; letter-spacing: 0px;">was published</span></a> in Science on Thursday of last week. “By age 30,” reports the Times, “those in the group given special care were four times as likely to have graduated from college.” In addition, however, both men and women in the treatment group had better health outcomes, including lower rates of hypertension and risk factors for heart disease, better nutritional habits, and lower rates of diabetes and stroke. Surprised by the physical health benefits and thrilled about potential outcomes for children born into poverty, the researchers are currently looking into how the cost of the program ($16,000 per child, per year, in 2010 dollars) compares with the cost of medical care were the children not enrolled.<br />
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While better outcomes for children born into poverty is undoubtedly a worthy goal, the glaring omission in this story is what places those children in poverty to begin with. Other research has demonstrated that we might better use that $16,000 per child, per year.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>The New Research - The key determinant of child poverty</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">According to the prevailing dogma of the welfare system, better job-training programs, education, and daycare subsidies will lift unwed mothers and their children out of poverty. That strategy —which has been pursued for at least a generation — has little to show for itself while its framers have ignored the growing body of evidence that suggests the country will make little headway in reducing poverty without addressing one of its major causes: the growth of the percentage of children being raised outside of an intact family.<br />
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The latest study, mining county-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development, and the American Religious Data Archive, reinforces that verdict. Conducted by Sri Ranjith of the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and Anil Rupasingha of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the study identifies numerous economic and demographic determinants of poverty while zeroing in on the relationship between social capital, religious adherence, and child poverty.<br />
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As might be expected, all seven economic variables weighed by the economists, including a county’s general unemployment and male unemployment rates, were found to be significantly associated with its child-poverty rate. The researchers also discovered new categories of links to child poverty: social cohesion and religious adherence. Using a county-level composite index developed by the Northeast Regional Center and composed of civic, sports, political, and business organizations, as well as nonprofits and voter-engagement data, the economists established that as their measure of social capital increased by 1 percent in a country, the child-poverty rate declined by 0.41-percentage point. In addition, their aggregate measure of religious adherents (representing Catholics and Protestants) demonstrated a similar positive impact on lowering the poverty rate.<br />
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Nonetheless, when the economists ranked the comparative impact of all their variables from the highest to the lowest (using the coefficients of their most sophisticated statistical model), they found that by far the “biggest factor” associated with child poverty in a county is the proportion of households headed by unwed mothers with children under 18 years of age. They established that every 1 percentage-point increase in these households correlates with a 1.2 percentage-point increase in the county’s child-poverty rate. This correlation remained statistically significant (p < 0.01) in all three statistical models.<br />
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Ironically, the magnitude of this association does not lead Ranjith and Rupasingha to consider strategies that might reverse increased patterns of unwed childrearing. No, the researchers seem enamored with the potential of “community social and cultural aspects for enhancing the welfare of children.” That’s not all bad; yet the very social capital and higher levels of religious attachment the economists covet find their origin in the family anchored on life-long marriage.<br />
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(Sri Ranjith and Anil Rupasingha, “Social and Cultural Determinants of Child Poverty in the United States,” Journal of Economic Issues 46.1 [March 2012]: 119–42.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>This article has been republished with permission from </i><a href="http://familyinamerica.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The Family in America</i></span></a><i>, a publication of The Howard Center. </i><a href="http://profam.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The Howard Center</i></span></a><i> is a MercatorNet partner site.</i></span></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-49717839341786581362014-03-27T20:15:00.000-04:002014-04-01T09:41:20.310-04:00Sacred Art II: Sacred Art and Modernism by Cornelius Sullivan<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Pietà, </i><span style="font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Michelangelo, marble, Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome, 1499. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Sacred Art II, </b>Sacred Art and Modernism</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Cornelius Sullivan</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Presented at <i>Honors Colloquium, Perspectives on Modern Art,</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">March 19, 2014, Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, FL </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">How did we get from Renaissance Art, faith embodied, to Abstract Art, art without recognizable content, and to Conceptual Art, art which is completely disembodied? <b> </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The Renaissance</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">As you enter Saint Peter's Basilica the first chapel on the right is graced by Michelangelo's marble Pietà. There is always a small crowd, and the silence there rises above the distant din. No-one speaks. Pilgrims are not disappointed, they will remember seeing something that looked like a vision. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">The artist in the Renaissance began training with a master in a guild at age twelve because talent was seen as a gift from God. They learned by copying, as their masters had done before them. Unlike in Modern Art, there was no pressure to always do the newest thing or to shock. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Authority in art went from the guild to the university, from those who do, to the experts who judge. For example, in the United States, with its Puritanical beginnings, Harvard University has always deemed that the study of making art is not a suitable occupation for a gentleman, whereas the study of art history has been acceptable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">There are some places connected with the Church today that promote Eastern like icons as the only valid form of religious art today. That's too easy, it acts as if the great Western tradition of art never existed. Go find the next Caravaggio!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Those who critique rule. Those who make, still make, but at the margins of society. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Artists from another time had a significant place in society, Columbia Art Historian James Beck said, "The most remarkable meeting of Renaissance artists ever recorded, and arguably the most extraordinary encounter of its kind in history, occurred on January 25, 1504 (in Florence) when some two dozen painters, sculptors, artisans, and architects were convened to take up the question of the appropriate location for Michelangelo's all but finished marble <i>David</i>."-1. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">The group included: the painters, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, the architect Guilano da Sangallo, the sculptor, Andrea della Robbia, and more artists and artisans. A group of two dozen and no theorists, no critics, no politicians, no lawyers, no lobbyists, only those who do, those who make. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Art Historian Kenneth Clark, from his classic book <i>Civilization</i> from 1969, says this about the Renaissance, and more specifically about Michelangelo's David:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0px;">" Seen by itself the David's body might be some unusually taut and vivid work of antiquity; it is only when we look at the head that we are aware of a spiritual force that the ancient world never knew. I suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people's idea of civilization. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilized life. It is the enemy of happiness. And yet we recognize that to despise material obstacles, and even to despise the blind forces of fate, is man's supreme achievement; and since, in the end, civilization depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of the great events in the history of western man." -2</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>David</i>, detail, Michelangelo, marble, 1504, Academia, <st1:city>Florence</st1:city>.<span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Protestants may insist that the faith is about the word and that the fact that Christianity began in the Hellenistic cultural world is not important. Pope Benedict said that the wisdom of Athens, along with the wisdom of Jerusalem, must be considered in understanding the early church. Greek sculptors made the gods as beautiful men with bodies<b>. </b>Then God became man, not as an idea, not as a theory, but with a body. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Pope Blessed John Paul II has privileged representational figurative art in his "Letter to Artists of 1999"."The Church has need especially of those who can do this on the literary and figurative level, using the endless possibilities of images and their symbolic force. Christ himself made extensive use of images in his preaching, fully in keeping with his willingness to become, in the Incarnation, the icon of the unseen God." 3. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Modern Art and Modernism</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">How did we get to Abstract Art? In 1619 rationalist philosopher Rene Descartes split body and spirit. Then Immanuel Kant with a new kind of subjectivity laid the foundation for Modern aesthetics, in his "Critique of Judgment", where human consciousness sets the terms for reality itself. -4. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Modern Art is a product of Modernism the philosophy, the world view, that influenced all aspects of life and culture and still holds sway today. The characteristics of Modernism that come into play with regard to art are: 1. Subjectivism, (everyone is an artist) 2. Rationalism, science is prized over artistic knowledge, 3. Dualism, privilege of mind over body, separation of mind and body 4. Anti-Traditionalism, let’s tear tradition down and start over.<b> </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Art is both form and content. In Late Modern Art, form and content were split asunder, in a way similar to the way that Descartes split body and spirit, and it was like Reformation Iconoclasm taking the body off of the cross. Content alone, Conceptual Art, devolved into trite jokes. Form alone, Abstract Art, a painting about paint, is as inane as a poem being solely about the alphabet. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">When form and content were partners vying for supremacy in Early Modern Art, exciting things happened. The push and pull of form and content, the interaction, is what can give art depth. Eventually, the forces, some theoretical and some financial, to separate form and content prevailed. The energy of the Early Modern era faded after a while. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Note how <i>form</i> and <i>content </i>worked together in Early Modern Art:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Monet's <i>Impression Sunrise,</i> from which Impressionism gets its name.<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Van Gogh's<i> Starry Night</i>, We believe the sky is sky and yet we know it is paint.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Rodin has understood Michelangelo's Neo-Platonist idea of the figure in the marble block. We are aware of the "uncovering" process.<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">In Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky we recognize the Modern composer but we also see how the line asserts itself. There is a good tug of war between form and content.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Descartes' attack on the body and taking the body off of the cross led to disembodied art. The contrast is between what is real and what is a mere symbol. It reminds me of what Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor said at a distinguished literary dinner, at which she remained too shy to speak, until a woman, knowing Flannery was Catholic, said, "The Eucharist, what a nice symbol." O'Connor said, "Well if it's a symbol, then, to hell with it".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Critique of Modernism</i><span style="font-size: 14pt;">, ink, 1982, by the author</span><b><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Theory Rules the Art World </span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt;">(from marble to drips)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Tom Wolfe says in his book <u>The Painted Word</u> from 1975, that he realized that "Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text."-5. Finally Wolfe proposes that the museum of the future will have, taking up a whole wall, in large block letters, Critic Clement Greenberg's "Theory of Flatness". Flanking it will be a postcard size image of a Jackson Pollock painting illustrating the theory. <o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">. <img src="http://www.corneliussullivan.com/clip_image013.jpg" height="81" v:shapes="_x0000_i1032" width="100" /> <i>Number 8</i>, Jackson Pollock , paint, 1949.<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Kant's subjectivity has caused the art educational system to fail. "Everyone is an artist, just express yourself." With no God, the concept of God given ability went away. Billy brings home scribbles from the first grade and they are stuck on the refrigerator and he is patted on the back for the sake of his self-esteem. Billy, that ..... learn how to draw.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">And we can see how </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">modern philosophy rejected the knowledge of natures, and thus, was able to make up a false nature for man, one that prized intellect over the body, and separated the two.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Kant's Modernist Aesthetics resulted in the phenomenon of viewers looking at a work of art and waiting, indeed hoping, for a personal aesthetic experience. Don't worry the cognoscenti, the experts, will tell you what to feel. Because of Kant this is a subjective experience. John Saward has said that, "In the heresy of Modernism we find a vague "mysticism" and a cult of subjective experience." 6. Remarkably some cling, even though "Modern Art" ended decades ago, to the idea that the artist possesses a special internal spiritual knowledge and that that is what is presented, then the viewer must try to get it, to be enlightened by it. Theory was like theology for Greenberg and he had the zeal of a Savonarola. Kandinsky tried, in his writing about art, to make of it a pseudo religion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">How free floating, strained, and artificial this is, and how different from the contextual aesthetic experience that one may have before a work of art that has content, and may be in situ, in the place that it was made for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Calling of Saint Matthew, detail</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, Caravaggio, San Luigi dei Francesi, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Rome</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, 1600.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt;">From <u>Caravaggio, Painter of Miracles,</u> American writer Francine Prose says something special happens to viewers in front of a Caravaggio painting. She describes a tour guide explaining to students <i>The</i> <i>Calling of Saint Matthew</i> in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. "There is nothing she is telling them that they absolutely need to hear, and the power of the paintings is drowning out her voice." And, "… it is possible to understand this painting without knowing much about art history, or Caravaggio, or even, perhaps, about the New Testament." -7.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">The only thing worthy of becoming the flesh of Conceptual Art, is "theory". And for all the other isms before Conceptual Art it was all about the theory. Those who have it, or invent it, spew it with authority, and tell us that we do not need to know what art is, because they will tell us what it is, and they will also tell us what is good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">There is a vast financial structure ensuring that the abstract paintings in the cellar of the </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Museum</span></st1:placetype><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Modern Art</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="font-size: 14pt;">, in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-size: 14pt;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-size: 14pt;">, that no-one wants to look at now, are still valuable. John D. Rockefeller and his money created that financial structure, the idea for MOMA was hatched in his living room.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">As art was becoming just theory strange things began to happen. Dadaists thrust mild obscenities and visual puns at viewers and began to call any object a work of art. Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal turned upside down and called it <i>Fountain</i> for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. The artists rejected it for the show, but it lives on in the lore of art as a joke on everyone.<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Fountain</i>, Duchamp, 1917.<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora, 1999 </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">This expensive joke is a plastic Pope John Paul II being crushed by a meteorite (exhibited at </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Royal</span></st1:placename><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Academy</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-size: 14pt;">, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 14pt;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 14pt;">, sold at Christies for three million dollars). I am not sure what it means, but assuredly, it is a joke on Catholics.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">And Abstract Art like Robert Ryman's painting <i>White on White</i> is a joke and complicit in it is New York Times Art Critic Michael Kimmelman, who says "Only experts are allowed to tell you what art is or not." And "We want to be told what to think." and "All art is Conceptual." He says that Ryman's painting is a "conversation within art" that "pushes the conversation forward." I suspect that that conversation goes on in the cellar of MOMA between all the abstract paintings in exile down there.<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">These are "in jokes" with political and financial motivations. That makes them so obvious, and thus, so boring. <o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Whit</i>e, Robert Ryman, 2003.<span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Pope Saint Pius X attacked Modernism in his encyclical of 1907, "Dominici Gregis Pascendi, Feeding the Lord's Flock", in which he characterized Modernism as " the synthesis of all heresies".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">He begins, "Modernists place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is usually called <i>Agnosticism</i>. According to this teaching</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> human reason is confined entirely within the field of <i>phenomena</i>, that is to<o:p> </o:p>say, to things that are perceptible to the senses, and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to transgress these limits. Hence it is incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognizing His existence, even by means of visible things. From this it is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject."-8.<o:p> </o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">"The Agnosticism of our time is perfectly expressed by the blank, bureaucratic facades on </span><st1:place><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Park Avenue</span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-size: 14pt;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-size: 14pt;">. And Charles Jencks in <u>The Language of Post Modern Architecture</u> also says, " Art, ornament and symbolism have been essential to architecture because they heighten its meaning, make it clearer, and give it greater resonance. All cultures, except the Modern one, have valued these essential truths and have taken them for granted."- 9. <o:p> </o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">And John Saward in his book, <u>The Beauty of Holiness and The Holiness of Beauty</u>, says about the ideologies of modernity,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">"When the Virgin Mother is not venerated, the Son's self-emptying is soon forgotten, and men dream of Progress, Superman, and the Will to Power." If man is to soar upwards to self-fulfillment, then, at all costs, God's descent to a lowly womb must be denied." - 10. Nietzsche-Zarathustra's demands deicide. "To you, Higher Men, this God was your greatest danger. Only when the humble God is dead can the Superman arise."- 11.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">The Theology of the Body and Sacred Art</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">The study of Art History is about the study of "style". The study of Christian Art History is about the study of "meaning". Some parts of Art History need to be re-written from a Catholic point of view.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">"The Theology of the Body" and a revival of Sacred Art are the answers to the errors of Modernism, Descartes' attack on the body, and the vacancy of abstract art.<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">In his "Theology of the Body" Pope Blessed John Paul II said,</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">"The body can never be reduced to mere matter; It is a spiritualized body, just as man's spirit is so closely united to the body that it can be described as an embodied spirit." -12.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">Dr. Michael Waldstein in the substantial introduction to his translation of the TOB says this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">"The ancient Gnostics found themselves in a demonic, anti-divine universe. Matter was evil. Yet, the</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> truly bottomless pit is opened only by the Cartesian universe with its complete indifference to meaning. Matter is "mere matter", sheer externality. It is value- free. The reason for this indifference of matter to meaning lies in the rigorous reconstruction of knowledge under the guidance of the ambition for power over nature." -13.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">What does the Catholic Church have to say about this? It understands the real in a special way. Art can say something about how the Incarnation has materially changed the universe. The Church can have Sacred Art<b>. </b></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The art of the Renaissance and the Counter Reformation Baroque in large part define Catholic Art. A case can be made, that the Virgin's connection with the art was not just coincidental, that without her, and without a vital female element in the culture, art would not have thrived.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">To conclude, it is worth looking at the </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">pietà</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> concept once again, because Pope Benedict XVI has explained how Renaissance Art has changed the art of Antiquity to engage the theological:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">“The languages into which the Gospel entered when it came to the pagan world did not have such modes of expression. But the image of the pieta, the Mother grieving for her son, became the vivid translation of this word. In her God’s maternal affliction is open to view. In her we can behold it and touch it. She is the<i>compasio</i> of God, displayed in a human being who has let herself be drawn wholly into God’s mystery.” - 14.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">He has said that through art, not just from the written word alone, we can understand more about God, in this case, more about the female aspect of his love, "his maternal affliction" and his "compasio".<o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>Pietà</i></span><i> 2006, Virgin Mary, detail</i>, marble, life size, by the author.<span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">1. <u>Three Worlds of Michelangelo</u> , James Beck, 1999, p.123-131<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">2. <u>Civilization</u>, Kenneth Clark, 1969, p. 123.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">3. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">"Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists, 1999."<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">4. "Critique of Judgement", Immanuel Kant, 1790.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">5. <u>The Painted Word</u>, Tom Wolfe, 1975, p.3<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">6. <u>The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty, </u>John Saward, Ignatius, 1997, p. 24.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">7. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><u><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt;">Caravaggio, Painter of Miracles</span></u><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt;">, Francine Prose, 2005, p. 8.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">8. The Encyclical Dominici Gregis Pascendi ,Pope Saint Pius X, 1907.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">9. <u>The Language of Post-Modern Architecture,</u> Charles Jencks, 1987, Rizzoli, p.7.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">10. Saward, 148<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">11. <u>Also Sprach Zarauthustra</u>, Freidrich Nietzsche, 1883.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;">12.<u> <em><span style="font-style: normal;">Man and Women He Created Them, A Theology of the Body</span></em></u>,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt;"> Pope Blessed John Paul II, Translated by Michael Waldstein, 2006. p. 96 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">13. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Ibid, p. 95<u><o:p></o:p></u></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">14. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, <u>Mary,</u></span><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> The Church at the Source</span></u><span style="font-size: 14pt;">,1997. p. 78.</span></span></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-5981608640757390052014-03-15T11:30:00.002-04:002014-03-15T11:30:51.163-04:00Stem cells are stem cells, not embryos<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Are totipotent cells really embryos?</b></div>
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by <a class="navLink" href="http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/old_bioethics/author_pagen/are_totipotent_cells_really_embryos" style="color: #666666; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-decoration: none;">Michael Cook</a> | 14 Mar 2014 |<a class="navLink" href="http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10888#idc-container" id="IDShowCommentLink8c7d8f6a4555e1eaf368f9371b8a07f9" rel="”nofollow”" style="color: #666666; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-decoration: none;" target=""></a></div>
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<img height="225" src="http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2014/01/30/1226674/966631-stem-cells.jpg" style="border: 0px; display: block; margin: 5px auto 10px; vertical-align: middle;" width="400" /><br />
Major developments in stem cell science tend to revive scruples about whether the new pluripotent cell is or could become an embryo. This happened with embryonic stem cells, with Yamanaka’s induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and now with stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells. Unhappily, a cloud hangs over STAP cells because it appears that the original paper in Nature was peppered with mistakes. But the question remains: if scientists create cells which can develop into any cell in the body (and into the placenta as well), are they not what we would otherwise call embryos?<br />
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Maureen Condic, of the University of Utah, a redoubtable opponent of human embryonic stem cell research, debunks this idea in the journal <a href="http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/scd.2013.0364" style="color: #003366; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Stem Cells and Development</a>: stem cells, she insists, are <em>not</em> embryos.<br />
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The problem begins with terminology, she says. The National Institutes of Health defines “totipotent” in two different ways: “capable of developing into a complete organism” or “differentiating into any of its cells or tissues”. The first kind of totipotency is an embryo; the second is a stem cell.<br />
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The difference between these two definitions is not trivial. Producing a mature organism requires the ability to both generate all the cells of the body and to organize them in a specific temporal and spatial sequence, that is, to undergo a coordinated process of development. Totipotency in this strict sense is demonstrated by the ability of an isolated cell to produce a fertile, adult individual. Consequently, a cell that is totipotent is also a one-cell embryo; that is, a cell that is capable of generating a globally coordinated developmental sequence.</blockquote>
Only the fate of an organism which is capable of developing into an adult is ethically controversial.<br />
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Rather, ethical consideration is given to human embryos based on the status they already possess; that is, their unique and fully operative ability to function as a human organism. Therefore, ethical controversy regarding totipotent human cells only concerns cells that are totipotent in the strict, organismal sense; that is, a cell that is a human embryo.<br />
Condic suggests that the term “totipotent” should be confined to organisms, ie, embryos. She coins the term “plenipotent” for cells which are capable of developing into all cells in the body.</blockquote>
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What accounts for the difference? Condic explains that research shows that factors in the cytoplasm of the egg are necesssary for the existence of true totipotency. “At this time, the only known totipotent cytoplasm is produced by an oocyte and contributed to the embryo at fertilization. The fact that oocytes produce the cytoplasmic factors that are required for an embryo to be totipotent is the reason oocytes are used for cloning.” Without these factors, a “plenipotent” cell can never become an embryo.<br />
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Language matters. If people do not grasp the difference, they can create artificial controversies “over areas of research that are ethically unproblematic”, Condic writes.<br />
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<em>Note: the article in Stem Cells and Development is behind a pay wall. Dr Condic has summarised her paper in <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/03/12361/" style="color: #003366; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Public Discourse</a>, which is readily available.</em><br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-73101848491150875362014-02-23T19:28:00.000-05:002014-02-23T19:28:44.835-05:00The silent war on religious liberty - Bobby Jindal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The Governor of Louisiana sails into American elites trying to circumscribe religious freedom</div>
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<a class="navLink1" href="http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/multiple_author/bobby_jindal" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">Bobby Jindal</a> | 21 February 2014</div>
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In a recent speech delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal made the case for defending religious liberty. He sailed into the “group of like-minded elites”, including the Obama administration, “determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.”<br />
The following excerpts re taken from <a href="mailto:http://officeofgovernorbobbyjindal.createsend1.com/t/ViewEmail/d/930F67F00F751D63/0B5AEB36B909D8502540EF23F30FEDED" style="color: #111111; text-decoration: none;">his prepared notes</a>.<br />
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Tonight I want to give a speech I’ve never given before, about an issue lurking just beneath the surface – that issue is The Silent War on Religious Liberty. I can think of no better place to give this speech than the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Library. President Reagan himself said that, “Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few, but the universal right of all God’s children.”<br />
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When he said this, he was not expressing a strictly personal belief in the nature of man as a created being — as a child of God. He was reaffirming the most basic contention of the American Founding, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that we are a nation constituted in accordance with the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,” and that we are a people “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”<br />
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<strong>The religious foundations of America</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
Let me make this explicit: the source and justification for the very existence of the United States of America is and always has been contingent upon the understanding of man as a created being, with a Creator conferring his intrinsic rights — “among [them] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”<br />
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How we understand and approach that Creator is properly left to the hearts and consciences of every citizen. I am a Catholic Christian. My parents are Hindus. I am blessed to know Baptists, Jews, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and so many more in the rich tapestry of American faiths. And I know men and women who acknowledge no denomination or creed, confess to uncertainty about the Divine, yet look to the richness of nature and the majesty of this world — and wonder, and inwardly seek, the Author of it all.<br />
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These days we think this diversity of belief is tolerated under our law and Constitution. But that’s wrong. This diversity of belief is the foundation of our law and Constitution. America does not sustain and create faith. Faith created and sustains America. President John Adams, in 1798, wrote to Massachusetts militiamen to remind them that “… Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”<br />
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In 1798, this was simple common sense. In 2014, we are forced to confront a question that would have been unthinkable to President Adams…and President Washington, and President Reagan, and every other American throughout history who believed in America’s founding premise: What happens when our government decides it no longer needs a “moral and religious people?”<br />
…..<br />
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<strong>Mired in a silent war</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
Today the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war. It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square, and the endurance of our constitutional governance. It is a war against the propositions in the Declaration of Independence. It is a war against the spirit that motivated abolitionism. It is a war against the faith that motivated the Civil Rights struggle.<br />
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It is a war against the soul of countless acts of charity. It is a war against the conscience that drives social change. It is a war against the heart that binds our neighborhoods together. It is a war against America’s best self, at America’s best moments. It is a war — a silent war — against religious liberty.<br />
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This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed. Their vision of America is not the vision of the Founding. It’s not even the vision of ten years ago. It’s a vision in which an individual’s devotion to Almighty God is accorded as much respect as a casual hobby — and with about as many rights and protections.<br />
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These elites have to this point faced little opposition – a non-profit here, a dedicated attorney there, a small business over there. A handful of principled organizations with the courage to stand up to the crushing weight of a liberal consensus unalterably opposed to their participation in the public square. They are the remnant who have the temerity to believe in America and its promises — and to do something about it.<br />
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After all, every person wants to live out his or her values. America’s most fundamental promise is that we can. When we cannot — when we are told that our faiths and our consciences are inimical to good governance and the law — then we are not simply facing a threat to our faiths and consciences. We are facing a threat to the very idea of America.<br />
…..<br />
Consider three storylines playing out in the states and at the highest courts over the past several years in three different areas, yet all with overlapping effects.<br />
First: the freedom to exercise your religion in the way you run your business, large or small, is under assault.<br />
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<strong>Hobby Lobby and the free exercise of religion</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
You have likely heard of the Obama administration’s case against Hobby Lobby, a mega craft store and a family business whose battle against President Obama’s contraception mandate will end up as a Supreme Court decision. The national chain filed suit after being told they would be fined $1.3 million per day if they didn’t pay for abortifacients through their insurance.<br />
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Hobby Lobby is nothing less than an all-American success story. The family owned company was launched in Oklahoma in 1970 with nothing more than a $600 loan and a workshop in a garage. Today they have 588 stores in 47 states. They have more than 13,000 full-time employees. They expanded, branching out to create a Christian supply shop to sell Bibles and craft supplies, opening another 35 stores in 7 states, with almost 400 more employees. This is entrepreneurship at its best…<br />
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Through it all, Hobby Lobby has retained the guiding principles of their devout founders. Their statement of purpose begins with a Bible verse, and they are closed every Sunday. They’ve committed to honor the Lord by being generous employers, paying well above minimum wage and increasing salaries four years in a row even in the midst of the enduring recession. The family also signed the “Giving Pledge,” committing to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. This is the definition of what a faithful entrepreneur looks like.<br />
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None of this matters to the Obama administration. The argument they have advanced, successfully thus far, is that a faithful business owner cannot operate under the assumption that they can use their moral principles to guide the way their place of business spends money. According to the administration's legal arguments, the family that owns Hobby Lobby is not protected by the First Amendment's "free exercise" of religion clause.<br />
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That’s the part of the First Amendment which states that "Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.<br />
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The Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder argue that because “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” A federal judge agreed: since Hobby Lobby is a “secular” corporation, they have no right to be guided by the religious beliefs of their ownership.<br />
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Keep in mind that the Greens weren’t arguing that so-called morning-after pills should be illegal, or banned, or doing anything to prevent their employees from paying the small cost of such pills. They just had a serious moral problem with paying for something they viewed as inherently against their deeply held beliefs.<br />
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The Obama administration’s argument ignores these beliefs and treats them as little more than an inconvenience to its ever-expanding regulatory state. The administration’s argument strikes at the core of our understanding of free exercise of religion. This case could have enormous ramifications for religious business owners across the country.<br />
….<br />
<strong>Hosanna Tabor and freedom of association</strong><br />
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And that brings us to the second front in the silent war: the assault on our freedom of association as people of faith, to form organizations where we work alongside others who share our views.<br />
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This brings us to the Hosanna-Tabor case, which revolved around the ability of a Lutheran academy in Michigan to fire a teacher. Here, the Obama administration advanced another extreme argument, claiming that job regulations prevented the academy from being able to fire anyone over a difference in beliefs.<br />
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The lawyers for the Obama administration went far beyond the issues of the case to instead advance the legally absurd position that there is no general ministerial exception, arguing that religious groups don’t even have the Constitutionally protected right to select their own ministers or rabbis.<br />
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Thankfully, here, the administration’s extreme position was rebutted by the Supreme Court in decisive fashion, with a 9-0 decision opposing its perspective. You have to take a pretty extreme position for Elena Kagan to join with Samuel Alito on an opinion.<br />
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So for the time being at least, the government doesn’t get to decide who can preach the gospel. But the important thing to note is that the government wanted to make that decision. That is truly offensive and frightening.<br />
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The administration advanced that extreme argument because it is consistent with the view of many on the left, particularly elite liberal legal scholars, that the god we must worship first is government, and that our rights are doled out by Washington as they see fit.<br />
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This same argument is even now being advanced against Catholic hospitals and adoption service providers, and other organizations that have a deeply held worldview, and simply want all their members and employees to share that worldview. The onslaught of lawsuits based on anti-discrimination law will inevitably lead to conflicts, which damage our society.<br />
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<strong>Elane Photography and freedom of expression</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
But those cases are only the beginning – there is a bigger threat, one that brings us to the third front in the silent war: the assault on your freedom of expression in all areas of life.<br />
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Consider the many cases against bakers, photographers, caterers and other wedding consultants who have religious beliefs, which prevent them from taking part in a same-sex ceremony. The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in August that one small business, Elane Photography, had violated the state’s Human Rights Act by declining to photograph a same sex commitment ceremony. In his opinion, the judge informed the Christian photographers being fined that they were “compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives,” because that was “the price of citizenship.”<br />
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This assault will only spread in the immediate future. We will see continued pressure brought on anyone who "refuses and refers" to be penalized for their views, denied membership in professional groups or even rejected from licenses.<br />
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<strong>The effect of redefining marriage</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
Many states have considered these issues in the light of the ongoing legal battle over marriage laws in the country. But that pressure is not going to stop with photographers and bakers – it’s going to be brought on churches, mosques, and synagogues, too.<br />
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Illinois shows us a preview of what this looks like. In legislation they proposed altering the definition of marriage, they would have required churches and other congregations to essentially close their doors to outsiders, stop providing services to the community, and close off their facilities to other non-profits or church groups in order to avoid being required to host same sex ceremonies.<br />
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The Illinois legislation would have required an unprecedented degree of government oversight, such as sending government representatives to survey students at Catholic schools to see how many were actually Catholic. They would not allow religious bodies to rent their facilities to non-members for use in weddings. They would drive churches to have to eliminate classes, day schools, counseling, fellowship hall meetings, soup kitchens and more.<br />
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In other words, this law and others like it would require believers to essentially choose to break with their deeply held theological beliefs, or give up their daily activity of evangelism, retreat from public life, and sacrifice their property rights. Churches that do not host same sex unions would essentially be barred from participating fully in civil society.<br />
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This is the next stage of the assault, and it is only beginning. Today, an overwhelming majority of those who belong to a religious denomination in America – that’s more than half the country – are members of organizations that affirm the traditional definition of marriage. All of those denominations will be targeted in large and small degrees in the coming years.<br />
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<strong>“Hate speech” and human rights</strong><br />
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Will churches in America even be able to remain part of the public square in a time when their views on sin are in direct conflict with the culture, and when expressing those views will be seen as hiding hateful speech behind religious protections?<br />
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Just as in Canada, where hate speech laws force courts to discern whether quoting Bible verses amounts to violating “human rights rules,” giving up your rights of religious expression may, as the New Mexico judge put it, be just “the price of citizenship.”<br />
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This war on religious liberty – on your freedom to exercise your religion, on your freedom to associate, on your freedom of expression – is only going to continue. It is going to continue because of an idea, a wrongheaded concept, which President Obama apparently believes: that religious freedom means you have the freedom to worship, and that's all.<br />
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In this misbegotten and un-American conception of religious liberty, your rights begin and end in the pew.<br />
…<br />
[Governor Jindal next reviews protections for religious freedom being enacted by states, and calls for more of them. He also reminds his audience that Christians in some countries are actually paying with their lives for their faith.]<br />
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So here, in America, we should be grateful that the laws and principles put in place by the Founders, men like George Mason and James Madison and Patrick Henry who understood the importance of religious liberty, have endured for so long. They are the reason America has come so far, and it is those same principles that should guide us farther still – principles that understand that power is derived from the people, not the government.<br />
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Calvin Coolidge understood this, in his own time: “We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.”<br />
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The things of the spirit do come first. We must act, and act now, to protect them. The temptation in some corners is to ask for a truce in these fractious battles – but in practical terms, a truce would only amount to those who value religious liberty laying down their arms. Our religious freedom was won over the course of centuries of persecution and blood, and we should not surrender them without a fight.<br />
…<br />
A few final thoughts.<br />
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<strong>Public opinion</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
First, let me be clear on something. You may or may not agree with the Catholic Church on contraception, most Americans undoubtedly do not. You may consider yourself to be pro-life or pro-choice, Americans remain fairly divided on that issue. And you may favor protecting traditional marriage between one man and one woman or you may favor making gay marriage legal. If we did a poll on those issues in this room, we would certainly find a variety of views. None of that is relevant in the least to the points I have made in this speech.<br />
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Our religious liberty must in no way ever be linked to the ever-changing opinions of the public. To the contrary, we must understand that our freedom of conscience protects all Americans of every persuasion — however those persuasions may evolve.<br />
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<strong>Targeting Christians</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
Second, it is unmistakable that most of the Obama Administration’s attacks on religious liberty are aimed at conservative Christians. But the fact is that our religious liberties are designed to protect people of all faiths. And I will note, that while I am best described as an evangelical Catholic, my extended family is quite diverse when it comes to matters of faith. And our liberties in America demand equal protections for all.<br />
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<strong>Stifling public debate</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
Third, for those of you who follow pop culture, you may have taken note of the recent flap between The Robertson family of Duck Dynasty fame, and the A&E Network that produces and broadcasts the Duck Dynasty show. And you may have further observed that the one of the loudest and most aggressive defenders of the Robertson family was the Governor of Louisiana.<br />
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You may think that I was defending the Robertsons simply because I am the Governor of their home state, the great state of Louisiana. You would be wrong about that. I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds, however indelicately they may choose to do so. Of course, A&E is a for-profit business, and they can choose what they want to put on the air.<br />
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But there was something much larger at stake here. There was a time when liberals in this country believed in debate. But that is increasingly not the case for the modern left in America. No, the modern left in America has grown tired of debate. Their new strategy is to simply try to silence their critics. So these leftists immediately mobilized and did all they could not to debate the issues, but rather to attempt to silence the Robertsons.<br />
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There was a time when the left preached tolerance. And they are indeed tolerant, unless they disagree with you. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, a liberal is someone who welcomes dissent, and is astonished to find there is any. The modern left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.<br />
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<strong>A pressing matter</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
Fourth, though this silent war on religious liberty may not seem as urgent a matter as the fact that our national debt is over 17 trillion dollars, it is actually a very pressing matter. Remember this quote from President Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”<br />
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<strong>A truly bizarre speech</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
Finally, let me finish by mentioning an incredible irony. I’ve been working on this speech for a good while. And last Thursday, exactly one week ago, something truly bizarre occurred.<br />
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The person who is at the tip of the spear prosecuting this quiet war on religious liberty spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The topic he chose to speak about was defending religious liberty.<br />
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I was stunned, and I bet the President of Hobby Lobby, who was in the audience, was stunned as well. Yes, President Obama did wax eloquent, as he always does, about the horrors of religious persecution that are occurring beyond our borders. And good for him.<br />
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To be clear, churches in America are not being burned to the ground, and Christians are not being slaughtered for their faith. There is really no comparison to the persecution of people of faith inside our borders and outside.<br />
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Yet, it is stunning to hear the President talk of protecting religious liberty outside the United States, while at the very same time his Administration challenges and chips away at our religious liberty right here at home. Once again, there is a Grand Canyon sized difference between what this President says and what he does.<br />
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Here is what the President said last week, no doubt playing to his audience -- “History shows that nations that uphold the rights of their people — including the freedom of religion — are ultimately more just and more peaceful and more successful.” Well said Mr. President, I couldn’t agree more.<br />
So I leave you with this -- The President is very concerned about religious liberty…and also, if you like your religion you can keep your religion.<br />
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Thank you, and may God Bless these United States.<br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-34360523714928454792014-02-17T17:54:00.000-05:002014-08-09T13:25:21.435-04:00How the Pill Changed the Marriage Market<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Paul Adams<br />
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The pill, we have argued, changed everything. It was the technological basis, the shock, that enabled the sexual revolution, with its profoundly negative effects on children and on women, especially those of lower income. The sexual revolution, and hence the pill, is at the heart of just about every social issue social workers and those concerned with poverty and injustice address in our society. Thus my post on <a href="http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/search?q=marriage+justice"><span id="goog_442065134"></span>marriage as a social justice issue<span id="goog_442065135"></span></a> begins thus:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Depending on how you understand the concept of social justice, you can see marriage from several angles as a social justice issue, indeed as central to the possibility of a just society. Historically (and universally) our most child-centered institution, marriage and the marriage-based family reduce the risk of poverty, crime, mental and physical illness, poor educational outcomes, domestic or intimate partner violence, and so on. The marriage gap between the more educated and affluent on one hand and the poor and middle class, both Black and white, on the other is widening and that is increasing inequality (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&utm_source=RTA+Lu+marriage&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email&" style="color: #6699cc; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #0726a7; letter-spacing: 0px;">DeParle, 2012</span></a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Caste-America-Post-Marital-ebook/dp/B004BKK2OE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381773479&sr=1-1&keywords=hymowitz+marriage" style="color: #6699cc; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #0726a7; letter-spacing: 0px;">Hymowitz, 2006</span></a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-America-1960-2010-ebook/dp/B00540PAXS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381772936&sr=1-1&keywords=murray+coming+apart" style="color: #6699cc; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #0726a7; letter-spacing: 0px;">Murray, 2012</span></a>). <a href="http://futureofchildren.org/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=37&articleid=107&sectionid=694" style="color: #6699cc; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #0726a7; letter-spacing: 0px;">Amato (2005)</span></a> shows the profound impact on children of changes in family structure since 1970 when the sexual revolution took off. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">It included the explosion of divorce, increase in non-marital births, cohabitation, and fatherless and blended families. The revolution’s defining feature was the destigmatization and increased incidence of almost all kinds of sex inside and especially outside of marriage.</span></blockquote>
In her pathbreaking book, Mary Eberstadt spells out in detail how the pill fundamentally changed the balance of power in the relations between men and women. Nobel-prizewinning economist <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/1996/08/childrenfamilies-akerlof">George Akerlof and Janet Yellen</a>, his wife and recently appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, pointed out that it was not the lack of marriageable black males or the perverse incentives of welfare policy that had produced these dramatic social changes - the effects of these and other common explanations were relatively minor - but the technological shock itself:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Around 1970, the United States experienced a reproductive technology shock. The legalization of abortion and dramatic increase in the availability of contraception gave women the tools to control the number and timing of their children. Over the ensuing 25 years, however, there have been huge increases in the number of single-parent families headed by unmarried mothers. The usual economic explanations welfare benefits and the declining availability of good jobs explain only a small fraction of the change. In our view, it was the technology shock itself that, by eroding the age-old custom of shotgun marriage, paradoxically raised out-of-wedlock birth rates instead of lowering them.</blockquote>
The "price" men had to pay for sex, in terms of women's demanding marriage or the promise of marriage (more or less enforced by the woman's family and the culture), fell through the floor as sex became delinked from the risk of pregnancy. The pill became widely available in the 1960s and legal abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy soon followed in the 1970s. Here is a new nine-minute "research animate" that explains the revolutionary changes in the economics of mating and the marriage market, and how they have worked to women's disadvantage, from the <a href="http://www.austin-institute.org/">Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture</a>.<br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-19887229323868265762014-02-09T12:46:00.001-05:002014-02-09T12:46:47.811-05:00Cruel and Unnecessary<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"> </span><img src="http://mercatornet.com/images/stories/hr.jpg" style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;" vspace="0" /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"> 5:14:48 PM</span><br />
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<span style="color: #006683;"><b>The One Child Policy Revisited</b></span></div>
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We’ve talked many times on this blog about the One Child Policy in China. We’ve discussed its <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/12213" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">horrendous human cost</a>: <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/9997" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">the forced abortions; the dead babies and dead mothers</a>; the forced sterilisations; and the drastic curtailment of <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/11237" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">the Chinese people’s liberty</a>. We’ve also discussed the <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/13206" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">social</a> and economic effects - the <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/12610" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">lack of girls and women</a>, the shrinking labour force and the ageing population. We’ve also discussed the difficulty that China will have in reversing its low fertility rate anytime soon. Against all of these horrendous costs, the apologists (and there have been a few in the commentators on this blog) of the policy have posited its one unquestioned boon – the curtailment of China’s runaway population explosion up to 1980.<br />
Well, today I’m going to question that boon. <a href="http://io9.com/did-chinas-one-child-policy-actually-reduce-population-1511784972" style="color: #006683; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">In the io9 website</a>, I came across this article that downplays the effect that the one child policy had upon China’s birthrate. As the author says:<br />
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<em>“...a rising group of demographers and sociologists is disputing that [the one child policy slowed China’s population growth]. By taking a closer look at population figures before and after the policy took effect, and by doing a more careful statistical analysis, researchers have found that China’s population growth rate would have decreased in any case, and the policy was not just cruel, but unnecessary.”</em></div>
Cai Yong, a sociology professor at University of North Carolina has tried to reconstruct what would have happened in China had the policy not been introduced in 1980 (a hard thing to do as a counterfactual cannot be proven). However, by studying the fertility rates of 16 comparable countries, Cai and his co-authors found that the projections of China’s future birth rate made when the policy was put in place was unrealistic. The Chinese government predicted that China’s birth rate would slow at a much slower rate than we can see the 16 comparable countries actually achieved.<br />
Cai noted that Chinese Amercians have a fertility rate og 1.5 children per woman, similar to China’s in 2010. Japan has been around 1.3 children per woman for the last 30 years while Taiwan’s fertility rate is about 1 child per woman. Women in these countries have of course no one child policy to coerce fewer births.<br />
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<em>“Cai and his colleagues also did a Bayesian analysis of China’s birth rate from 1970 to 1980 and tried to project what the trend would have been from 1980 onwards, if nothing else had changed. And they found a decline similar to the one observed in other countries. So it seems likely that China could have reached a level of 1.5 children per women [sic] by 2010 regardless – but the decline might have been less steep.”</em></div>
In the decade prior to the one child policy being introduced in 1980 China’s fertility rate had halved from 5.8 to 2.8 children per women. This was in part due to governmental programmes that encouraged fewer children, but were less brutal than the one child policy. The government made birth control easier to access, gave study sessions and meetings and the terrible economic conditions at the time also encouraged fewer children. However, there were forced abortions stories making their way into the western press by as early as 1973. So prior to 1980, the policy may have been less brutal, but was still pretty terrible!<br />
Interestingly in 1974 the Chinese denounced western calls for birth control at the UN as part of an imperialist agenda. However, after experimenting with other policies over the next few years, the Chinese government had decided by 1980 that birth control and abortions were actually the way to go. Despite the policy’s numerous loopholes, by 2005 this had resulted in 63 percent of Chinese couples being restricted to one child only.<br />
Furthermore, the researchers have found that attitudinal changes have come about through the three decades of the policy. Cai published another paper in which he surveyed 30,000 women in Jiangsu Province. A third of these women were eligible to have a second child but only a third of these eligible women would consider having another child. Further, when Cai returned to the province, only four percent of those eligible women had actually had a second child. Mara Hvistendahl, author of “Unnatural Selection: Choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men” says that:<br />
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<em>“Perhaps the largest success of the policy, if you can call it that, is that it really turned China into a one-child [country]. Many people just don’t want more than one child now.”</em></div>
As Cai notes, it’s much easier to reduce the fertility rate than it is to increase it. So the growth rate of China’s population will continue to shrink and Cai expects China’s population to sink in the future. Its labour force is shrinking and China will lose its competitive edge in that field. Men will find it harder to find wives. The population will get older and greyer. In fact, there’s plenty to suggest that we should talk about the one child policy in the same category as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. That is, it’s another tragic disaster that we can lay at the feet of an overweening despotic state. Let us hope, once again, that this disaster will be brought to an end soon.<br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-21339460732969620202014-02-06T10:33:00.002-05:002014-02-06T16:56:38.395-05:00Can Art and Art Schools Be Saved from the Pretentious and the Bureaucratic? - Paul Adams<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The parody <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=328301737610513476#editor/target=post;postID=1266486003110015871;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=1;src=postname">posted below</a> of pretentious indie films, like all good parodies, calls for some more serious reflection on the state of affairs it mocks. Here's another parody of the pretentious, in this case an art student using every contemporary cliche to explain what he is doing with his artistic efforts.<br />
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As my daughter, an art school graduate, pointed out in response, "The thing is, though, that you can't just present a piece for critique and be like, 'I just thought this would look cool...' So you have to pull something like this out of…."<br />
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She has a point. Certainly you can be a great jazz pianist or painter or sculptor without being able to talk coherently about what you are doing. They are different skills. It is in the nature of art that it cannot be reduced without loss to some other form of expression, poetry to prose, Jane Austen's novels to analytical philosophy. That was Tolstoy's point in seeing parable as the essence of art. Good art, as opposed to kitsch, is true. But it says what it says, shows what it shows, precisely as parable. You can take much longer, as homilists necessarily do, to expound on a parable's 'meaning', but not without some loss. Should the art student even be expected to jump through those hoops that reduce his work to cliché, even if it is better than that? And my daughter is surely right to point out, as she goes on to do, that students in other fields in the humanities and social sciences are also given to pretentiousness. But students do vary enormously in their capacity to make a reasoned argument (not a strength of social workers, I'm afraid, who also claim "other strengths"). Of course, as the parody of indie films shows, the cliches can be in the art itself, not just the artist's explanation of it.<br />
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But there is something about the arts in modern times that makes them particularly hard to talk about. Made harder still by what German writer Martin Mosebach calls the senile avantgardism of the last century that aims even in its aging practitioners to shock, <i>épater les bourgeois</i>, like permanent adolescents. Here's what he says in his book on the destruction in Europe of liturgy, altars, sacred music, art, and architecture over the past 40 years,<i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heresy-Formlessness-Martin-Mosebach-ebook/dp/B0044KLOV6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391699358&sr=8-1&keywords=mosebach+formlessness">The Heresy of Formlessness</a></i>:<br />
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The 20th century cult of youth culminates in a cruel curse: while the aging process cannot be stopped, the aging human being is not allowed to mature. and is condemned, until his life's end, to play the long-dead games of his youth. This is most clearly seen in the world of art--which is so closely related to religion--where the avantgardisms of 1905 are still being repeated again and again, as an ossified ritual, a hundred years later. And, with her famous aggiornamento, the Church thinks that, in order to survive, she needs to 'open herself' to these senile avantgardisms!" (pp.81-82). </blockquote>
Look at this <a href="http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/wellesley/2014/02/realistic_statue_of_man_in_his_underwear_at_wellesley_college_sparks_controversy.html">piece of silliness</a> recently installed at a prestigious women's college. Note how the museum director defends or explains the sculpture not as good, true, or beautiful, but as "provoking dialogue" or "starting discussion." On the flip side of that same coin, there is this deadening tendency to destroy art by bureaucratizing or deconstructing it, or bureaucratizing deconstruction: See this piece by one of my favorite essayists, <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/how-common-core-devalues-great-literature?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29">Anthony Esolen</a>, on the Common Core Curriculum and how it destroys literature and the capacity to appreciate it.<br />
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On the other hand, here is <a href="http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/2014/01/sacred-art-by-cornelius-sullivan.html">a piece (posted on this site January 21, 2014</a>) by my friend, the artist Cornelius Sullivan, who <i>is</i> able both to write about and practice art. He bemoans the lack of a department of sacred art in any Catholic university. People have sent his essay to college presidents, provosts, and trustees (ours anyway). After reading Esolen on what happens to art in the hands of educational bureaucrats, as well as Cornelius's own comments on the Reformation-like iconoclasm in Catholic colleges and the self-referential elitism of modern art, I wonder if Cornelius shouldn't be careful what he wishes for. I am sure he would agree, we need not only departments of sacred art at our centers of Catholic learning and culture, but ones that reflect the understanding of and sensitivity to art, and sacred art in particular, that he offers here and that is in such short supply - according to the parody above - in the art schools and art students of our time.<br />
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-12664860031100158712014-02-03T17:21:00.002-05:002014-02-03T17:21:55.107-05:00Pretentious hipster indie films parodied<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-26592910303001817292014-01-28T09:56:00.000-05:002014-01-28T09:56:46.534-05:00Prejudice as strong as ever? by Sheila Liaugminas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px;"> </span><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px;">| 28 Jan 2014 |</span></div>
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<img height="200" src="http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/2013/0122-roe-wade-abortion-anniversary/14823967-1-eng-US/0122-Roe-wade-Abortion-Anniversary_full_600.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 5px 10pt 10px 10px;" width="300" />It takes many forms, and it snakes its way through cultural relativism. But it’s alive and very active.<br />
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The topic is probably worth a book, certainly a long article or series. For purposes of a manageable blog post for now, let’s look at some recent events in light of other related events and see how the pieces fit together to form a picture.<br />
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Fr. Robert Barron is the force and the voice behind the Catholicism Series. So he’s an important voice to listen to when he speaks out about some recent <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/369107/why-anti-catholic-prejudice-ought-bother-everyone-rev-robert-barron" style="color: #412c84; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">anti-Catholic outbursts</a>, and why they should bother everyone.<br />
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Last week two outrageously anti-Catholic outbursts took place in the public forum. The first was an article in U.S. News and World Report by syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm. Ms. Stiehm argued that the Supreme Court was dangerously packed with Catholics, who have, she averred, a terribly difficult time separating church from state and who just can’t refrain from imposing their views on others. Her meditations were prompted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s granting some legal breathing space to the Little Sisters of the Poor, who were objecting to the provisions of the HHS mandate. As even a moment’s thoughtful consideration would reveal, this decision hadn’t a thing to do with the intrusion of the “church” into the state, in fact just the contrary. Moreover, the appeal of American citizens (who happen to be Catholic nuns) and the decision of a justice of the Supreme Court in no way constitute an “imposition” on anyone. The very irrationality of Stiehm’s argument is precisely what has led many to conclude that her column was prompted by a visceral anti-Catholicism which stubbornly persists in our society.</div>
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Clearly and correctly stated. This is true.<br />
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The second eruption of anti-Catholicism was even more startling. In the course of a radio interview, Governor Andrew Cuomo blithely declared that anyone who is pro-life on the issue of abortion or who is opposed to gay marriage is “not welcome” in his state of New York. Mind you, the governor did not simply say that such people are wrong-headed or misguided; he didn’t say that they should be opposed politically or that good arguments against their position should be mounted; he said they should be actively excluded from civil society! As many commentators have already pointed out, Governor Cuomo was thereby excluding roughly half of the citizens of the United States and, presumably, his own father, Mario Cuomo, who once famously declared that he was personally opposed to abortion. Again, the very hysterical quality of this statement suggests that an irrational prejudice gave rise to it.</div>
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This needs to be addressed and confronted. Fr. Barron takes us back through historical anti-Catholicism and it’s good to remind Americans of what it was.<br />
But…<br />
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What is particularly troubling today is the manner in which this deep-seated anti-Catholicism is finding expression precisely through that most enduring and powerful of American institutions, namely the law. We are a famously litigious society: The law shapes our identity, protects our rights, and functions as a sanction against those things we find dangerous. Increasingly, Catholics are finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, especially in regard to issues of sexual freedom. The HHS mandate is predicated upon the assumption that access to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs is a fundamental right, and therefore to stand against facilitating this access, as the Church must, puts Catholics athwart the law. The same is true in regard to gay marriage. To oppose this practice is not only unpopular or impolitic, but, increasingly, contrary to legal statute. Already, in the context of the military, chaplains are encouraged and in some cases explicitly forbidden to condemn gay marriage, as this would constitute a violation of human rights.</div>
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And this is why the remarks by Andrew Cuomo are especially chilling. That a governor of a major state — one of the chief executives in our country — could call for the exclusion of pro-lifers and those opposed to gay marriage suggests that the law could be used to harass, restrict, and, at the limit, attack Catholics. Further, the attitude demonstrated by the son of Mario Cuomo suggests that there is a short path indeed from the privatization of Catholic moral convictions to the active attempt to eliminate those convictions from the public arena. I would hope, of course, that it is obvious how this aggression against Catholics in the political sphere ought deeply to concern everyone in a supposedly open society. If the legal establishment can use the law to aggress Catholics, it can use it, another day, to aggress anyone else.</div>
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Which recalls Martin Niemoller’s ‘<a href="http://hmd.org.uk/resources/poetry/first-they-came-pastor-martin-niemoller" style="color: #412c84; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">First They C</a><span style="text-decoration: underline;">ame</span>…”<br />
Which precisely gets to the point of the Nazi Holocaust and the belief in ‘lebensunwertens lebens’, or ‘life unworthy of life’, when an entire class of human beings can be denied any human rights when another class has power over them.<br />
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And that gets to this past week’s anniversary of Roe v. Wade in America, 41 years of abortion on demand. And President Obama’s remarks to observe that anniversary. And Fr. Barron’s assistant Brandon Vogt taking those remarks to task, <a href="http://brandonvogt.com/why-the-president-is-wrong-on-abortion/" style="color: #412c84; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">challenging the message</a>.<br />
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Here’s the message:<br />
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Statement by the President on <em>Roe v. Wade</em> Anniversary</div>
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Today, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health. We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom. And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children. Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.</div>
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Here’s Brandon Vogt’s challenge:<br />
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Though relatively short, the President’s statement is packed with several confusing assertions. I’d like to respond to some of them:</div>
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“[W]e recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health.”</div>
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It’s true that every woman should have liberty to make decisions regarding her own body, but not the body of another. Modern embryology affirms that a new human life is created at fertilization (i.e., conception.) Therefore abortion intentionally destroys the life, and thus the body, of an innocent human being. We all should have choices, but nobody should have the freedom to murder anyone else.</div>
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“We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care.”</div>
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Everyone agrees that women (and men) deserve safe, affordable healthcare. That’s not the question. The question is whether the restrictions put in place by Roe v. Wade constitute healthcare. Unfortunately, they primarily concern the right of mothers to uninhibitedly take the life of their children. It’s not healthcare to disrupt a healthy and normally functioning process (e.g., pregnancy) nor is it healthcare to destroy the health of unborn babies.</div>
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“[We reaffirm a woman’s] constitutional right to privacy”</div>
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Like many Constitutional rights, the right to privacy is not absolute. In the eyes of the law, what a woman does with her own body in her own environment is her own concern. Yet when her choices threaten the lives of innocent others, the common good trumps her right to privacy. We all intuitively understand this. It’s why we agree that invading drug labs trumps a drug dealer’s right to privacy. The same principle applies here: women have a right to privacy, but not at the expense of innocent lives.</div>
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“[We reaffirm a woman’s] right to reproductive freedom.”</div>
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I agree! Women should be completely free to reproduce however and, with certain qualifications, wherever and with whomever they will. But <em>Roe v. Wade</em> doesn’t concern reproduction at all. It regards what happens *after* reproduction occurs, after a new, unique, individual human has already been produced by his or her parents. I agree we should promote reproductive freedom but not the freedom to terminate any resulting children.</div>
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This is intellectual honesty we seldom see, directed at each line of the president’s remarks. This is engagement we need.<br />
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“[We resolve to] support maternal and child health”</div>
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I struggle to see how the <em>Roe v. Wade</em> decision supports child health when it seems that 100% of the children it directly affects are no longer alive.</div>
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Yet it doesn’t support maternal health either. By violently disrupting a healthy bodily function, abortion leads to increased depression, cancer, mental illness, future pregnancy complications, and more.</div>
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Also, note the President’s chilling word choice here. He didn’t resolve to support<em>women’s</em> health, but specifically “maternal” health. The word maternal connotes motherhood, and you can only be a mother if you have a child. This subtle choice insinuates that the President knows well that pregnant mothers carry children, not some abstract clump of cells, and therefore abortion is not a neutral surgical procedure. It involves a mother intending the death of her child.</div>
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“[We resolve to] build safe and healthy communities for all our children.</div>
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Again, I struggle to see how the <em>Roe v. Wade</em> decision supports children. Abortion doesn’t result in safe and healthy communities for children. It results in less children.</div>
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“Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.”</div>
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I wholeheartedly agree! And that’s why<em> </em><em>Roe v. Wade</em> should be overturned. The misguided court decision crushes the rights of unborn citizens for the sake of born citizens. It smashes their freedom and opportunity on the altar of false liberty. Everyone in this country deserves the same rights—men, women, and children—especially the smallest and most vulnerable among us.</div>
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Argue with that, and you are defending age discrimination, among other class distinctions.</div>
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<span style="background-color: #fffbef; color: #555555; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;">This article was first published by</span><span style="background-color: #fffbef; color: #555555; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;"> </span><b style="color: #555555; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;">Sheila Liaugminas </b><span style="background-color: #fffbef; color: #555555; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;">and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons license. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following</span><span style="background-color: #fffbef; color: #555555; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;"> </span><a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/info/copyright_and_syndication" style="color: #412c84; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 15px; text-decoration: none;">these guidelines</a><span style="background-color: #fffbef; color: #555555; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;">. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation.</span></div>
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Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328301737610513476.post-39127780295013442042014-01-23T11:52:00.001-05:002014-01-23T11:52:49.047-05:00Fr. Barron on Anti-Catholic Prejudice Then and Now<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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See also Fr. Barron's article, "<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/369107/why-anti-catholic-prejudice-ought-bother-everyone-rev-robert-barron">Why Anti-Catholic Prejudice Ought to Bother Everyone</a>."</div>
Paul Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18102737143876952898noreply@blogger.com0