In a post a couple of weeks ago, I noted that New York City is going to allow individuals to change the gender designation on their birth certificates and quoted Joann Prinzivalli of the New York Transgender Rights Organization, who hailed the "move away from American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity," a fixation that is "based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes." By email, Ms. Prinzivalli has offered a lengthy response to my post. Here is an excerpt: When I refer to sex assignment at birth, I refer to the common practice of using genital shape as the guideline - and for over 99% of babies, this works as an accurate assignment. For the visibly intersexed (those having genital ambiguity), the sociocultural imperative drives doctors to perform genital mutilation to make them conform to one or the other of the official assignments. For those who are not visibly intersexed, such as transsexuals, who have some brain structures that develop in a way that closely matches the development in persons of the sex opposite their initial assignment, that initial assignment is incorrect. Additionally, some who are intersexed do not identify with either of the binary assignments. Our society insists that there are two and only two sexes, and while that is true for the large majority, there is a small minority for whom there is a diversity - and that is not merely in gender identity, but in sex assignment as well. I would appreciate the opportunity to respond to your blog with these comments, as well as the following more theological exegesis, which was my homily for the service at last year's International Transgender Day of Remembrance. Looking at your rather impressive list of professional writings, I would think you might find my disagreement with the Magisterium somewhat interesting. I is entirely too bad that the Vatican relied on he terribly warped views of Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins for the "science" behind its sub secretum Y2K document on transsexuals in the Church. . . . . What the Pope and the Christianists refuse to understand, is that the punishment of Sodom was meted out to those who do not accept strangers, and who hate people be-cause they are different. The real "sodomites" are the people who have a rabid hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, because we are different, because we are strangers, because we are eunuchs. But God loves us. There is a further message in the Gospel for those who preach bigotry and hate, and who want to deny human dignity and fair treatment to those of us who are different because we are LGBT. The message of Mathew Chapter 25:31-46 is a warning to the intolerant. When the time comes for Judgment, they will be found wanting. Whatsoever they have done to the least of God’s children, they do to God. Those who insult and hate us, and shoot us in the back of the head, or bludgeon and stab us until we are unrecognizable and dump our bodies in a shallow grave, are not the only ones who will number among the goats. Those whose intolerance in the name of Christ leads them to deny to the members of the LGBT community basic human rights and dignity will fare just as poorly on the Day of Judgment. Like the men of Sodom, their inhospitable and suspicious bigotry is an affront to God as well as to those who are the victims of their persecution. These same Christianists, the real sodomites, also often wrap themselves up in the flag and claim that their concept of Christianity is also patriotic and American. The nation that supposedly guarantees its inhabitants the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, has a history of treating people with injustice. The treatment of slaves, of women, and of LGBT people, has all the same earmarks. You will know them by their works. My prayer for them is this: May God forgive them, if they know not what they do. But they do know what they do, and they believe they are justified, and that is so much sadder, because they are more likely to die unrepentant. And so I pray for them, that they may become open to the knowledge and understanding they need, the strength and courage to change their ways and see the truth, and, inspired by Holy Wisdom, that they no longer be so hard of heart, and that they know peace and love.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Transsexual Rights and the Gospel
Who Are Better Drivers?
Apropos our recent discussion about comparative charitable giving and the Pope's recent statement on Thanksgiving accidents (cited by Rick below), I have to ask: who are better drivers, liberals or conservatives?
-- Mark
PB16's advice for Thanksgiving weekend
Benedict XVI Urges Prudence on Highways
VATICAN CITY, NOV. 19, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI appealed for respect of road-safety norms on the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.
After praying the midday Angelus with the crowds gathered in St. Peter's Square today, the Pope recited in French a prayer to the Lord to receive "in his peace all the persons who died in traffic accidents."
Remembering that the injured often suffer long-lasting problems, the Holy Father appealed "emphatically to automobile drivers to respect traffic norms vigilantly and to pay ever more attention to others."
Traffic accidents are one of the main causes of deaths in the world. In a 2005 report, the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that these accidents, especially frequent in urban areas of developing countries, cause 1.2 million deaths a year, or 3,000 a day. Tens of millions of people are injured.
WHO estimated that, at current trends, by the year 2020 victims of traffic accidents will exceed those of AIDS.
Theocrats in Poland
Books & Culture has an interesting profile of Polish human rights activist Adam Michnik and his respect for the political thought of Pope Benedict and resistance to Catholic fundamentalism in his home country:
"We are witnessing an alliance between a significant part of the clergy and those forces the democrat-skeptic calls 'the new populism.' The rhetoric of the new populists is Manichaean. They claim to be serving the absolute good rooted in the Church's teachings and fighting the absolute evil present in the theories and practices of their adversaries. They intoxicate themselves with the cult of their own sinlessness, narcotizing the public opinion with campaigns against ever new threats, with attacks on ever new scapegoats, with ever new witch-hunts."
"They often declare their ardent anti-communism, and yet they are genuine children of the communist mentality, with its obsessive suspiciousness and its contempt for truth and the law. There lives in the 'new populists' the spirit of homo sovieticus, with its primitive egalitarianism, its collectivistic aversion toward the heretics, its belief that the state should regulate all mechanisms of social life and that the state's will is the source of morality and truth about the world. This becomes particularly powerful when the state—that is, the ruling élite—refers to the Chruch's teachings, and the Church consents to that."
Rob
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
"The Religious Divide"
Here's a bit from a Boston Globe op-ed by Cathy Young (of Reason magazine):
BEHIND THE political divide in America, there is also a religious divide. The split is not just between people who believe and people who do not; it is between those who see religious faith as society's foundation and those who see it as society's bane. So far, the debates on this subject have generated more heat than light, as both sides preach to the converted and talk at, not to, those who disagree.\
. . . Each side in the faith wars is angry and afraid. Secularists see a creeping theocracy in attempts to outlaw same-sex unions, abortion, and stem cell research and to promote government funding for faith-based charities. Believers see assaults on their values everywhere from education to television and movies. Non religious Americans feel they are a beleaguered minority; in fact, more than half of Americans hold a negative view of people who don't believe in God. Religious Americans feel, also with some justification, that they are held in contempt by intellectual and cultural elites (remember Ted Turner's reference to Catholics as "Jesus freaks"?)
Unfortunately, the current polemics only reinforce these fears. Religious people see atheists who are hateful and intolerant toward faith, to the point of wanting to ban it; secularists see champions of religion who promote hostility toward non believers and wield religion as a political club. Under these circumstances, there is little prospect for dialogue or true understanding -- only for more shouting.
Pope Benedict on Religious Freedom
Here (thanks to Amy Welborn) are some most excellent thoughts on religious freedom from il Papa:
Religious freedom is not only the individual right of each person to profess and display one’s faith, but it is also the collective right of families, groups and the Church itself, and engages civil power to “create conditions favourable to the fostering of religious life, so that citizens are truly able to exercise their religious rights and fulfil their respective duties.” The cordial meeting between the Pope and the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, gave occasion to Benedict XVI to reinforce the concept of religious freedom and to reaffirm the respect due to it by States, as occurs in Italy and other countries.
. . . "It would however be reductive,” the Pope went on to say, “to consider that the right of religious freedom is sufficiently guaranteed based on the absence of violence against or interference in personal convictions or when it is limited to respecting manifestations of faith that occur in the ambit of places of worship. Not to be forgotten in fact is that ‘the social nature of man itself requires that he should give external expression to his internal acts of religion: that he should share with others in matters religious; that he should profess his religion in community’ (ibid). Thus religious freedom is not only a right of the individual but also of the family, of religious groups and of the Church herself (cf Dignitatis humanae, 4-5.13) and the exercise of this right has an influence on the multiple ambits and situations in which the believer finds himself and operates. An adequate respect for the right to religious freedom implicates, therefore, the engagement of civil power to “create conditions favourable to the fostering of religious life, in order that the people may be truly enabled to exercise their religious rights and to fulfill their religious duties, and also in order that society itself may profit by the moral qualities of justice and peace which have their origin in men's faithfulness to God and to His holy will’ (Dignitatis humanae, 6).”
Now, regular readers will note the consonance between the Pope's statement and the work of a certain blogging law professor (ahem). Accordingly, I have decided to borrow a bit of magisterial authority, and canonize, sua sponte, this man. I'll also be issuing a motu proprio, or bull, or some other document, banning the liturgical use of songs written by Marty Haugen and Bernadette Farrell. And . . . I'm just gettin' warmed up. . . .
Charity and Justice
Notre Dame philosopher John O'Callaghan passes on some thoughts about our recent discussion about charitable giving:
While I support taxation that, among other things, puts wealth to the use of ameliorating poverty, it is important to distinguish the apple of taxation from the orange of charitable giving. The discussion has tended to throw taxation and charitable giving into the same basket, in order to ask, "who does more for the poor, liberals or conservatives?". But the government's use of the wealth of my neighbor to ameliorate poverty is not a charitable act on the government's part, or my neighbor's part simply because of his participating in it. It may be an act of justice--but it certainly isn't in any ordinary sense a charitable act. And when I place my wealth at the service of the common good through taxation I may be participating in an act of justice. But as such it is no more a charitable act on my part than it is for my neighbor, even if I do it willingly and he unwillingly. Government putting the wealth of the community to the use and service of the common good, even wealth that is possessed privately according to human law, is a primary task of government required in justice by the natural law.
Charity, on the other hand, is an infused theological virtue--the love of God and the love of neighbor in God. Acts of charity need not be conceived of along strictly individualist lines, as if individual persons cannot enter into voluntary communities, and act charitably in common. And being an act of charity does not necessarily exclude being an act of justice. So, perhaps as an individual citizen, informed by that theological virtue, one can participate in the just acts of government. But given the condition of our modern desacralized political communities, to equate the just acts of government with charitable acts would be to attribute grace to the activities of government in pursuit of justice. But that would appear to resacralize the modern state in a way that I suspect most of your readers, even your liberal readers, would want to avoid. To entrust the gift of charity to the managers of the modern state empties it of its supernatural power, a practical argument for subsidiarity if there ever was one.
So it would still seem to be the case that conservatives, according to the study mentioned, are indeed more charitable than liberals, charitably assuming of course that those acts identified by the author of the study do in fact proceed from the theological virtue of charity. And as you pointed out, conservatives also pay their taxes. But in the end, does it matter who has the upper hand in serving the needs of the poor, the conservatives or the liberals? Consider the words of St. Robert Bellarmine: "it matters little whether one goes to hell for lack of justice or from lack of charity."
Much Ado About Nothing?
Apparently, Brooks found in an October 2003 article that religiosity has a much greater impact on charitable giving and volunteering than political affiliation. (I can't find an on-line version of the article, but you can find a shorter version of it here.) In fact, Brooks says that intensity of political feeling matters more than what one actually believes (e.g., strongly conservative and strongly liberal give more than more wishy washy types). If religiosity trumps politics, then this strikes me as altering some of the fundamental meaning of the book's findings. It suggests that the most significant factor at work is religiosity and not ideology and that the comparison of religious conservatives to secular liberals is a red herring intended to stir up debate (and publicity for the book), but does not tell us much about either conservatives or liberals. In any event, I've ordered the book from Amazon and will report back when I've had a chance to read it.
The Shame of Darfur
As a follow-up to Susan's post, my colleague, Allen Hertzke wrote an article entitled The Shame of Darfur, which was published in First Things in October of 2005. Here are the opening paragraphs:
"In April 2005, a striking celebration occurred in Washington to mark the signing of a peace accord between rebel groups of southern Sudan and the Islamist regime in Khartoum, ending Africa’s longest and bloodiest civil war. In a packed room in the Longworth House Office Building, Sudanese exiles mingled with the American officials and religious leaders whose efforts helped halt Sudan’s two-decade genocidal war against its non-Muslim population.
The event marked a triumph for both the Bush administration and the faith-based human-rights movement that has burst on the American foreign-policy scene in recent years. But the triumph was muted, for the Sudanese government in Khartoum has now turned its attention from the southern part of the country to the western, undertaking massive ethnic cleansing in the region known as Darfur. And so far, neither America’s religious community nor its government has acted with the same vigor in addressing the crisis."
The full text is here.
Catholic Response to Darfur
I received the following from a MOJ reader:
"I am reaching out to you as a resource or a guide to assist me in understanding the Catholic response to the atrocities in Darfur. I read a blog by Greg Sisk in the Mirror of justice, however the link to his contact information is broken. I am very concerned about the lack of public attention the Pope has called to this issue. I do realize he has made statements (last known in January of this year) in regard to the need to intervene in Darfur, but it is not enough. I do not hear about this issue at Mass and other than donating to Catholic Relief Services I do not know how I can help. The church and the Pope have the power to intervene in Darfur through a public campaign on the issue - however for all intent and purpose we seem to be silent as thousands are murdered. Please advise how we as Catholics can take action on this issue."
Any thoughts for our reader? I confess I share the frustration that more outrage is not being expressed (by everyone - Catholics and non-Catholics) over what is happening in Darfur.
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