Cowards Or Tyrants?

The law firm of King & Spalding has taken the cowardly action of bowing to PC threats and withdrawing from the defense of DOMA. That's one way to look at it. Certainly the action is shameful.

Or did they just drive Paul Clement out? Hadley Arkes has been predicting for years that as gay rights laws passed, it would become impossible for anyone defending natural law and natural rights to work for a conventional law firm. From Clement's resignation letter:

"Efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law," Clement continues.  "Much has been said about being on the wrong side of history.  But being on the right or wrong side on the merits is a question for clients.  When it comes to the lawyers, the surest way to be on the wrong side of history is to abandon a client in the face of hostile criticism."

Update: Volokh has a good post, w/ background. The law firm caved to pressure from HRC. Here's what the LA Times --which supports gay marriage-- said about that:

It’s perhaps understandable that leaders of an advocacy group like the Human Rights Campaign would be outraged at the idea of anyone defending a law that they so strongly believe is discriminatory. But the suggestion that it’s shameful for Clement or his firm to do so misunderstands the adversarial process. For one thing, with sharp-witted counsel on both sides making the strongest possible arguments, it is more likely that justice will be done. For another, a lawyer who defends an individual or a law, no matter how unpopular or distasteful, helps ensure that the outcome is viewed as fair. If DOMA is struck down, the fact that it was defended effectively will make the victory for its opponents more credible. . . .

If you want a settled question, you have to be perceived to have won fairly and on the merits, not just by tyranny of the majority. But of course HRC's position is: "Shut up!" 

When Is A Lie Not A Lie?

Here's Robbie George wondering if those LiveAction videos exposing Planned Parenthood are actually moral. I'm not caught up on the whole conversation yet, so won't comment, but basically the matter comes down to an old debate:

The question in dispute between them is whether lying is a legitimate means.  Tollefsen, in line with the teaching of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, argues that lying is always and everywhere wrong, and may never be resorted to, even as a means of preventing wrongful killing and other grave injustices.  His account of the moral wrongness of lying focuses on its damage to the integrity of the liar and to the relationship (the communio) of the liar and the person to whom the lie is directed---damage that is unavoidably done whether one's lying is in a good cause or a bad one.  Kaczor appeals to a counter tradition, one associated with Cassian and St. John Chrysostom, that maintains that there are narrow circumstances in which lying (to those who have "no right to be told the truth") is permissible as a means of frustrating the efforts of a grave wrongdoer to achieve his evil objectives.

George seems to think the Catechism has settled the matter in favor of the former position. I'm thinking about it.
I raise it, however, because my anti-Kant rant last week touched on a similar point, and one of my commenters thought I took the matter of lying to Nazis too lightly (which I admit I did, but my point was about the finiteness of the human condition). Anyway, a commenter at the link shares my own initial reaction:

I can't help but note the comparison to the all-encompassing torture debate of recent years. There was an enormous amount of righteous indignation directed against the idea that one could legitimately debate the scope and meaning of "torture" and acknowledge the hard cases. I'm not sure there's any difference in our present case: "lying" is one of those words where "everyone knows what it means," and yet people are far more willing to debate its scope and meaning and acknowledge its hard cases. The blood just doesn't boil as much and as a result, real inquiry into something we don't know as well as we think we do is possible.

That was my criticism of certain popularizers of Catholic teaching:  the tendency to turn "discussion" into no discussion at all. I would have liked to have had the actual argument rather than just be boxed about the ears.

Update: Various: It is a sin to lie, even to Planned Parenthood. Dawn Eden's post Building a culture of lie; Mark Shea unsure. And then surer. And Pat Archbold on Just Deception Theory.

Let's Repeat The Non-Conformists' Oath

Anyone remember Steve Martin's bit about the non-conformists' oath? Thought of it today when I saw the following bumper sticker (on a prius, natch, with a bunch of other stickers as well).

Annoy Conservatives: think for yourself.

That could go in the "annals of self-awareness" file, except that I got to free-associating about what it means to think for yourself, and decided that "thinking for ourselves" in the manner the bumper sticker envisions is precisely our problem. That kind of thinking for yourself usually precludes learning anything about the topic or listening to anyone.

Which sort of relates to this piece I had in my reader (I am too lazy to make a 2nd post and that's all the segue I can muster) but decided was too funny not to give more attention to it. It's about how "natural" ain't human...or at least about how very selective we are about what we deem "natural." If you read me, you're already familiar with the argument. But the picture captions amused me. And it all winds up to this defense of art and holiness, neither of which is "natural."

Cutting down and processing trees to make paper, grinding bone and plant matter to make ink—all artifice, perfected over centuries. All true poetry is profoundly artificial, a laborious distillation of language: who talks in iambic pentameter?
Even charity is a kind of artifice: we’re not born with the ready-made ability to love our neighbor. Our hearts have to be molded like clay until they start to resemble something beautiful. But that beautiful thing, the thing only achieved in fear and trembling, is our deepest self. We’re made in the image of the great Artist, the great Technician, and our charge is not only to tend the garden, but to complete it.

Out Of Frying Pan

ninme found this interesting article on whether the Bible actually calls homosexuality an abomination. Apparently the word translated as "abomination" is the Hebrew "toevah."

The term toevah (and its plural, toevot) occurs 103 times in the Hebrew Bible, and almost always has the connotation of a non-Israelite cultic practice. In the Torah, the primary toevah is avodah zara, foreign forms of worship, and most other toevot flow from it. The Israelites are instructed not to commit toevah because other nations do so.

Interesting, but not comforting:

Deut. 12:31, 13:14, 17:4, 27:15, and 32:16 further identify idolatry, child sacrifice, witchcraft, and other “foreign” practices as toevah, and Deut. 20:18 says that avoiding toevah justifies the genocide of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanaites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. So, toevah is serious, but it is serious as a particular class of cultic offense: a transgression of national boundary. It is certainly not “abomination.”

Not sure that last sentence follows. The problem God has with idolatry is that "other" nations do it? Child sacrifice would be just fine if it weren't foreign --if the Israelites had come up with it as an organic practice instead of importing it?

In the Book of Proverbs (which comes late in the Bible but which scholars believe to have been composed prior to the Deuteronomic and Levitical material), toevah is used twenty-one times to refer to various ethical failings, including the ways, thoughts, prayers and sacrifices of the wicked (Prov. 3:32, 15:8-9, 15:26, 16:12, 21:27, 28:9), pride (Prov. 6:16, 16:5), evil speech (Prov. 8:7), false weights (Prov. 11:1, 20:10, 20:23), devious heartedness (Prov. 11:20), lying (Prov. 12:22, 26:25), scoffing (Prov. 24:9), justifying the wicked and defaming the righteous (Prov. 17:15). Interestingly, Proverbs 13:19 says that “to turn from evil is toevah to fools,” again suggesting that toevah is something relative in nature. Similarly, Prov. 29:27 says poetically: “An unjust man is toevah to the righteous, and the straightforward man is toevah to the wicked.”

I think I see the distinction the author is trying to make, and the Church beat him to it long ago in saying love the sinner, not the sin. What tempts a man is his cross to bear --a sparring partner in life that will make him a better person if he fights and drag him down and enslave him if he doesn't.  It doesn't make him in himself, ontologically, an abomination. So if what's intended is a rebuke to the "God hates fags" types, bravo. God loves fags, as he loves all of us sinners -- and as He is Mercy itself, the weaker we are, the more we have a claim on that mercy if we care to exercise the claim --sort of a Divine Triage.

But homosexuality still ain't kosher, and this seems willfully dishonest, stretching the distinction beyond where it will go.

Now, if by “abomination,” the King James means a cultural prohibition—something which a particular culture abhors but another culture enjoys—then the term makes sense....In fact, toevah is mostly about idolatry, and male homosexual behavior is only as abominable as remarriage or not keeping kosher.

Or, as noted above, as abominable as idolatry and child sacrifice, deviousness, lying, cheating, stealing and scoffing --i.e. not consistent with goodness and leading man to his own isolation and misery. Only as abominable as other abominations. Only as sinful as other sins.

Furthermore, while the author seems to want to say homosexual acts are like eating bacon --and bacon, we know, makes everything better-- there's the wee little problem of St. Paul, conveniently neglected in the catalog of instances of the term "abomination" in the King James New Testament. Possibly because he refers to homosexual acts --again, acts, not persons-- as "shameful" instead.

So, Homosexuals....you're only as sinful as the heterosexual liars, thieves, gluttons, fornicators, cynics and generally impious all around you. Feel better?

"I'm A Born Humanitarian"

Mike Wallace's 1957 interview with Margaret Sanger. You have to watch! She's about what you'd expect, but Wallace!

The cigarette ad at the beginning is amazing: all natural tobacco with a man's kind of mildness in a crush-proof box. And he talks about the natural law! And the Church's opposition is described as "reasoning but unalterable."

She seems a poisonous old biddy. Half a dozen times he makes her disavow her own statements; he never touches race, where she was particularly offensive, although she does tell us murder's not a sin, but bringing a child into the world who has no chance to even be human (by which she means a WASP) is the greatest sin of all.

He asks her what to do about the 400,000 divorces in the country each year. 400,000!

I love her complaint that in Boston, Catholics have simply out-bred Protestants and are "in control" of that city.

Now Sanger reigns supreme and the poor cigarette's considered immoral.

Curtsy: Mere Comments

Science & The Catholic Mind

Yuval Levin:

One of the great ironies of the stem cell debates of the last few years has been that some of the most serious attention to scientific detail and reality has come from Catholic circles, while some of the most wide-eyed messianic faith-healing talk has come from liberal political (and sometimes even scientific) circles.

With that Levin, no Catholic, introduces the Vatican's latest document on reproductive technologies, Dignitatis Personae. Read up.

Levin makes a further remark about the document:

The view of many of us who have argued against the destruction of embryos for research is that we ought not understand ourselves to be faced with a choice between science and ethics, but with the challenge of championing both, which is a challenge both to scientific ingenuity and to ethical reflection and argument (a case I take up, among other issues, in my recent book on science and democracy).

This observation seems not unrelated to a jacket summary of Fr. Schall's latest,The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays. A summary:

The "Catholic mind" seeks to recognize a consistent and coherent relation between the solid things of reason and the definite facts of revelation. Its thought aims to understand how they belong together in a fruitful manner, each profiting from the other; each being what it is. The Catholic mind is not a confusion of disparate sources. It respects and makes distinctions. It sees where things separate. It is in fact delighted by what is.

Delighted by what is. Not suppressing what is, not denying what is, delighting in it. That's the Catholic mind and that's the culture of life.

P.S. Fr. Schall says this relatively new work of Fr. Sokolowski's is so good you can throw away every other philosophical text. Just read this and you'll get it. He also says he makes the points so lucidly you have to be an idiot not to get it. That's some high praise!

Cut Tongues Are Worse Than Cut Throats

Magdi Cristiano Allam --the at least nominally Muslim fellow B16 baptized at the last Easter vigil-- recently gave an interview about his conversion, attributing it largely to B16's witness --especially the Regensberg lecture.

"Thanks to Christianity," he said, "I understood that truth is the other side of liberty: They are an indissoluble binomial. The phrase, 'The truth will make you free' is a principle that you young people should always keep in mind, especially today when, scorning the truth, freedom is relinquished."

And later:

There is a greater and more subliminal danger than the terrorism of 'cut-throats.' It is the terrorism of the 'cut-tongues,' that is, the fear of affirming and divulging our faith and our civilization, and it brings us to auto-censorship and to deny our values, putting everything and the contrary to everything on the same plane: We think of the Shariah applied even in England.

RTWT. About this throw-away observation more later:

The journalist emphasized for the students the importance of an education that goes back to transmitting "an ethical conception of life, with values and rules at the center of everything." A negation of such principles, he contended, "is wild capitalism, which, paradoxically, has its maximum development in communist China."

"We cannot conceive of the person in 'business' terms," he concluded, "and we have to find rules of co-existence that are not founded on materialism. We should redefine our society based on being and not on having."

Mean People Aren't Smart

At the close of his introduction to Jesus of Nazareth, explaining that the work is a private meditation and not Magisterial, Benedict XVI famously declares:

Everyone is free, then, to contradict me.

That’s the line that got the press, but the one that impressed me was immediately following:

I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.

I’ve written previously about the connection between charity (understood as a virtue or habitus—a fixed inclination of the will) and reason, but the topic keeps coming up and it struck me again when I was re-reading The Idea of A University and came across Newman’s description of a gentleman:

He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best.

That's enough to make my point, but it's so good I'll continue a bit:

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice.

There's a lot more. What interests me is that the gentleman doesn’t have these qualities simply because they're beautiful. They are useful:

If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust. ….

Nowhere shall we find greater candor, consideration, indulgence: he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes.

The point being, as the pope indicates in that one line, it is not possible to arrive at truth or understanding on the path of readiness to believe the worst of everyone or, on the other hand, of being easily slighted. At least thusfar, charity is an intellectual virtue:

Such are some of the lineaments of the ethical character, which the cultivated intellect will from, apart from religious principle. They are seen within the pale of the Church and without it, in holy men, and in profligate.

Slavery Today

Among the things that bug me about our current obsessions with race is that dwelling on our past makes us ignorant of the evils we can actually do something about. Power Line has a post calling attention to a new book by Ben Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous. They invite Skinner to summarize his book for their readers and he writes

There are more slaves in the world today than at any point in human history, and A Crime So Monstrous is their story, in full color. For four years, I traveled in over a dozen countries, talking to slaves, traffickers and liberators, going undercover when necessary in order to infiltrate slave trading networks.

The book is a record of evil. I witnessed the sale of human beings on four continents, once being offered a suicidal, mentally handicapped young woman as a sex slave in exchange for a used car.

But it is also a story of survival. A young man in Sudan escapes slavery in the Muslim north, finds Christ, and frees his mother and sisters. A Haitian girl is freed when two Americans of sterling conscience discover her domestic bondage in a suburban Miami home.

And it is a living history of quiet heroism. John Miller, a former Republican congressman appointed to be America's antislavery czar, zealously cajoled foreign governments—friends and foes alike—to bear their responsibility and free their slaves. At the same time, he battled State Department elites in an attempt to convince them that abolition mattered. Thanks to his efforts, the Bush Administration can boast of the most aggressive antislavery record since Lincoln.

The research quickly shattered many of my internationalist preconceptions. Global abolition is part of the UN mandate. But the UN Human Rights Commission cottoned to genocidal regimes like Khartoum that demanded it expunge the word "slavery" from its lexicon, and certain UN peacekeepers actually participated in the slave trade in countries like Eritrea and Cambodia.

My research also reinforced a belief: the pillars of America—faith, the free market, and the inherent nature of human liberty—are also universal ideals, and they are the keys to ending slavery worldwide.

Rowan Williams: "There Is No God But Allah & Mohammed Is His Prophet"

The Archbishop of Canterbury says Shar'i'a is unavoidable. Which would seem to be the Mullahs' position.

Seriously, though: let's ignore for now the hopelessness conveyed by a Christian prelate who thinks Islam is stronger than his own faith and the Muslim citizen incapable of tolerance. Speaking strictly of politics, when he says this:

It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system.

We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances.

Does he really see no difference between conscientious objections and treating different citizens by different rules --with different courts? With police able to arrest some citizens but not others? Your right to life is protected unless you are a Muslim or offend one? Your right to religious liberty is protected unless you are a Muslim or offend one? That spells the end of justice under the law in Britain, not a minor accommodation. That's to say, politically speaking, some are more equal than others.

[Private wish: please, oh please, public Christians! Study political philosophy a tiny wee bit before making sweeping political proclamations. Heavy sigh.]

Perhaps this would be the time to note there are now more practicing Catholics in Great Britain than members of the Church of England. And don't think Catholics haven't noticed. Fr. Aidan Nichols' program in that final link is programatically the opposite of the Archbishop of Canterbury's. The former expects the springtime of evangelization, the latter the inevitability of Islam.

Update: Britons losing grip on reality. Perhaps this explains everything: a quarter of the Brits think Churchill is a fictional character, while 58% think Sherlock Holmes was a real historical personage. Others who never existed: Richard the Lionhearted, Florence Nightingale, the Duke of Wellington, Charles Dickens, Gandhi.

Faith, Reason & The Embryo

Apropos the wisdom of Gov. Huckabee's rhetoric in supporting the Human Life and Federal Marriage proposed amendments to the Constitution, here's Robbie George explaining the approach he took in his new book (with Christopher Tollefson): Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. From an interview in Laywitness:

LW :You propose that religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for making the argument against the destruction of human embryos. What role does religion have to play in the pro-life argument? Why is it important that people of faith learn the scientific and philosophical arguments?

His first point is self-evident, I think. Communication and persuasion require common ground:

RG: I think Christians have to understand that very many of our fellow citizens are not Christians, or are not devout Christians, or do not hold an understanding of Christianity that affirms right out of the blocks the moral status of the human embryo. So they deserve to hear the argument for that proposition, and I think it’s incumbent upon Christians to do that—to make that argument in the public square and to appeal to common sources such as reason itself, science, and our basic philosophical stances articulated in the Declaration of Independence. It simply won’t be persuasive to citizens who don’t accept the authority of the Bible or the authority of the Church that the Bible or the Church says “this is so.” So one reason I think Christians need to learn to make these arguments is that this is the currency of public debate in our culture. And I think it’s good that that’s the case. I think it’s good that we can lay aside our distinctive and different religious beliefs in an area like this and argue on the basis of the philosophy and science—on the basis of reasons that are accessible to all, what are sometimes called “public reasons.”

But isn't this interesting? We're all so accustomed in a pluralist environment to "tolerating" differences of faith, it turns out even for believers the arguments from reason are stronger motivators than those of faith:

And number two, I think Christians need to learn this argument so they will be motivated to act for the sake of justice. Even if we don’t appeal to religion to determine whether an embryo is a human being—that’s a scientific question—once we’ve determined that an embryo is a human being, and determined, in view of our commitment to the equal dignity of all human beings (all members of the human family), that the human embryo deserves our respect and protection, I think faith should motivate people to go out there and act for the sake of defending the defenseless, act for the sake of protecting the vulnerable. Just as it was faith that motivated so many people to exercise leadership roles and to support the civil rights movement and to overcome racial injustice, I think similarly faith should motivate all of us—Christians, Jews, people of other faiths—to act in defense of the vulnerable human embryo who right now is subject to being manipulated and destroyed in biomedical research.

This is precisely why, as I've pointed out before, it is the pro-choice side that continually tries to make the abortion question a matter of religious faith. Instinctively it realizes that if believers can be made to think their opposition to abortion is something that can be known only through Revelation --such as the Trinity or the hypostatic union-- they'll be unmotivated to "impose their view" on others. Faith, after all, is a gift. The defense of the unborn is a question of justice precisely because we can demonstrate rationally and scientifically that the embryo is a person. That's something everyone can know, not something that must be received as a revelation. People of faith defend the unborn because it is just; and because they are people of faith, they're especially motivated to promote justice for all.

Ezra Levant, Peacemaker

Here's a post that compiles in one place all of Ezra Levant's comments before the Alberta HRC. He says this additionally in an interview:

we can’t have a system that is based on giving a veto to the most thin-skinned person in the room.

What I regard as unreasonable is different from what you regard as unreasonable and what I regard as offensive is different from what you do. And the only way we are going to be able to reconcile that in such a diverse society and I mean diverse intellectually, diverse politically, diverse religiously is if we say “well we are going to allow it all, as long as it doesn’t actually hurt anybody”, as long as it’s not incitement to violence or fraud, in fact I list about ten instances in one of my videos of the limits. For example, copyright is a limit on free expression in a way. Anyone who signs a confidentiality agreement is limiting their free expression. But we accept all of this because there is a basis of law in our culture for that.”

As long as a political or religious discussion does not flip over into a culture of violence, Levant believes that we should let our offended feelings go. “In a typical day we are probably offended by ten or twenty things. I can’t turn on the news at night without being offended. The number one response, just to keep our sanity, is to ignore things and to brush them off and not take things so personally. And if something just sticks in our craw, then rebut it, write a letter to your editor, call a radio talk show. And if you are really revved up by something, well then get politically active, start an activist group, lobby for a change. There is a degree in how we respond. That’s a civil society.”

Moreover, it doesn't take much to see that the suppression of speech is a threat to order:

Levant believes that if free speech is limited in civil society, violence will be the natural consequence. “If someone has an emotion, they feel a grievance, they feel like things are not fair, talking about it not only helps affect change, but it’s a way of dealing with issues. And if you are not allowed to say what is on your mind if the state forces you to apologize, I think that breeds deeper and deeper anger and resentment. Like pressure building in a pipe. So not only does free speech vent those feelings, but actually makes it possible for the world to be changed to remedy the underlying problem.”

Is it not obvious that the inevitable result of HRC suppression of speech will be to cause the hatred of Muslims (and others) it's meant to prevent? Speech --even rude and hateful speech-- beats dueling and gang warfare.

Equal Time For Huckabee

In fairness I must agree with Prof. K. that Huckabee's re-formulation of his understanding of the amendment process passes muster. As a matter of political strategy, I think Fred Thompson's understanding that as President you do more to advance the social issues agenda by calling attention to it and taking the small steps you can take in 4 years than by contenting yourself with support for an amendment process in which you have no role. At this stage in the game, we shouldn't be focusing on amendments. But I will even concede that Huckabee's understanding of the matter is better than Fred's, at least as expressed here:

if Roe v. Wade is overturned, we haven’t won the battle. All we’ve done is now we’ve created the logic of the Civil War, which says that the right to the human life is geographical, not moral. I think that’s very problematic. That’s why I think that people like Fred Thompson are dead wrong when he says just leave that up to the states. Well, that’s again the logic of the Civil War – that slavery could be okay in Georgia but not okay in Massachusetts. Obviously we’d today say, “Well, that’s nonsense. Slavery is wrong, period.” It can’t be right somewhere and wrong somewhere else. Same with abortion.

I'm not so content with this comment, however.

it’s not a matter that we’re going to become left-wingers. I don’t think that at all. I think taking care of the earth is a matter of stewardship. It’s not about global warming, it’s about stewardship and responsibility. Things like hunger and homelessness. And it’s not about having a government program, it’s about simply reminding each of us as individual citizens that this is an area of our own responsibility. At my own church… our church is very, very engaged in everything from dealing with hunger, poverty, and we reach out to a lot of people. We don’t ask the government to do it. We do it ourselves as a church. It’s part of our ministry. The only reason the government would get involved would be that the other social institutions – primarily the family the church the neighborhood – failed. If the family or church does its own work and does it well, then there’s no reason for government to ever get into these things at all. The ideal is that they wouldn’t, that they’ll do a lousy job of it
generally.

Sounds good. But I fear (a fear substantiated by his record in Arkansas and the things he advocates on the stump) that Huckabee would be quite quick on the trigger in deciding that individuals and institutions have failed or are failing and therefore government should step in. I need to hear some specifics about how we enable the mediating institutions to do their work, primarily by getting the government regulationcrats out of the way. (Please don't tell me about the Fair Tax and abolishing the IRS, which can't be done in 4 years, even if it's a good idea, which I doubt.)

Don't Look At Me, Pope Says, I Ain't Sayin' A Thing

Slate's running two excerpts from Tim Harford's The Logic of Life, in which he uses rational choice theory to explain the forces that shape our world. The first argues that the Pill has turned men into slackers.

...the existence of other women who are a little freer with their favors weakens the bargaining power of the Madonnas, and means that men have less incentive to marry. Some men will not bother at all, feeling that they can get all they want from a lifestyle. Or they may delay marriage until middle age, cutting down on the pool of marriageable men and increasing male bargaining power.

As we have seen, the rational response is for women to go to college, bringing them both better prospects in the job market and better prospects in the marriage market. Meanwhile, the more capable women become of looking after children by themselves, the less men need to bother. It's a textbook case of free-riding: with highly-educated women in excess supply, men have realized that they can get sex, and even successful offspring, without ever moving too far from the La-Z-Boy chair and the potato chips. Statistics seem to bear this out. There are nowadays four US women graduating from university for every three men, and this is not a particularly American phenomenon: in 15 out of 17 rich countries for which the data are available, more women are graduating than men. The most educated men in the United States were born just after the second world war and graduated in the mid 1960s—male graduation rates dipped after that, and have not yet returned to that peak. The rational choice perspective suggests it is probably not coincidental that this decline set in roughly when women got hold of the contraceptive pill.

Tomorrow he'll demonstrate that The Pill is responsible for our divorce rate.

Instacurtsy.

Compatibility Is Not Identity

There's a little discussion of the Huckabee comment I quoted here going on at NLT (thanks for the link). Prof. K. links to a succinct statement of the problem from Bob Sasseen, who was president of UD when I was there. Worthwhile to RTWT, but here's the conclusion.

the Declaration's principles and argument refute the claims of the Secularists who would kick God out of our politics, laws, and customs. Nor do they support the claims of those Christians who proclaim that our regime is founded on the Gospel or its Christian principles. Compatibility is one thing; identity is another.

Our regime does not recognize a triune God whose essence is love. Our regime is ordered to freedom and justice, not to the advent of the Kingdom of God. Nor does our regime command either love of God or love of neighbor as does the Gospel. Finally, Christ founded a Church, not a polity. Salvation is to be found only in Christ and through Christ. It is not to be found in politics, or through politics, or through the founding or reconstitution of the political and social order. That belief is idolatry.

(Sasseen explicitly recognizes that the folks he's arguing with --and by extension Huckabee, whom he was not directly addressing-- are not preaching said idolatry. He's just saying they're making a mistake.)

By way of comparison and contrast, let's set Huckabee's comment

[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards.

Beside Fred Thompson's response to a question about whether he'd continue Bush's funding against AIDS "as a Christian, as a Conservative" (questioner's words):

“Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson said. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”

(He wasn't saying he wouldn't, by the way, just that he preferred not to campaign by such appeals:

“I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that,” he said. “With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you – we’ve got a lot of problems here, and we all may have our one that’s affected us the most, but it’s a broad array. And a president who will tell you the truth is that we have to look across the board and do what we can and what we should based upon the severity of the problem and the chances that our research money will do some good in these areas.”)

(Instacurtsy for the Thompson stuff.)

More: See Matthew Spalding's short piece on religious liberty here.

America does not depend on a shared theology, but it does depend on a shared morality. In his First Inaugural Address, the first president said that 'there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness' and that no nation can prosper that 'disregards the external rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.' Jefferson put it more succinctly: The people, who are the source of all lawful authority, 'are inherently independent of all but the moral law.'

Bonus Points If You Recognize This

Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man's material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place --that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

The root difference between Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man's nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior part of man's nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man's spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand, --in the name of a concern for "human beings"-- regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their characteristic approach is to harness the society's political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel "progress." In this approach I believe they fight against Nature.

Scroll over:Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of A Conservative

Trans-Fat Bans, Smoking Laws, Gun Laws & Hate Crimes Legislation Explained

The notion of freedom as personal autonomy is superficially attractive; endorsed by intellectuals, the media, legislatures, and the courts, it becomes a powerful cultural force. Yet it ultimately destroys the personal good of individuals and the common good of society. Freedom-as-autonomy, by its single-minded focus on the autonomous will of the individual as the sole organizing principle of public life, dissolves the bonds of obligation between men and women, parents and children, the strong and the weak, majorities and minorities. The result is the breakdown of civil society, and a public life in which the only actors of consequence are the autonomous individual and the state. This, as the twentieth century ought to have taught us, is a sure prescription for tyranny.

--John Paul the II, to the bishops of the state of Texas on their ad limina visit, 1998 RTWT. Short and excellent.

Free Mark Steyn, II

Mark Steyn on "Christmas with counsel.

"Here's my bottom line: I don't accept that free-born Canadian citizens need the permission of the Canadian state to read my columns. What's offensive is not the accusations of Dr Elmasry and his pals, but the willingness of Canada's pseudo-courts to take them seriously.

Right-o. Some fans started a Free Mark Steyn site. The editor of Human Events stands up for Steyn and others. Robert Spencer writes Stand by Steyn.

wherever offensive speech is prohibited, the tyrant’s power is solidified. That is no less so in this case, although the tyrant in question is of a different kind.

Kathy Shaidle's been all over the Steyn case (scroll around). She or someone created that banner ad up top (that it doubles as an anti-Hillary ad is bonus). David Warren points out that if we won't have free speech, we will have much worse.

We, in the West, do not legislate for the Dar al-Islam (the Muslim realm). On the contrary, we endure the fallout from countries in which, because the right to free speech is not secure, opposition to authority must be expressed through violence.

I make this hard point because it is necessary to understand. “Freedom of expression” did not develop in the West from purely idealistic motives. Nor is it necessarily a pretty thing. Like so much in civil society, we put up with it because the alternative is worse, and we'd rather cope with free speech, than with the free intimidation that results from its suppression.

I Was Wrong. Huzzah!

Tony Popes! (I freely admit I never believed the rumors.)

And meanwhile, Sarko's trying to get the French to moderate secularite. Are the leaders of Europe beginning to read Benedict?

The Still-Empty Manger

At right is a manger from about the time of Christ's birth. It was found inthe town of Megiddo (Armageddon), which you can see from the Mt. of Transfiguration. (Holy Land Photos.)

The redoubtable Padre Schall has a lovely Advent meditation. It's about waiting.

My own childhood memories of the days leading up to Christmas were ones of waiting and expectancy. These are both great categories of finite being. Without the waiting, the reality of Christmas is not nearly so wondrous. Some things we cannot have unless we wait for them to be what they are. I sometimes suspect that this unwillingness to wait is the besetting sin of modern times. It has something to do with the replacing of a hope rooted in the divine by a hope transferred into a human project, something discussed in detail in Pope Benedict's latest encyclical.

And choice:

Often I think that purely "human" history--a history conceived as depending on no transcendent order--means letting us human beings conjure up for ourselves the best way of live. Then, once we have produced what we think we want, we find out not only that we do not want it, but that it is not worth having once we get it. God has a purpose in letting us attempt to make our own world. He long ago discovered that, if free beings like ourselves are warned about some route not to travel, the first thing we know is that they are busy traveling on it as if that is the only way to go. I have often thought that God does not bother to prove us wrong. He lets us do it ourselves. We only have to look with cold eyes at the results of our own confabulations.

And growth:

The verb "to grow" means that a living thing directs itself to the fullness, to the flourishing of its own being. If a toad grows up to be a chicken, we do not call it "growth." We call it a monstrosity. A connection exists between what a thing is and what it ought to come to be. It comes to be ultimately because of what it ought to be. This "growth" is especially true when it comes to ourselves. The hitch with us is that to be what we are intended to be, we have to get into the act ourselves. No one, not even God, can make us what we ought to be if we do not
choose to be what we ought to be. This is why everything in the divine dealings with our kind passes through our minds and our wills. God, as it were, does not want us unless we want Him.

And from there to what Christmas means.

Other items:

• I meant to post Ken Masugi's latest excellent interview w/ the good Padre. Just a taste:

The voluntarist strands in Islamic and other philosophies were designed to prevent anything from being taken away from the Godhead, from Allah. Thus, if we postulate a creation of secondary causes, that is, of beings who were free and who could act, we would somehow denigrate the Godhead by claiming that something in the world was not caused by Allah. Thus even what I do must really be the effect of Allah, not me. To praise God means to be totally submissive to the fact that I can do nothing. I acknowledge that nothing comes from myself.

Now the Christian view of this position is that it is a denigration of the power of God, of His glory, to maintain that only what God does really exists and acts. God is greater because beings other than Himself really exist. They really and freely act. Now if we try to act in a world in which our theology denies the very possibility of our acts meaning anything, then it will be utterly useless for us to try to do anything. Indeed, it will be blasphemous if we claim to do anything.

On these premises, of course, it is difficult to imagine just why there is a world at all. Why would God have gone to the trouble of creating a world in which nothing could happen but what He did? He already knew that. We do not intend here to deny divine providence, but to point out that this providence is really a knowledge of what free creatures do in their freedom. It is not what determines them to do them.

Ultimately, all arguments are theological. What is remarkable about the new encyclical of Benedict on hope is, as I have remarked in my comments on ignatiusinsight.com, is the effort to straighten out the political. By taking away what is not political but theological, we can leave politics to do what it in fact is capable of doing.

• Don't forget the Straussian nature of those "O" antiphons.
  
• Some Advent customs here I'd never heard of.
• And it's not Christmas without this classic Michael Kelly column. Egad! Dead link in that post. Try this (you have to scroll down to comments).