[I meant to post last week on Bill Moyers's truly extraordinary speech at West Point--but I forgot. MOJ-readers may be interested in what Martin Marty has to say, below, about the speech. I hope you will follow the link to the speech, print it out, and read it at your lesiure.
I recall that Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel, among other prominent Catholics, were cheerleaders for Bush in Iraq. What are they saying now, after over three and a half years of gross incompetence and countless deaths?]
Sightings 12/4/06
Bill Moyers's
Message -- Martin E. Marty
Let me start unconventionally this Monday by passing on
a link [click here] Let me also continue unconventionally. Most of the 375-plus "sightings"
from the past almost eight years have fulfilled my assignment to go scouting for
religiously themed items in the public sphere -- but this time the scope is not
clearly or purely religious. The link above takes you to excerpts from a
speech Bill Moyers delivered as the Sol Feinstone Lecture on the Meaning of
Freedom at the United States Military Academy on November 15. Moved,
sometimes to tears and sometimes by the rage it inspires, I sent it on to many
addresses on my list. Never have I had so many "thank you's" and "let
everyone know's" as I did this week. That is why I am breaking precedent
here and calling further attention to the speech.
In it, Mr. Moyers shows empathy, almost tender
regard, for the consciences, assignments, and paradoxes that go with becoming a
military officer during the Iraq war. Aware that any questioning of the
prosecution of that war used to draw overwhelming public criticism of a sort
which challenged the patriotism of the critic -- and such questioning still
draws some, even though most of the public has itself done such questioning --
Moyers displays his love for the nation and its freedoms, which is the overall
topic of the Feinstone lectures.
There is much historical accounting
here, for which the speaker acknowledges the help of historian Bernard A.
Weisberger. One hears of adventures and misadventures, conflicts and
moments of consensus, all the way back to the American Revolution and through
the Mexican War and the Vietnam War, itself prosecuted by conscience-troubled,
now older-but-wiser Moyers, who was in the Johnson administration in the bad old
days.
Part of what set Moyers off was the judgment by media mogul Rupert
Murdoch that the casualties in Iraq were "minute" -- a dismissal that inspires
Moyers to provide some close-ups of people who have lost someone close to them,
citizens who cannot live with the word "minute" as an R.I.P. wave of the
hand.
The focus here is not on the men and women who have
signed up to be cadets; Moyers makes clear that he is not a pacifist or a
dissenter against all forms of military engagement. But, getting to his
own field of specialization, he is disturbed that the present administration is
not heeding warnings of ancients like James Madison and moderns like Dwight
Eisenhower and others who feared the threat that comes from placing too much
power of decision in the hands of the executive -- meaning, in the end, chiefly
in war-making.
Then he does turn to the paradoxes that military
officers face, speaking some "unpalatable" words when he "would prefer to speak
of sweeter things." Here he invokes one line of a sacred text, out of
context but still reinforcing: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set
you free."
I think some credit must go to West Point leaders who
invited someone they knew would be a critic, and to the audience, who will not
find their wrestling with conscience, calls to duty, and love of country
easier. Others will have the chance to give their versions of the truth,
but Moyers offers a very bracing one.
----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
•Civil Union Act makes South Africa fifth nation in world to legalize gay marriage
•Church hopes to perform first same-sex ceremony on Saturday
•Homosexuality still outlawed in much of sub-Saharan Africa
CAPE TOWN, South Africa
(AP) -- With the deputy president's signature on a new law, South
Africa on Thursday became the first country in Africa and only the
fifth in the world to legalize same-sex marriages.
The Civil
Union Act entered into force on the eve of a December 1 deadline set by
the Constitutional Court for the government to change its marriage
legislation to ensure full equality for gays and lesbians.
Gay
rights groups have welcomed the law, although they criticized
provisions allowing clergy and civil marriage officers to turn away gay
couples if their consciences prevented them from marrying them.
Deputy
President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka signed the law in her capacity as
acting president because President Thabo Mbeki is in Nigeria.
South
Africa recognized the rights of gay people in the constitution adopted
after apartheid ended in 1994, at a time when leaders were determined
to bury all kinds of legal discrimination a thing. The constitution,
the first in the world to prohibit discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation, provides a powerful legal tool for gay rights
activists even though South Africa remains conservative on such issues.
The
governing African National Congress had to push the legislation through
despite reservations from some of its own members. Influential
traditional leaders said the legislation violated African cultural
norms. The Roman Catholic Church and Muslim groups -- and many other
religious organizations -- denounced it as violating the sanctity of
marriage between a man and a woman. The Anglican church said it was up
to individual ministers to decide whether to use the "opt out" clause,
while liberal churches like the Metropolitan Churches Community were in
favor.
The National Assembly passed the legislation earlier this
month and the National Council of Provinces approved it on Tuesday.
Mlambo-Ngcuka's signature was the final legal step.
"There will
be a huge response from same-sex couples who have waited such a long
time for their relationship to be recognized," predicted Melanie Judge
of the lesbian and gay project, OUT.
Janine Pressman, a pastor
with the Glorious Light Metropolitan Community Churches in the capital,
Pretoria, said she hoped to marry a couple on Saturday, provided the
paperwork could be rushed through.
Priests wanting to wed same
sex couples at a religious ceremony have to apply for permission from
the Home Affairs Ministry and possibly undergo exams to get their
license, ministry spokesman Jacky Mashapu said.
This could take two to three weeks, he said. But he added that the ministry wanted to speed through the applications.
Civil
unions, without a religious component, could be performed virtually on
the spot, subject to completion of the proper paperwork, he said.
"We are ready to go," Mashapu said.
The
Civil Union Act provides for the "voluntary union of two persons, which
is solemnized and registered by either a marriage or civil union."
Radio
talk shows and newspaper columns have highlighted opposition to
same-sex marriages in a country where gays and lesbians are victims of
violent attacks because of their sexual orientation.
South Africa
is only the fifth country in the world to legalize gay marriages. It is
the first in Africa, where homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana and most other sub-Saharan countries.
Judge,
from OUT, said the public reaction had "forced us to confront the
deep-seated prejudice and intolerance against gays and lesbians. It's a
day to day reality," she said.
"It's been quite a frightening
process to see the level of hatred that has been openly expressed
against this minority," she said.
How long will it be before magisterial moral theology catches up with what we're learning about the complexity of human sexuality? (And why is what we're learning so threatening to so many?)
New York Times December 2, 2006
Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear
OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 1 — Until
recently, many children who did not conform to gender norms in their
clothing or behavior and identified intensely with the opposite sex
were steered to psychoanalysis or behavior modification.
But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity
rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let
people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change
is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who
display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being
supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.
Doctors, some of them from the top pediatric hospitals, have begun
to advise families to let these children be “who they are” to foster a
sense of security and self-esteem. They are motivated, in part, by the
high incidence of depression,
suicidal feelings and self-mutilation that has been common in past
generations of transgender children. Legal trends suggest that schools
are now required to respect parents’ decisions.
The Washington Post reports
that for the second time in one year, the Christian Coalition has named
a new a leader and then removed him before he took office:
The Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a nondenominational megachurch in
Longwood, Fla., said he resigned as the coalition's incoming president
because its board of directors disagreed with his plan to broaden the
organization's agenda. In addition to opposing abortion and same-sex
marriage, Hunter, 58, wanted to take on such issues as poverty, global
warming and HIV/AIDS.
"My position is, unless we are caring as much for the vulnerable
outside the womb as inside the womb, we're not carrying out the full
message of Jesus," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They
began to think this might threaten their base or evaporate some of
their support, and they said they just couldn't go there."
COMMONWEAL December 1, 2006 Stay the Course? The Editors
Meeting last month in Baltimore, the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a number of
statements, including guidelines for the pastoral care of “persons with
a homosexual inclination” and an instruction-titled “Happy Are Those
Who Are Called to His Supper”-on who should or shouldn’t receive
Communion.
Overshadowed in the media reaction to the
guidelines and the bishops’ “hard saying” about Communion was Bishop
William S. Skylstad’s “Call for Dialogue and Action on Responsible
Transition in Iraq.” Skylstad is president of the USCCB and his
statement on the war has much to recommend it. Dismissing the idea that
there are only two options in Iraq, either “cut and run” or “stay the
course,” Skylstad pleads for a “collaborative dialogue that honestly
assesses the situation, acknowledges past difficulties and
miscalculations, recognizes and builds on positive advances.”
These are sensible recommendations, necessary
steps in bringing about a responsible resolution to a tragic and
untenable situation. The USCCB would do well to adopt just as sensible
a policy in confronting the laity’s doubts about church teaching on the
meaning of human sexuality. For instance, 95 percent of married
Catholics do not find the teaching on contraception persuasive. And how
do the bishops respond? “Stay the course or get out of the Communion
line” might be a rough paraphrase of the USCCB statements.
Homosexuality is not a sin, write the bishops further, but engaging in
homosexual acts is. Increasingly, Catholics find this distinction hard
to square with what they know about homosexual persons. The bishops’
response? “Stay the course or get out of the Communion line.”
It is especially disappointing that before
issuing their statements, the bishops didn’t bother to listen in any
systematic way to either homosexual or married Catholics. If one’s
syllogisms are all in order, why bother talking with people who possess
such “inclinations,” or who have tried to reconcile the church’s
teachings with actual marital life? Instead, the bishops stumbled on
the brilliant strategy of reminding the faithful that in the church’s
view, resorting to contraception and engaging in homosexual acts are
equally “disordered.” Evidently, the bishops believe that equating
homosexual acts with a sexual “sin” committed by 95 percent of married
Catholics makes their pastoral guidelines “welcoming” to homosexual
persons.
Echoing John Paul II’s idiosyncratic
“theology of the body,” the USCCB’s statement on “Married Love and the
Gift of Life” argues that the use of contraception introduces “a false
note” into the spousal sexual relationship. By such acts, the bishops
explain, you begin to make yourself “into the kind of person who lies.”
When fertility is “suppressed”-rather than merely outwitted through the
diagnostic calculations of Natural Family Planning (NFP)-the sexual act
becomes “something less powerful and intimate, something more
‘casual.’” Married Catholics may be surprised to learn they are
inveterate liars obsessed with having “casual” sex. What is not
surprising is how unconvincing the argument for NFP remains. Why is it
morally permissible to avoid pregnancy by using NFP, but “disordered”
and an “intrinsic evil” to act on the same intention using a different
contraceptive method? When the bishops can explain that, perhaps
Catholics will resume listening to what they have to say about marital
love.
Some outspoken conservative Catholics argue
that it was the failure of the bishops to strongly affirm Humanae
vitae, and not the teaching itself, that explains the encyclical’s
rejection by the laity. Will the condemnation of contraception now be
vigorously preached from the pulpit? If so, the effect may be the
opposite of what is hoped for. Telling married Catholics that their
sexual lives are seriously “disordered” will likely only increase their
doubts about the church’s understanding of sexuality, while
strengthening the growing moral solidarity felt between heterosexual
and homosexual Catholics. Ironically, perhaps that is what the Holy
Spirit has been up to at the USCCB. As the saying goes, God writes
straight with crooked lines.
The point is that when “stay the course” and
“cut and run” are the only alternatives in the battle over human
sexuality, too many Catholics will opt for the latter. Just as Iraq
requires, in Bishop Skylstad’s formulation, an honest collaborative
dialogue-one that “assesses the situation, acknowledges past
difficulties and miscalculations...and builds on positive advances”-so
too is such a dialogue desperately needed between the laity and the
bishops concerning the church’s teachings on sexual morality. The
current situation, to adapt Skylstad’s words again, is indeed “taking a
terrible toll,” and “moral urgency, substantive dialogue, and new
directions” must be found. While “stay the course” is not an option,
“cut and run” cannot become the default position. What Catholicism has
to teach us about the meaning of sexuality should not be reduced to NFP.
[The U.S. Catholic bishops were gathered in Baltimore earlier this month. They issued some documents. Here are some passages from the lead editorial in the November 24th issue of the National Catholic Reporter:]
Let’s consider for starters the document on contraception. A
lot of the U.S. bishops today might say there are a lot of bad, or at least
ignorant, Catholics out there, Catholics influenced by the contraceptive
culture, for instance, who no longer know good from evil.
Maybe they’re right. More likely, though, it’s because the
teaching makes little sense, doesn’t match the experience of lay Catholics
and tends to reduce all of human love to the act of breeding.
In short, the bishops aren’t terribly persuasive or clear when they
talk about sex, and they tend to want to talk about sex a lot. To be sure, they
say lots of lovely and lofty things about marital love, about how it completes
people and cooperates with God’s plan and fills married lives with joy and
happiness. You can want not to have children, say the bishops, you just
can’t do anything “unnatural” about it. It’s a strange
concept, like not wanting to die of heart disease while not doing anything
“unnatural” about it.
They make the point that if every time a married couple makes love they
are not open to having children, then they’re not giving “all”
of themselves to each other. If you use birth control, say the bishops, and
every single act is not open to having children, then “being responsible
about sex simply means limiting its consequences -- avoiding disease and using
contraceptives to prevent pregnancy.” Whew! So that’s it, eh?
It’s either be open to having kids or married sex is no more
significant than an encounter with a prostitute. Such a view of marriage and
sexuality and sexual intimacy can only have been written by people straining
mightily to fit the mysteries, fullness and candidly human pleasure of sex into
a schema that violently divides the human person into unrecognizable parts.
There’s a reason 96 percent of Catholics have ignored the birth control
teaching for decades. We doubt the new document will significantly change that
percentage.
So it is with gays. Here again, church authorities try to fit together
two wildly diverging themes. They go something like this: Homosexuals are
“objectively disordered” (that’s about as bad as it humanly
gets, in our understanding of things), but we love them and want them to be
members of our community.
Only this time out, the bishops are not using the term homosexual
“orientation” (a definite position) but homosexual
“inclination” (a liking for something or a tendency toward). Sly, no?
The inference to be drawn, we presume, is that someone inclined one way can
just incline another way, whereas someone with an orientation is pretty much
stuck there.
That science and human experience generally say otherwise is of little
concern, apparently, though the bishops were clear they weren’t suggesting
that homosexuals are required to change. This time, too, the bishops, while
acknowledging that those with homosexual tendencies should seek supportive
friendships, advise homosexuals to be quiet about their inclinations in church.
“For some persons, revealing their homosexual tendencies to certain close
friends, family members, a spiritual director, confessor, or members of a
church support group may provide some spiritual and emotional help and aid them
in their growth in Christian life. In the context of parish life, however,
general public self-disclosures are not helpful and should not be
encouraged.”
The next paragraph in the document, by the way, begins, “Sad to
say, there are many persons with a homosexual inclination who feel alienated
from the church.” You can’t make this stuff up.
It is difficult to figure out how to approach these documents. They are
products of some realm so removed from the real lives of the faithful one has
to wonder why any group of busy men administering a church would bother. They
ignore science, human experience and the groups they attempt to characterize.
The documents are not only embarrassing but insulting and degrading to those
the bishops are charged to lead. The saddest thing is that the valuable
insights the bishops have into the deficiencies and influences of the wider
culture get buried.
"God Gap Narrows as Democrats Take Majority of
Catholic Vote" is Joe Feuerherd's headline in the liberal National Catholic
Reporter (November 17). "Republican hopes that socially conservative
church-going Catholics would help forestall an electoral catastrophe in the 2006
midterm elections were not simply dashed. They were obliterated, a real
thumping." The NCR editors had had little to cheer about on the
Catholic vote front in recent years. They and we had been told by many
pundits that Roman Catholics were securely relocating themselves as blocs or in
slots that would help make up a permanent Republican hegemony.
Now,
however, "The Public Shakes Things Up." This is the headline for the
post-election column by editor Tom Roberts. Blaming or crediting the war
in Iraq most of all for the change, he pointed to the victory of progressive
Kathleen Sebelius for governor in "redder than red" Kansas, among many other
indicators. He reported that Republican strategists had "hoped the
so-called God gap" would continue to work in their favor. But in exit
polls, for whatever they're worth, 55 percent of Catholics said they voted
Democratic. Reliable analyst John Green, who watches these things for the
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, observed: "More telling ... is that white
Catholics -- considered the most swinging of swing voters -- gave a majority (50
percent) of their vote to Democratic candidates" -- a
surprise.
Malfeasance, the Foley-Haggard-Katrina cluster of events, and
issues of corruption and competence (more than philosophy and theology) were
major determinants. Opposition to abortion and gay marriage always
galvanizes many, but this time not enough. Referendums on such issues
offered mixed news. Green noted that if those two issues were not still
prominent, ever more Catholics and Evangelicals would fold into the Democratic
Party. "Catholics care more about right and wrong than right and left,"
said Alexia Kelly of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. Jeff Carr
of the evangelical Sojourners group said that the "big losers" were "the
secular left and the religious right."
The postscript editorial page
in NCR judged the whole election "A Move Away from Extremism." "The
unilateral projection of U.S. power abroad and a domestic program that put
individualism in hyper mode, and wrapped it all in a religiosity owing to the
most extreme and conservative brand of Christianity" did not hold the place it
had for several years.
While the returns gave liberal Catholics an
occasion to cheer, the public at large may well welcome the shifting attitudes
within the Catholic fold. It is possible to make too much of one election
as a turning point, but among other things it did lead editorialists to pay
attention to more kinds of religious voters than those in the Christian Right,
which they had seen as almost all-powerful.
Week after week we keep
noting James Madison's observation that the security of rights in a republic
depends on the diversity of interests, sects, and the like. We can be sure
that those weary of polarization will be working to energize the non-extremists,
whose commitments are yet hard to assess.
---------- Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind By LOUIS UCHITELLE
A decade into the practice of
medicine, still striving to become “a well regarded
physician-scientist,” Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not
making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.
And today, after moving on to Wall Street as an adviser on medical investments, he is a multimillionaire.
Such routes to great wealth were just opening up to physicians when
Dr. Glassman was in school, graduating from Harvard College in 1983 and
Harvard Medical School four years later. Hoping to achieve
breakthroughs in curing cancer, his specialty, he plunged into
research, even dreaming of a Nobel Prize, until Wall Street reordered his life.
Just how far he had come from a doctor’s traditional
upper-middle-class expectations struck home at the 20th reunion of his
college class. By then he was working for Merrill Lynch and soon would become a managing director of health care investment banking.
“There were doctors at the reunion — very, very smart people,” Dr.
Glassman recalled in a recent interview. “They went to the top
programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure
goals. And then they went to the 20th-year reunion and saw that
somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money.”
"The Decreasing Ontological Density of the State in Catholic Social Doctrine" Villanova Law/Public Policy Research Paper No. 2006-23 Villanova Law Review, Scarpa Symposium, Vol. 52, 2007
ABSTRACT: Over the last century-plus, Catholic social thought has gradually reduced the ontological density of the state, to the point that the state now appears to have only a tentative grasp on the natural law basis of its legitimacy. During the first part of the twentieth century, Catholic social doctrine tended to view the legitimate state as a participant in the divine rule; although draped in a sacred mantle, the state was subject to the limits imposed by the divine and natural law. In response to the totalitarian states' transgressing of those limits at mid-century, Catholic thinkers reduced the scope and stature of the state's place in man's life in society, while insisting that the state remain tethered to the natural law. Today, however, Catholics and others face a laicized state that utterly denies its obligations under the natural law. While Pope John Paul II eventually responded to this denial by emphasizing the natural law limits on the state, Pope Benedict has instead summoned leaders and citizens to acknowledge and develop a state that is committed to "reason," even if this means inviting unbelievers to act "as if God exists." As understood by Pope Benedict XVI, the state, a servant of individuals and diverse societies, is to receive its content and direction from, among other sources, the Church; it is to receive reason purified by faith.
