Another day, another set of arguments.
I must admit if I was in her place, I would not have sent the letter, but then I could never be elected to this most liberal part of Virginia, the tony suburbs of Washington DC where she is the only Republican of any kind elected to the Virginia House of Delegates from inside the Beltway.
Even though she represents a profoundly pro-choice area, where abortion is practically a sacrament, she has a stellar pro-life record, voting against state funding of abortion, against abortion funding in a proposed state health exchange, in favor of ultrasound, and she even voted in favor of something that many pro-lifers oppose for prudential reasons, personhood for the unborn child. She voted a single time against an amendment to cut abortion funding from Obamacare but, according to pro-life watchdog Family Foundation of Virginia, she did so as a vote against Obamacare and not as a vote in favor of abortion. And one of her Republican challengers runs on this, and on contraception?
Wait wait wait — what’s this about?
Rewind the tape to Sandra Fluke, of “my birth control is too expensive” fame and the HHS Mandate, which forces everyone to pay a little rider to provide for abortion services and contraceptives. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (DISCLAIMER: nah… not really… I keed) and about 49 other governors now have to comply with the Obamacare regulations for state exchanges — ’tis federal law.
The solution for Jindal? Rather than have the government dispense birth control out gratis to just about everyone in the world, why not make birth control over-the-counter (OTC), take it out of the hands of the federal government, and put it into the hands of the public square to hammer it out?
Given the options between bad and worse, seems like a good play — right? Which is why Del. Comstock and a host of other folks asked for birth control to go over the counter, deciding that the fight was better held in the public square rather than in the 4th Circuit Court.
Not so fast.
Austin Ruse over at C-FAM (DISCLAIMER: … psyche! this is more fun than a guy ought to have… ) does a pretty good job of describing the prisoner’s dilemma that every single delegate and senator (and governor) are having to stare down. It’s tough — there are no clean answers.
For Catholics, it’s even worse.
Three things come into play:
(1) Humanae Vitae and a very clear position on the role of contraception and the primacy of the defense of human life.
(2) Proportionalist ethics.
(3) How to handle those Catholics with whom we disagree.
Obviously, voting against Obamacare in all its forms is a non-starter, since Comstock has been attacked for doing precisely that in the past. As a practicing Catholic, Comstock was given one of two options: make the impact of Obamacare a little less worse, or leave it along and make our current condition worse. It’s what Catholics would term “a St. Thomas More moment” in terms of decision making, to quote:
“You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds…. What you cannot turn to good, you must at least make as little bad as you can.”
— St. Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
Humanae Vitae is the governing encyclical that crystallizes about 2,000 years of Christian teaching, history, Scripture, and Tradition on the dignity of human life. Catholics typically fall into two camps, it’s often said — those who have read Humanae Vitae and those who have not. Pope Paul VI — he himself a victim of making things “as little bad as you can” during the Second World War vis a vis the Jews and Vatican relations with the Third Reich — intuitively knew the consequences of a culture that showed such utter disdain for life. An androgynous culture that objectifies the Other as an object for sex; a culture that would spread the disease of modernist sentiment, viewing individuals as cogs rather than appreciating them for the fullness of their sexuality.
It’s the chief complaint of American feminism of the 1960s and 1970s that contraception, rather than allowing men to see women for who they are, merely lessened women by suppressing their femininity. It is no small part of the reason why a new, more modern feminism looks so unquestionably pro-life on college campuses, classrooms, and among the generation most deeply impacted by Roe v. Wade (18-40 year olds). The feminism of our mothers wasn’t feminism at all — it was a mimicry of masculinity. But I digress… this is philosophical musing on a Sunday morning at this point.
…but it does give rise to the question of proportional ethics, of whom Pope St. John Paul the Great (DISCLAIMER: santo subito!) was famously exclaimed “the terminator of proportionalism” by James Kruggel. Indeed, Veritatis Splendor ought to be requisite reading for anyone looking to faithfully apply Humanae Vitae in a modern context, if for no other reason than John Paul II takes square aim at the very problem we face here with regards to making the HHS Mandate less harmful, in Kruggel’s words:
The conflict in the Church today over moral theology—which prompts McCormick to describe his realist opponents in words like “inquisitor (493),” and “incompetent (499),”—is at its core a conflict over the meaning of the human person. Is the human person a creature, united in body and soul, whose telos is entered and ultimately achieved through receptive assent to reality and adoration of the One who created him? Are we really destined, body-soul whole, for eternal beatitude, in spousal love with God? Or is the human person a creature, radically closed off from objective reality by virtue of a dualized—ultimatelyalienated--body and soul, who (in Plato’s words) are prison and prisoner respectively?
In Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II affirms the former. He convincingly and soundly argues that Church moral teaching must be grounded in the objectively accessible Revelation of God in Scripture and Tradition, and in natural moral law available to natural reason. He does not “logically force” proportionalist moral theologians to say anything they have not argued. In fact, he takes great pains to exposit their arguments accurately—but in realist and essentialist terms, not in the idealist and dualist terms by which they critique him. We cannot assess the components of the moral act—its object, its intention, and its circumstances—correctly, unless we have a valid anthropology and epistemology. By soundly affirming the accurate descriptions of reality provided by Thomas and Aristotle, while affirming the Enlightenment’s and modernity’s concern for human freedom and the dignity of individual human persons, the Pope has provided an excellent rational basis for understanding the implications of Christian Revelation for the moral life. And he has shown that the proportionalism of McCormick does necessarily entail, at its heart, a judgment that nothing is truly wrong anymore.
If you would like me to press #1 for English, the translation is that Catholics are not asked to make decisions based on cutting cards with reality. Rather, should we be forced into a “St. Thomas More” moment, there has to be a telos — an end — that is not an accommodation with evil, but rather a means of outflanking it.
This gives rise to the final point — namely that of how to handle Catholics with whom we disagree, even if we’re all fighting for the same telos.
For one, I do not necessarily agree with the Jindal position. Making birth control and abortifacients more available doesn’t mean we’re moving the ball down the field one iota. Nor do I see the federal government handing out birth control to my daughters gratis like so many M&Ms a real solution either. Of course, were we to suspend that via the federal government… guess what happens next? Birth control goes over the counter.
So what do we do with those who share the same telos but deviate from the ironclad prescriptions in Humanae Vitae? The answer for Catholics is rooted deeply in tradition, and has parallels to today’s rhetoric about the HHS Mandate being the equivalent of dropping a pinch of incense to the Roman Emperor. Quoting from Sandra Sweeny Silver’s magisterial book Rome Versus Christianity:
Many Christians over the centuries cracked under the pressures of torture or fear of torture and death. These people preformed the sacrifice to the Emperor or gods and were let go. After the persecution was over, most of them wanted to be back in fellowship wit the Christian body. This produced a dilemma in the Early Church: should we allow them back after they had denied Christ and sacrificed to pagan gods or should we exclude them permanently from the Church?… One can imagine the heat this problem generated. So many had family and friends tortured and killed. Most had chosen to die rather than to betray their Lord. Just because the persecution was over for a while, why should these lapsii be admitted back into the Church? What kind of faith did they have that could so easily be broken? Could we ever trust them under torture not to betray us to authorities?… The churches eventually came down on the side of the forgivers. The church in Rome wrote to the church in Carthage that if the lapsii were left to their own resources, their fall would be irreparable and they would be lost. The bishop encouraged them to extend their hands to the fallen that they may rise again. Dionysius, a contemporary of Origen, argued that before their martyrdom by Decius in 249-251, even some martyrs had accepted lapsii back int otheir fellowship. Who were they after the persecution was over to “grieve mercy and overturn order?” The chalice of mercy was ever full during the centuries of Christian persecution. (92-96)
There is a huge difference between lapsii and dissent. Dissenters, heterodoxy, and so forth seek to present something far different than the Catholic faith teaches. Lapsii are those who buckle under coercion… those who are presented with situational ethics and choose something different than what the perspective of time or the Ivory Tower would demand as a matter of purity and spiritual rigor.
That is not to say that Marshall, Comstock, Cuccinelli, Saxman, Ware, or any host of Catholic legislators are somehow lacking or lapsii when they choose sides such as these. I’ll allow the reader to determine whether this class of fine Catholic legislators — some of the best we have had in the history of the Commonwealth — have made the right decisions during their tenure at the General Assembly.
But to go down the list of items that come into play:
(1) Catholic legislators have a moral duty to create a society which respects the dignity of human life in all forms and in all conditions.
(2) There is a gulf between proportionalism and taking things one bite at a time.
(3) There is a difference between those forced to make things less bad, and those actively choosing to make things bad.
Imagine if we put this much time and energy in taking on those who really distort the Catholic faith? You know — Nancy Pelosi? John Kerry? Those who vote for policies that promote abortion yet still believe they can take the Eucharist?
As for Comstock, I see her point and the point Governor Jindal is making. It’s a Catholic position with all the right motives and directed towards the right ends. Disagreeing with it is a matter of style, but certainly not one of substance when it comes to Humanae Vitae or Veritatis Splendor.
Austin Ruse was right to call out the politically-driven mummery that condemns Catholics who uphold the spirit of St. Thomas More. True, there may come a time when we are called to surrender our conscience to the state — but that is nothing Catholics haven’t suffered through (and survived) before. At no point in time in history do you find the martyrs condemning the lapsii — perceived or otherwise. Some legislators want to move the ball down the field incrementally; others want the Hail Mary pass on 1st and 10 for an absolute victory. Both have their merits and demerits — but what we should all be looking for, as Catholics (and as Christians) is whether or not we are all working towards the same telos.
That’s Christ, in case anyone was wondering. Those who are focused on something else? Well… they are probably chasing other ends, none of which should merit respect.
