Paul Krugman on Voodoo Economics of Republican Budget Proposal: Ludicrous and Cruel

Good commentary today (as always) by Paul Krugman in the New York Times--on the Republican budget proposal, to be specific.  As Krugman rightly notes, it's both ludicrous and cruel.

Ludicrous, in that it continues the long-discredited shell game of neocon voodoo economics, which asks us to trust the very rich and give them even more concessions through tax cuts, because--trust us!--eventually the wealth that flows in ever-increasing floods into the treasuries of the wealthy will trickle down to all the rest of us.  And cruel, in that it asks all the rest of us to foot the bill for our entire infrastructure, while the rich amass that increasing wealth and decide whether or not to use it to sustain the societies from which it has come.

Hint: they somehow, mysteriously, never get around to the sharing step.  To the trickling down.

I'm frankly ashamed at (but hardly surprised by) the shilling Andrew Sullivan has been doing lately for Ryan's smoke-and-mirrors game.  The shilling, and the pretense that the Ryan budget proposal is a respectable document addressing our acute budget crisis, begin to bring into disrepute Sullivan's moral stance on just about anything else he addresses.  For me, at least.

The graphic is artist Stephen Hansen's "Trickle Down."

Paul Krugman on the Wisconsin Situation: The Pertinence of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine"

 

I like Paul Krugman's analysis in today's New York Times of some of the parallels between what's happening in Wisconsin now and what has been happening in the Middle East.  After I blogged glancingly about that topic recently, I saw a segment of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" in which Stewart did a take-down of the idea that the Wisconsin demonstrations in any way parallel what has been happening in Egypt, Libya, and Iran.

And, of course, he's right in some ways.  People aren't dying in Wisconsin.  Even so, as Krugman points out, there are some clear parallels, and they deserve attention--particularly if we want to understand the underlying causes of the Wisconsin situation.

As Krugman notes, the conditions for much of the upheaval in the Middle East were actually created by Bush-generation right-wing American ideologues who were determined to impose right-wing ideological political and economic ideas and structures on nations in the Middle East (and elsewhere), no matter how badly the ideology being imposed fit the situations on which the ideology was imposed.  Krugman notes that Naomi Klein explored this pattern brilliantly in her book The Shock Doctrine.

And in Krugman's view, Klein's analysis of how the conditions that have ultimately resulted in democratic revolution in the Middle East were created, ironically, by rigid right-wing ideologues definitely does fit the situation in Wisconsin in key respects.  As we all know by now, we're being lied to when we're told that breaking the unions in that state (or anywhere else) is a necessary precondition to balancing the state budget.

Here's Krugman's take: 

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

A power grab.  Deliberately exploiting a fiscal crisis created by the political right in order to ram through an economic and political agenda of the political right that is at the very base of the economic crisis this ploy is purportedly designed to resolve.  As I keep insisting, we really need to educate ourselves as much as possible about what's going on right now in our country, vis-a-vis the democratic structures of our society, or it may soon be too late.

What's going on in Wisconsin is, I think, a hopeful sign that when more and more Americans become aware of how a filthy rich elite is trying to buy our democracy lock, stock, and barrel, we citizens will begin to push back--as citizens of the Middle East are doing, as well.  Against forces that in some respects are not entirely different from those eliciting the pushback now in Wisconsin.

Nicholas Kristof on "Tussling Over Jesus": The Two Faces of Contemporary Catholicism

Nicholas Kristof's op-ed piece, "Tussling Over Jesus," in today's New York Times continues a theme he began developing last April in an op-ed piece about the two Catholic churches he encounters as he travels around the world.  One is the church of a self-absorbed, self-protective patriarchal old boys' club that puts its own power and privilege above the needs of the church as a whole.  A self-absorbed, self-protective old boy's club that puts the continuation of its power and privilege above the future of the church itself.  And above the gospels.

The other is the church of the grassroots, of priests, nuns, and layfolks struggling to live the gospel wherever they find themselves, and wherever they find the challenge to feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit the prisoner, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, etc.  In Kristof's view, the magnificence of members of this grassroots church "lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness."

Kristof continues this narrative framework today in his "Tussling Over Jesus" piece, which focuses on the draconian measures that Phoenix Catholic bishop Thomas Olmsted has taken to try to force a Catholic hospital in his diocese into subjection to his will.  I've recounted that story on this blog: as I noted in a posting last May, Olmsted excommunicated Mercy Sister  Margaret McBride after she participated in a decision of the ethics committee of St. Joseph's hospital to abort the 11-week old fetus of a woman suffering from pulmonary hypertension that, left untreated, would almost certainly have resulted in her death and that of the fetus.  Olmsted later went on to remove the designation "Catholic" from St. Joseph's hospital.

And so, Kristof proposes, Catholics today are tussling over Jesus--over where Jesus is to be found, over what fidelity to Jesus demands in contemporary culture.  Over who controls the central symbols of Catholic faith, who defines the meanings of those symbols.  Whose word and experience counts, as we read the gospels and apply them to our lives.  Who owns Jesus.

As Catholic bishops grow more conservative, Kristof notes, we are likely to see more of these power struggles at Catholic hospitals, which provide some 15% of hospital services to the nation at large.  Already, a report issued by the National Women's Law Center notes that doctors working in some Catholic hospitals say they're being pressured to give substandard care to women suffering miscarriages of ectopic pregnancies, substandard care that can leave them pregnant or even endanger their lives.

Kristof sees hope in the fact that St. Joseph's hospital has continued to insist, in the face of Olmsted's penalties, that it is doing and will keep doing the work of Jesus in its healing ministry.  He cites Anne Rice, who sees the response of St. Joseph's to Olmsted as a potential turning point in the American Catholic church:  

Anne Rice, the author and a commentator on Catholicism, sees a potential turning point. “St. Joseph’s refusal to knuckle under to the bishop is huge,” she told me, adding: “Maybe rank-and-file Catholics are finally talking back to a hierarchy that long ago deserted them.”

And I would like to share Kristof and Rice's hope here.  But I'm not sure I can.  I'm not sure I'm there yet, at the place of hope where it's possible to see a turning point in American Catholicism.  From the marginal place in which I find myself--from the margins to which the current regime in the church has pushed me and many others--what I see is this: the U.S. bishops are not merely growing more conservative. 

They are overtly and unapologetically aligning their church with a single political party--the Republican party--and are overtly and unapologetically making common cause with the most rabid sectors of the American religious right.  The bishops are completely blind to the considerable shortcomings of the party to which they have pledged their loyalty, while they focus with laserlike intensity on the shortcomings, real and imagined, of the other party.

They, and a wealthy elite of right-wing political and corporate business leaders who now have disproportionate influence over the thinking of the Catholic bishops of the U.S., are determined to turn the American Catholic church into a propaganda machine for the Republican party.  And an official level.

It is, of course, evident to me that a large number of American Catholics do not buy into this realignment of the bishops of the American Catholic church with the Republican party and the religious right.  But here's where I struggle to see hope: even when those American Catholics represent the majority, and a large majority, in their church, they do not own the official voice of the church.  They do not control the definition of the central symbols of the church.

That official voice, and the right to define the central symbols, belongs exclusively and unilaterally to the bishops.  Who guard their power and privilege jealously, and who intend to be utterly ruthless about safeguarding their right to speak exclusively for the church and to define what our central symbols mean for all the rest of us.  And in asserting this unilateral right to control the official voice of the church (and align it with a single political party), the bishops have the powerful backing--the powerful financial backing--of wealthy elites whose interests that political party serves.

And this will not change until members of the church--until members of Kristof's grassroots church, until the rank and file of the church--stop permitting their bishops to behave this way.  It will not change until rank-and-file Catholics stop allowing their bishops to sell their church and to sell out the gospels in the process.  This week, Tom Fox reminds us that the apostolic visitation of American nuns is still underway.  At a point in Catholic history in which one bishop after another has been revealed to have shielded priests abusing minors, Rome is investigating religious women--not bishops.  

And as Tom Fox notes, this bizarre, unjust investigation of American nuns is costing more than a million dollars.  But church officials aren't revealing who's paying for this investigation--who wanted it in the first place, who is footing the bill for the investigation.  Just as with those videos attacking gay marriage that the Catholic bishops of Minnesota produced in the last election cycle and mailed to all Catholic households in their state, where a similar sum of money was spent while Catholic dioceses in the state were closing churches and consolidating parishes, church authorities have refused to disclose the source of the the funds they use to play partisan politics.

Who is buying and selling American Catholicism today?  Who's buying and selling the American Catholic bishops and the official voice of the American Catholic church?  And why is this being done?  Whose interests are being served by the sale of the official voice of American Catholicism to one political party and its backers?  How can the gospel be proclaimed effectively by an organization whose leaders are for sale, and who have subjugated the voice of the faith community they serve to the interests of a wealthy elite?

These are perhaps the most pertinent questions of all for grassroots Catholics to ask today.  And, frankly, until I hear many more rank-and-file American Catholics asking these questions--asking where their donations to the church go and how they're used--I don't hold much hope for the American Catholic church.  Until I see the grassroots church holding its leaders accountable and demanding transparency re: the use of money given by lay Catholics to the church, money that oils the machinery of the church and keeps it running as bishops continue turning the church into a Republican political machine, I don't see a lot of hope.

As one of my nephews, who is now teaching political science courses at a local community college, told me a day ago after he and his mother heard our local bishop preach last Sunday at the cathedral, "All he talked about was abortion.  And he said that he is non-partisan, but everything he said was a Republican talking point--as if the Catholic church is an organ of the Republican party.  And so I stopped listening when I saw where he was headed."

New York Times on Scalia's Attack on Equal Protection Clause: "Outlandish"

As I expect many readers of Bilgrimage already know, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia began his new year with a bang by declaring that the U.S. Constitution's equal protection amendment, the 14th amendment, does not guarantee women and gays freedom from discrimination.  As a constitutional literalist, Scalia does a mind-reading act to discover (and then reveal to the rest of us) what was in the mind of the writers of the constitution when they wrote the document.  Never mind what the actual words say.

There are various ways to look at what Scalia is hoping to accomplish with this  new year's salvo.  For my money, here's at least part of what's going on: as the cultural shift that is bringing rights long denied to gay and lesbian human beings proceeds in developed nations, Scalia is seeking to lay a judicial foundation for denying those rights in the U.S.'s court of highest appeal, when appeals of legislation or lower judicial decisions re: these rights finally reach the U.S. Supreme Court.  Scalia is seeking to put into place a screen that hides from view one of the most significant foundations for equal rights for all citizens in the U.S., regardless of inborn characteristics that separate citizens into various groups--the 14th amendment.

It should be noted that Scalia's attempt to develop this screen and justify judicial activism against the human rights of LGBT persons fits hand and glove with the rhetorical ploy I have discussed in the past two days, the ploy now being used by top Catholic pastoral officials.  This is the ploy of claiming that, in denying the human rights of gay and lesbian persons in every way possible, the Catholic church is actually defending human rights.  And that it, and not members of minority communities it attacks, is the victim of discrimination.

Scalia is, after all, Catholic, an extremely influential Catholic voice of the American political right.  Members of his family exercise significant influence throughout the U.S. Catholic church.  Scalia's son Paul, a priest, is, for instance, chaplain of the group Courage, which encourages Catholic gays and lesbians to view their sexual orientation as a "problem" to be overcome by prayer and self-denial, and to live lives of lifelong chastity, without intimate, fulfilling love relationships with members of their same sex.  

Fr. Paul Scalia pastors a beltway Catholic parish many of whose members are neo-conservative luminaries who exercise disproportionate on the thinking of the Catholic intellectual and media elites of the center.  Even at its most far-fetched and, their voice receives an attentive hearing in academic and mainstream media circles, as "the" Catholic voice.  Follow the Catholic blogs of the American Catholic intellectual center, and you'll inevitably run across highly regarded, persistent voices from Scalia's parish, offering the American Catholic center Scalian political and religious views as if these views represent orthodoxy itself.  And because of their beltway influence, these right-wing Catholic voices go largely unchallenged in the dialogues of the American Catholic center.  They are allowed to posture as "the" Catholic voice, no matter how irrational and ill-grounded their "Catholic" views are.

Scalia's voice counts, in other words.  It counts in the minds of many of the guardians of the normative media conversation of our culture as the authentic embodiment of Catholic values.  By speaking as he has done re: the issues of women's and gay rights as this new year begins, Justice Scalia is seeking to situate the authentic voice of the U.S. Catholic church--the only possible Catholic voice, from his standpoint and that of the hierarchy--to the right.  He is seeking to undercut Catholic arguments that women and gay and lesbian human beings deserve human rights, and political arguments that this theological appeal to human rights is mirrored in the U.S. constitution.

And so I am delighted to see the New York Times today countering Scalia's grotesque misreading of the 14th amendment as "outlandish," and noting,  

No less dismaying is his notion that women, gays and other emerging minorities should be left at the mercy of the prevailing political majority when it comes to ensuring fair treatment. It is an “originalist” approach wholly antithetical to the framers’ understanding that vital questions of people’s rights should not be left solely to the political process. It also disrespects the wording of the Equal Protection Clause, which is intentionally broad, and its purpose of ensuring a fairer society.

The 14th amendment was enacted precisely to provide a safeguard, in one of the foundational documents of American democracy, against the argument that Justice Scalia is implicitly putting forth in his denial of what the equal protection clause really means.  This is the argument that, since the constitution was written by white male property owners, that privileged class of America citizens deserves special protection under law, while the onus is on all other disenfranchised and marginalized minority groups is to prove that they deserve any protection at all.

Or that their humanity is equal to that of white male property owners.  

And the real theological question, the most significant one of all, to ask about Scalia's reading of the constitution is this: how on earth does he get from Catholic social teaching  (or the gospels) to a social theory that privileges those who are already rich and powerful, and seeks to continue the stigmatization of those without power and privilege?  And how does the Catholic hierarchy today think it can maintain any credibility at all as it increasingly seeks to align the church with the rich and powerful of the world against those without power and privilege, while maintaining that this alliance serves human rights?

2011 is shaping up to be an interesting year, when it comes to the ongoing realignment of the Catholic church, from its top echelons down, with a neo-conservative ideology and social agenda that find themselves increasingly embattled in many parts of the developed world.  What remains to be seen is how willing rank and file Catholics will be to go along with this realignment.

The graphic: Justice Scalia and Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, Washington, D.C., at that diocese's "Red Mass" in 2008.

Robert Scheer on Mr. Obama's Decision to Rely on Mr. Clinton to Sell the Tax Deal: Desperate

A campaign is already underway to give President Obama cover for his tax-cut deal and his decision to bring in the master triangulator, Bill Clinton, to soft-sell that deal to the American public.  I'm not persuaded by the apologists, though.  

For my money, Robert Scheer is right when he says the following: 

The sight of Bill Clinton back on the White House podium defending tax cuts for the super-rich was more a sick joke than a serious amplification of economic policy. How desperate is the current president that he would turn to the great triangulator, who opened the floodgates to banking greed, for validation of the sorry opportunistic hodgepodge that passes for this administration's economic policy? A policy designed and implemented by the same Clinton-era holdovers whose radical deregulation of the financial industry created this mess in the first place.

Many of us feel sorely betrayed precisely because Mr. Obama ran as an alternative to the Clinton style of Democratic leadership, with its constant concessions to neo-conservative ideology, its deal-cutting and principle-waffling.  Many of us were persuaded that things had become so bad for our nation during the Bush period, we needed (and would surely get, with the new president) a clean break with both the neo-conservative paradigm and the new Democrat paradigm that tries to reframe the traditional values of the Democratic party as neo-con values.

And so we feel conspicuously betrayed by this president, and determined to continue dissenting, because the socioeconomic problems facing our nation remain acute, and we know full well that more of the same, whether that neo-con same comes to us outright through the Republicans or in Democratic disguise, is not going to get us out of the mess we're in.

We need a whole new paradigm if we're to succeed as a nation.  That paradigm has to return to the classic values of participatory democracy.  It has to make every voice count.  It has do to so first and foremost by listening as attentively to the experience of everyday citizens as it does to the voices of CEOs.  

Nothing short of this--nothing short of a new paradigm rooted in the now-imperiled values of our participatory democracy--will retrieve democracy in the U.S.  This president's decision to keep playing by the rules of the new Democrat playbook written by Mr. Clinton has proven to be a coda to--and a dangerous one, at that--the narrative of erosion of democracy that is the legacy of the Bush era.  Not a viable and praiseworthy alternative to that legacy.  Anything but that.  To the woe of many citizens.

William K. Black on Wealth Managers' and Bankers' Support of Tax-Cut Deal

And look at who else (besides David Brooks) is crowing about the president's "very good week" (never mind the DADT failure this same week, and the president's refusal to move on eradication of discrimination in the military from the outset of his presidency): as economics professor William K. Black reports at Huffington Post today, the Obama administration has set up a website to justify its tax-cut deal.  And the people it's solicited to praise the tax deal?  "Wealth managers" and bankers.

Black writes:

You know the administration is desperate when it creates a web page citing economists who support its capitulation on taxes.  . . .  The administration thinks it says good things that the Bush administration's principal apologist for its tax cuts for the wealthy supports Obama's agreement to extend those tax cuts. The mind boggles.  . . .  All of these endorsements simply emphasize the extent to which Obama was taken to the cleaners. It's bad to be bullied, but it's pathetic to cite the testimonials of those that got even wealthier through the bullies' triumph as evidence of your success.

I've been characterizing this president's leadership style as principles-lite.  But the more I read about the shameless attempt of the administration to spin its sell-out to the Republicans and the very rich as a Santa Claus gift of munificent largesse to everyone, which enriches all of us at the same time that it puts even more money into the pockets of the already filthy rich, the more inclined I am to conclude that this administration and its leaders have no real principles at all.

No real principles other than doing the bidding of the wealthy and powerful.  And rolling their supporters, while delighting in the pain they produce as they do this, since that pain is the one indicator they can find in their otherwise morally pusillanimous behavior to suggest that they're big, tough macho men.  And feathering their own nests, assuring that, whatever comes down the pike for them politically, they'll still have a cushy place to return to in the corporate structures ruling the nation, once they're out of office.  

The failure of DATA repeal has everything to do with the moral vacuity of the tax cut deal.  Mr. Obama never had any real intent of tackling the human rights issues of gay citizens, because he has no real commitment to human rights, period.  And he does not intend to pay any political price for any of the lavish promises he made to support human rights on the campaign trail, and to help heal the deep wounds inflicted on the nation by several decades of neo-conservative dominance.

To the contrary, he's making the wounds much deeper.  And is assuring the final triumph of the neo-conservative dominance that has gotten us into the dark pit in which we now find ourselves.

More on the False Pragmatist vs. Idealist Meme about Obama's Tax-Cut Deal

As I noted yesterday in commentary on the president's tax-cut deal, the meme of centrist political commentators who persistently echo the echo chamber of the beltway media is that we're now seeing the pragmatist Obama emerge, and those who expected this president to govern according to ideals are hopelessly naive, and know nothing about how politics works in the real world.  The president actually said as much to his base yesterday in the news conference about which I posted in my final posting yesterday.

This analysis sets up a false dichotomy between pragmatism and idealism which is really all about putting a screen around the real principles according to which the current president makes his decisions.  From my reading of John Dewey and other American pragmatist thinkers--reading I did as a backdrop to my study of a social gospel theologian in my doctoral dissertation work--I know at least a little bit about the pragmatist tradition.  And what I know leads me to conclude quite decisively that the pragmatism-idealism meme so beloved of centrists and the beltway media--as they beat up on anyone to the left of center--is deliberately misleading.

Pragmatism isn't about making the best decision possible as one passively waits for any and all decisions to come along.  It's about fighting for one's ideals as long and as hard as possible, and when one has done all one can to attain those ideals, then making realistic pragmatic decisions about how to move towards those ideals in a world that never perfectly mirrors the ideal.

What we've seen with this president from the time he took office has been an altogether different kind of pragmatism--one that's not really pragmatist at all, but is essentially neo-conservative in style and flavor.  Rather than enunciating some clear principles according to which he intended to govern, and setting goals (i.e., ideals) in line with those principles, from the outset of his presidency, Mr. Obama has told us repeatedly that we need to concede core Democratic principles to the Republican party, to seek a fatuous and totally idealistic bipartisan consensus, and to stop expecting political decisions to mirror core principles of his own party and of its base.

The pragmatist model according to which this president governs is principle-lite.  It is also solidly neo-conservative behind the shifting screen of elusive lite principles by which the president claims to be making his political decisions.  This is not a pragmatist model grounded in the philosophy of classic American pragmatist thinkers like Dewey, who developed their systems of pragmatism to explain how social groups like nations can realistically pursue ideals like participatory democracy, while pursuing those ideals in a real world that never adequately attains the ideal.  

With its fast and free, loose way with core principles of his own party--e.g., the need to make political and economic decisions with those at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid in mind first and foremost--Obama's pragmatism is a mask for the real principles according to which he governs.  These are neo-conservative principles that reward the rich with the expectation that rewarding the rich (Wall Street, bankers, the top 2% of the economic bracket) will then turn around and pour capital into the economic engine of our society and spread wealth around.

Increasing numbers of Americans are seeing that this neo-conservative economic myth is absolutely false.  And so a large percentage of American citizens were resolutely opposed to the continuation of tax cuts for the very rich.  That makes the attempt of the White House to convince us that it cut its deal on tax cuts as a response to widespread support for a continuation of the Bush program not merely false, but obscene.   

Once again, we're being asked to swallow a script generated by this administration, which informs us that progressives ought not to demand principled action on the part of the president, since that demand is rooted in hopeless, naive idealism.  And we're being implicitly told that the administration will cut deals whenever necessary--regardless of the core principles at stake--if its cold-hearted political calculus tells us that the populace wants such a deal, and that making a deal will score political points for the administration.  

Finally, this administration continues to say, loudly and clearly, to its own base that if those of us who voted Democratic in the last election don't like what we're getting, we might as well lump it.  The people who really count are the minority of wealthy neo-conservative interest groups who set the political and economic agenda for the nation.

Michael Sean Winters on John Boehner as Admirably Pro-Life: No Such Animal

This is exactly what I was talking about in my summary of Charles Curran's analysis of the shift in the U.S. Catholic bishops' position on abortion in the past 40 years: Michael Sean Winters writes yesterday, 

Mr. [John] Bohener is admirably pro-life - although the rest of his policy positions are less admirable.

And I repeat: there is no such animal.  One cannot espouse positions antithetical to the values of life in every other respect, and still be "admirably pro-life" simply because one opposes abortion.  As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing pro-life at all about John Boehner or anything for which Mr. Boehner stands.

The term "admirably pro-life" is an oxymoron, when applied to neo-conservative politicians who oppose health care for everyone, promote discrimination against women and gays and lesbians, target immigrants, and actively defend a socio-economic system that robs the poor and makes those who are already wealthy obscenely wealthy.

The U.S. Catholic bishops have made a colossally stupid and downright immoral misstep in building their entire body of moral teaching at this point in history around men like John Boehner--or Deal Hudson, Erik Prince, Newt Gingrich, and Randall Terry.  The values of life and respect for life are hardly the first things that leap to mind for most of us who observe who such men are, what they stand for, and what they're promoting.

And as we look at the behavior of the bishops themselves, and their chosen alliance with these political operatives . . . .

News on Thanksgiving Day: Necon Catholics Resist Pope on Condoms, Benedict on Media and Maciel, and Mormon Musings

In the news this morning of American Thanksgiving: three articles that have caught my eye online in recent days (though I'm finding far too little time to read the news):

First, neocon Catholics are perturbed--perturbed, I tell you!--that the pope has spoken out about condoms.  And contradicted their messages of hate, transmitted for years now to anyone struggling with decisions about whether it might be morally better to use a condom to avoid infecting someone else with a fatal illness, than to refrain from using a condom. 

At Huffington Post (I think this may actually be an AP article picked up by HuffPo), Rachel Zoll reports that leading American neocon Catholics are refusing to accept what Benedict has said about condoms, and are claiming (variously) that the always anti-Catholic media have made all of this up, or that the pope's spokesman Fr. Frederico Lombardi is an unreliable source for a statement by Benedict, or that they'll accept the papal verdict on condom use in cases where someone may infect another person with serious illness only when it's officially defined by the papacy. 

I find this reaction deliciously ironic, given that these are the same folks who have, for years now, been telling their brother and sister Catholics that it's the papal way or the highway.  Though they've always been highly selective in reading church teachings, following in the footsteps of one of the founding members of the American Catholic neocon movement William F. Buckley, who refused to accept John XXIII's encyclical critical of ruthless capitalism, Mater et Magistra.  And who famously said in response that he'd take the mater but forego the magistra.

One can't escape the impression that for some Catholics, keeping hate alive--in the case of the condom discussion, keeping hate of gays, in particular, alive--trumps almost any other value.  What theocon Catholics obviously fear in any sane, rational, nuanced discussion of matters like condom use is the opening of a door to sane, rational, nuanced discussion of the whole shaky edifice of natural-law based sexual ethics.  They fear opening the door to any discussion that might in any shape, form, or fashion moralize homosexual behavior and homosexual lives and relationships.  Or might bring into the light for honest discussion the important fact that the vast majority of married Catholics in developed nations practice contraception and affirm its use as moral.

And they fear--the constant, disingenuous bugbear of the Catholic right, anytime discussions like this arise in the Catholic church--the "confusion" of the laity.  Who are imagined to be too dull to understand theological fine points or to handle nuance, but who need the firm hand of guidance from above and the simplistic bullet points from on high that tell believers precisely what to think about any matter at hand.  As Zoll's article notes, the "confusion" that the recent papal statement is now said to be causing will create real headaches for the U.S. Catholic bishops, given the extent to which they have realigned the U.S. Catholic church in recent years around the hardest possible positions on issues of sexual morality.

I can't say I'm sorry to see the bishops cope with this new papal headache. Sometimes a headache serves the valuable purpose of reminding us that we have a head on top of our shoulders.

And on the new book of interviews with Benedict by journalist Peter Seewald, Light of the World, in which the papal remark about condoms first appeared: as Paddy Agnew notes in the Irish Times, while media attention is focused primarily on the condom remark, much more that is newsworthy in the book is going unnoticed.  For instance, Benedict continues to slam the media, without which we would not even know what we now know about the abuse situation, since church officials have hardly been intent on divulging information about this situation to the public.  As Mark Serrano notes at SNAP, the continued attempt of Catholic officials including the pope to divert blame to the media for doing its job, while they refuse to admit or deal with their own involvement in cover-ups of abuse, is "inappropriate and hurtful."

And then there's Benedict's astonishing observation that, though the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marciel Maciel, who is now known to have sexually abused seminarians for years, to have fathered children while heading the Legionaries, and to have raped some of his own children, was "a false prophet," the order he founded is "by and large sound."  Though that order long made a cult of Maciel's personality and defended him tooth and nail when all of this information began to become public.

Like another of its right-wing counterparts, Opus Dei, the Legionaries of Christ are a cash cow for Rome, and the Vatican is not about to repudiate this lucrative cow.  Both religious communities are closely connected to wealthy business leaders and social elites in Europe and the Americas, and both have disproportionate influence in the Catholic media throughout the world.  The pope is not about to lose the milk offered by this particular cow, or the power its adherents wield in the political, economic, and media lives of many nations.

Finally--a complete change of subject--I'm intrigued by Holly Welker's recent article at Religion Dispatches explaining why she won't leave the Mormon church alone, though she has left this church in which she was raised.  I find strong parallels between Welker's argument about why the LDS church deserves her critical attention, though she is not now an active Mormon, and the situation in which many Catholics find ourselves today.  

First, in both cases, there's a strong push from those who remain in these churches--particularly those intent on shielding the church from critical scrutiny--to keep their errant brothers and sisters decisively locked out.  I'm interested to read that some Mormons, including members of her own family, complain that Welker won't leave the church alone though she's left it.  These complaints sound very much like the taunts that many Catholics issue to their brothers and sisters who have serious reservations about the sharp turn to the right the church has taken under the last two papacies.  These taunts constantly reiterate, "If you don't like it, leave it; find a wishy-washy mainline Protestant church that accepts anybody and believes anything."

Welker notes that, though she has left the LDS church in the sense that she is no longer an active member and she openly criticizes some of its positions, she cannot leave behind what is woven into her own being from childhood.  She was a pious and committed Mormon, and the formative influence of Mormonism on her life remains strong.  The LDS church continues to affect her and many people she loves, and she will not leave it alone:

That, of course, is one primary reason I cannot and will not leave the church alone: it continues to exert its influence in areas that affect my life and the lives of people I love. Most of what I have written recently about the church deals with gender and sex; as long as the church has opinions that move it to action on these topics, I will have opinions on the church’s actions, which I claim the right to express.

And I suspect quite a few Catholics on the margins, including me, could say the same of the Catholic church and our relationship to it from the margins.

More Reactions to Dolan-Kurtz Election: Left, Right, Center, Faces of American Catholicism

More reactions to the elections of Timothy Dolan and Joseph Kurtz as president and vice-president of the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference:

This is the full text of Tom Reese's commentary, emphasizing the bishops' "tilt to the right," which I mentioned in a posting yesterday.  And here's another perspective viewing the election of Dolan-Kurtz as a victory for the vocal right wing of the U.S. Catholic church, by Susan Jacoby, a non-Catholic looking in from the outside.

And two predictable spins from the center (which is to say, from those who hob and nob with bishops and who tell us benighted outsiders what we should really think, and would really think, if we, too, dined with prelates): John Allen and Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter.  As with Pope Benedict (and here), Mr. Winters is "a huge fan" of Timothy Dolan.  And as I read that statement, my mind boggles, when I try to put together being a "huge fan" of this bishop and having any understanding of or commitment to one's gay brothers and sisters, given the deplorable records of Bishop Dolan and Kurtz in the area of including and welcoming gay Catholics.

Dolan hosted the meetings that produced the odious Manhattan Declaration, which attempts to keep alive the culture-war attacks on gay and lesbian human beings for the political gain of the Republican party. Watch the clip of the interview with Dolan embedded in Reese's article to which I link above.  Note his attempt, right out of the neocon playbook of Robert P. George that forms the basis of this document's attack on gay and lesbian persons, to root a one man, one woman definition of marriage in the DNA of human beings! And then try to tell me this is a man of whom one can be a "huge fan," and still claim to have any concern at all about the inclusion and welcome of one's gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.  

And then there's the "huge fact" that Dolan led the highly politicized resistance among the U.S. Catholic bishops to the Obama administration's health care reform bill, with bogus (just as bogus as Dolan's bogus DNA meanderings) charges that the bill extends and pays for abortions--a charge that Dolan and other bishops making it have never tried to prove.  Because they can't do so.  And there's the "huge fact" that he was one of the leaders of the movement to censure Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to be its commencement speaker last year.

And re: Allen's commentary, as I frequently do, I find more light in the responses to his observations than I do in his text itself. I'm with Rachel when she writes, "Phooey...just more right-wing Church politics ad nauseam...electing a noisy glad-hander just covers the real problems."  And I'm with Sarto, who says, "Well, whatever. As an old priest, I long ago got out of the habit of watching bishops and worrying about Rome. I expect very little and am usually not disappointed."

Even so--even though I find these intra-ecclesial, insider discussions of what Bishop Q said to Bishop Z as the brandy and cigars made their rounds beyond tedious--I do think that the recent election of Dolan and Kurtz bears watching.  It signals the continued willingness of the Vatican and the U.S. Catholic bishops to listen far more intently to Catholics of the right, even when those Catholics represent a minority (but a powerful one, in which men of wealth and power are disproportionately represented), than to Catholics of the middle or left.  

This election represents the continued decision of the Vatican and U.S. Catholic bishops to let that powerful minority of highly placed and wealthy Catholics of the right keep calling the shots for American Catholicism.  Look at who's crowing about the Dolan-Kurtz victory, and you'll see what this election means for American Catholicism and its future: there's Bully Bill Donohue of the Catholic League; there's Robert P. George, the eminence grise of the American Catholic right (quoted in the New York Times article by Laurie Goodstein to which I link above); there's Jeff Mirus of CatholicCulture.org, who uses the election results to bash Bishop Gerald Kicanas for his "sympathy towards homosexuality in the priesthood," etc.

As my mother never tired of reminding her children, be careful who your friends are.  Whoever they are, you'll come to be identified with them.  When I want to know the measure of someone's character, I listen to that inner voice of my mother, and I look at his or her friends.  And as I look at Dolan's cronies and friends, I'm not edified and not hopeful about the future of U.S. Catholicism.

David Brooks on the Party of Modesty and Caution (Yes, the Ones Who Now Control the House)

David Brooks has written some damned foolish lines over the years, in his ongoing attempt to soft-sell hardline draconian neocon values as kinder, gentler heartland American values.  But this op-ed piece takes the cake.

All those Republicans who swept to office last night in a tidal wave of misplaced anger and ignorance are "sober" and "modest and cautious"?!  Their goal is to govern with modesty and humility, knowing that their way may not be the only way or the right way?  It was modesty, caution, and sobriety that brought these folks into office last night?

Was Brooks even listening to the campaign speeches?  Has he been listening at all for the years in which Mr. Obama has been in office?

How will he soft-sell the "modest and cautious" politics of gridlock the Republicans intend to usher in now that they have control of the House, I wonder?  And how does he intend to spin the even more adamant no that the party of no will now have effective power to speak with control of the House floor, as it shuts government down?

We haven't seen anything yet.  And what we're about to see at our federal level will be anything but the sobriety, modesty, and caution about which this fatuous spinmeister is dreaming, as he spins, spins, spins his fantasies and expects us to swallow them with our eyes closed.