Eric Johnson: October 2005 Archives

It didn't take long before the Moonbat Left started employing anti-Catholicism against Judge Alito. No sooner was he nominated to the Supreme Court, but the loons on Daily Kos started hyperventilating about a CATHOLIC MAJORITY ON THE SUPREME COURT!!! They didn't notice that Scalia and Kennedy often find themselves at odds, and neither of the judges use their religion to justify their rulings, as well they shouldn't. (In fairness, several commenters dissented from this display of raw bigotry.)

Alito would join faithful Catholics Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts. That would make a 4-1 ratio of decent Catholics to Judases on the Court. Not as good as the 11-1 ratio at the Last Supper, but for a secular institution, not bad.

The best thing I can say about this article by Maureen Dowd is that I didn't hate it from the very first line. The tipping point came here: "Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women." This was in a middle of a passage where Dowd tries to convince us that men don't like to marry women who are too darn smart and successful. (Like her: fifty-three years old, a columnist at the most powerful newspaper in the world, and as single as an ace of spades.)

This opinion is backed up by a bunch of pseudo-scientific claptrap:

"A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent."

There probably is an evolutionary explanation for that phenomenon, assuming it's true, but it isn't what Dowd thinks. If evolution is all about perpetuating your genes, then men will naturally tend to avoid many high-achieving women, because they presume that these women will want to spend more time on their career and less time caring for their offspring.

For women, the reverse isn't true, because primarily they want men to contribute two things to families: moral leadership and physical sustenance. If Dowd thinks that will ever change, she's fooling herself. Women will only behave differently if they are under the sway of false ideologies such as radical feminism, or if they aren't thinking of marriage at all.

Long-time Catholic Light readers will recall that I've asked whether Dowd is "the dumbest prominent columnist in America, or the most prominent dumb columnist in America." This piece has all of Dowd's hallmarks, from the embarrassingly unreadable sentences ("Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole") to the lengthy passages where she assumes everybody agrees with her already:

Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.

I wonder if "many women" hated Betty Friedan and her ilk because back then, there were many recent survivors of real concentration camps, who probably didn't appreciate the equasion of Buchenwald and the suburbs.

Be that as it may, Dowd's article, excerpted from a forthcoming book, is not a screed, and for her that's saying quite a lot. When she writes, "...the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century," it's a startling admission.

In the '90s, feminists argued that feminism hadn't succeeded in making women happy because feminism wasn't yet fully implemented. (Just as Marxists said that no state had ever implemented communism correctly, so you couldn't say it had ever failed.) Feminism originally appealed to many women (and not a few men) because of the spiritual emptiness of postwar American consumerism, as well as the undeniable injustices that men often perpetrate upon women. At its best, feminism affirmed that women needed lives with dignity and self-worth, and should not be treated as means to an end.

As a living intellectual movement, feminism ran out of ideas a long time ago, and as a political movement it committed suicide by defending Bill Clinton's disordered sexuality. Its fundamental mistake was to seek material solutions for spiritual problems. For example, feminists demanded that women should be able to work outside the home and thus gain their own status; the American tendency to value money too highly was left unchallenged.

What began as a ringing challenge to treat human beings as uniquely valuable has shriveled into an increasingly strident, narrow demand that unborn children should be treated as worthless blobs of cells, which (if you'll pardon the phrase) seems to be their sole remaining viable political issue. Had they rooted their movement in an authentic anthropology such as the late Pope John Paul II's, or at least left the door open for an understanding of what humans truly are, they might have survived. Instead, feminism still wanders the world, doing much damage but having forgotten why it began in the first place.

I just deleted a comment, for the second time ever. It was by someone who has been commenting a lot recently, and he shall remain nameless. Here was the comment:

Maybe if those bishops at that worthless synod that Paul VI instituted after Vatican II would have some guts and decided to excommunicate these "Catholic by name only" murders, or at least deny them communion, we would not have this discussion. But you see the Popes after Vatican II and the Bishops themselves are no better than the pharisies of the 1st century who handed our Lord over for crucifixion, only now they are handing our Lord over to baby killers. And you contribute money to this baby killing church?

They are more worried about being Loved by the world like JPII than doing what is right by God, and they are paying the price now.

I can't speak for anyone else here on Catholic Light, but if you want to insult me, go right ahead -- I've got a thick skin, and I can hold my own. But you will not use this space to disparage any pope, or the bishops collectively.

Offering a critique of a pope's governance of the Church, with respect and true charity, is fine. Nobody said any pope is perfect (and any pope would agree with that.) But you simply cannot claim to be a faithful Catholic while throwing around phrases such as "baby killing church."

I'm frustrated that many bishops don't firmly rebuke Catholic politicians for publicly betraying the Faith. Everybody else on Catholic Light thinks the same way, too. If you really want to see the bishops take action, do you think baseless, angry accusations are the best way to accomplish that?

Virginians know that God created Maryland to make Virginia look even better than it is. But we can envy our northern neighbors for its lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, who is running for the U.S. Senate next year.

Steele grew up in poverty to a single mother, attending Catholic schools on his mother's earnings in a laundromat. He's more conservative than the Republican governor, and he's charismatic and loquacious. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, he gave a solid prime-time speech.

What's more, Steele is openly pro-life in a very pro-abortion state, and one of his personal heroes is John Paul II, whom he quoted in his announcement speech. In a state where elections are decided in two places -- Baltimore and the D.C. suburbs -- Steele's race won't hurt him, either. Keep an eye on Michael Steele, because you might be seeing more of him in the very near future.

If you're a Virginia resident, for the second year in a row you have the opportunity to decide between a pro-life, conservative Protestant and a pro-abortion sell-out Catholic. This time, instead of Bush and Kerry, it's Kilgore and Kaine. (Too many "K" names, I know.)

Tim Kaine, the current lieutenant governor, is the liberal former mayor of a big city who alternatively runs away from his record or tries to conceal it. Virginia is a solidly right-of-center state, and the only reason we have a Democrat governor is because he swore up and down that he wasn't a liberal. Kaine has to win by simultaneously pretend he isn't a lefty, while sending enough lefty vibes to urban and suburban liberals to keep them interested.

It probably won't work, although it isn't for lack of smarmy pandering. Read this statement on "Values and the Family." He quotes scripture, talks about being a Catholic missionary...you'd think this was a true son of the Church. This abortion statement would lead an unsuspecting voter to believe that Kaine is pro-life because of his Catholicism: "I have a faith-based opposition to abortion."

That is so misleading that it constitutes a lie. He does not want any abortions prohibited, so far as I can determine (feel free to send me evidence to the contrary.) He wants to promote contraception as an alternative to abortion:

Kaine said the state should emphasize "tried and trusted ways to cut abortion," including contraception access. He does not support abortion, citing his faith, but said he would enforce laws allowing it.

Worse, Kaine doesn't even stand up for his own principles. He used to be an opponent of the death penalty, which enjoys massive support among Virginia voters. Executing murderers, along with abolishing parole, liberalizing concealed-carry permits for firearms, and imprisoning more criminals, led to a dramatic drop in the statewide crime rate over the last decade, significantly more than the national average.

Kaine called for a death-penalty moratorium in the past, and as an attorney he represented capital-murder defendants. His opposition seemed honorable, but now he's running advertising where he practically promises to kill death-row inmates with his bare hands. "My faith teaches me that life is sacred," Kaine says into the TV camera, "but I will carry out death sentences handed down by Virginia juries, because that's the law."

His opponent, Kilgore, has been running tough ads attacking Kaine's previous views on the subject, and so Kaine decided that the law trumps faith. Had he said, "I believe that the death penalty is necessary to defend society against the worst criminals," he would have remained within Catholic tradition. But unlike abortion, where he will merely look the other way, Kaine is willing to take an active role by signing convicts' death warrants. It's the kind of thing that gives weak-willed politicians a bad name.

Kaine's candidacy is an opportunity squandered. In 1928, Virginia gave its electoral votes to Republican Herbert Hoover because the Democratic candidate was Catholic, marking the first time that our commonwealth had ever gone Republican. It's heartening to see that Kaine can showcase his Catholic faith for this overwhelmingly Protestant electorate, but it is unconscionable that he should attempt to conceal his moral and political cowardice with a veil of religion.

Which is why on November 8, I will vote to give him the sound electoral thrashing that he so richly deserves.

A few years ago, Zimbabwe was a major food exporter, and one of the few African economic success stories. Its president, Robert Mugabe, saw that white Zimbabweans (most of whom had lived there for generations) were largely responsible for this success, and he wanted his black countrymen to be more prosperous.

So he immediately implemented free-market legal reforms, including an anti-corruption campaign to secure private property. He worked with religious and tribal leaders to gain their support, emphasizing education and entrepreneurship as the keys to prosperity, along with the virtues of hard work, honesty, and looking out for one's community.

Kidding! Mugabe got armed bands of thugs to throw the white farmers off of their land. Those farms, which don't magically sprout crops but require hard work and planning, don't grow much food anymore. Now 200,000 people are facing starvation, according to Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncumbe.

But despite Mugabe's responsibility for the deaths of thousands of black Africans so far, with thousands more to come, the international Left has largely been silent. Why? Because Mugabe is one of their fellow loons, attending international conferences to denounce their favorite targets:

"Must we allow [Bush and Blair], the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed [an] unholy alliance, form an alliance to attack an innocent country?" asked Mr Mugabe, apparently referring to Iraq.

And this was at a food summit! While his countrymen are going hungry because he blew up his own economy simply to stir up racial resentment! Imagine if a white dictator caused mass hunger on this scale, with thousands of Africans facing death? Would he be invited to any fancypants international conferences?

The racialist modern Left is always willing to cut murderous dictators lots of slack -- just as long as the dictators are Darker People, and regardless of whether Darker People are the ones watching their kids die for lack of food. This demonstrates that Leftists are motivated primarily by hatred of the West and capitalism, and the United States most of all. When they encounter someone who shares their hatreds, they will look the other way, even when innocent people are killed and oppressed.

Postscript: A bishop named "Pius Ncumbe" must be a total badass.

You may have heard about the Duggar Family, the Arkansas couple who have 16 kids, ages 1 to 17. Although they are Evangelicals, they abandoned birth control after four years of marriage, embracing the idea that children are gifts from God and accepting as many children as God might give them.

The Duggars inspire mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, if they say that it's God's plan for them to procreate 16 people, who am I to say that it isn't? Truly, they live lives of heroic sacrifice. On the other hand, nowhere does it say in Scripture that we are called to have as many children as possible. Apparently, after child #10, a doctor advised Michelle the wife that she probably shouldn't have any more kids, which could be a serious enough reason to refrain from having any more. Also, their children's names all begin with the letter J. But the Duggars are not living on public support, as the husband makes a good living in real estate, and their hearts seem completely focused on God.

But to Mark Morford, a lunatic columnist in San Francisco, the Duggars are a threat to all that is right and good:

Let us be clear: I don't care what sort of God you believe in, it's a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet's resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she'd have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.

You gotta read the entire diseased essay. Morford's columns are light-years beyond parody. He manages to pack all of the Left's hatreds into a comparatively small space, screeching against chastity, marriage, Christianity, Wal Mart, etc. And where did the "repressed pedophilic priests" come from? If someone is pedophilic, wouldn't it be good for them to be repressed?

Assuming he's not truly insane, Morford does say a couple of things worth commenting upon. First, overpopulation, even if you believe in it, is a local problem. Arkansas is not overpopulated. It has 20 people per square kilometer, well below the density for the entire U.S., meaning that there are 33 states with higher densities. New Jersey's population is 2,110% more dense, and somehow most of them manage to eat and clothe themselves, except perhaps in Newark. Even if Arkansas were "overpopulated," it's unlikely that one couple having 16 children is going to make much difference.

Second, Morford suspects that maybe in the long run, it's people who have more kids who will inherit the earth, because his buddies on the Left aren't producing many "funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring." Those who are in love with sterility and death will eventually die out, like dinosaurs. Quite perceptive.

Every time I have the slightest twinge of doubt that Catholic school is worth the money, something like this happens.

Apparently, some athletes Osbourn High School in Manassas decided to have a "sexual incident" one afternoon, to use the clinical term from the article. And did the parents discipline their children, or move to another state? No -- according to WMAL, a local station, they complained that their rutting children were punished too severely.

Whenever parents attack the authorities for punishing their misbehaving kids, one can only assume it's displaced anger from shame. They think that by defending their children, they can refrain from blaming themselves. That's the charitable interpretation -- the less charitable one would be that they really think there's nothing wrong with such an "incident."

I will be completely happy to write that tuition check next month.

Remember Senator John Edwards (D-Prell)? Okay, probably not. He was the guy who lost the presidential election along with that other guy, you know...the one with the gray bouffant hairdo and obnoxious wife.

Anyway, before running on the Al Qaeda Proxy Candidate ticket, Senator Edwards ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He told voters that there are "Two Americas," one with gold plated toilets, the other with no indoor plumbing, one that shops at Tiffany's, the other that can't afford to shop at Wal-Mart, etc. This clumsy quasi-Marxist theme didn't play well, even with hard-core Democrats, who, if they believed in the death penalty, would limit its use to anyone making over $200,000 a year.

Nevertheless, without so much as a self-serving press release, John Edwards took a look at both Americas, and decided that the leather seats and martinis of Rich America looked better than the folding chairs and Pabst Blue Ribbon in Poor America. He's joining a private investment group so he can "[develop] investment opportunities worldwide and strategic advice on global economic issues."

Edwards was worth about $50 million when he ran for VP eleven months ago, so it's not like he needs the money. The BusinessWeek article notes that other politicians have gone into the financial sector, but none of the examples they list had ever run on a haves vs. have-nots agenda before doing so.

Democrats say they're for "social justice," which is why far too many Catholics buy their rhetoric and vote for them. But that platitude translates into sordid things like racial set-asides and massive income transfers from working families to the often-undeserving elderly. And for all their talk about compassion for the "little guy," when it comes to the littlest guys at all -- babies in the womb -- they have no compassion at all.

Bravo for John Edwards: he isn't going to pretend to work for the wretched and the oppressed. He's going to make buckets full of money and throw them on his pile. At least Jimmy Carter has done some demonstrably good things in his well-deserved retirement.

There are plenty of sleazy Republicans, too, but at least under their policies, we get to keep at least a little more of our money, and nobody ends up dead.

At a two-day training class I attended a couple of weeks ago, the students were mostly civilians, but there was a large contingent of Navy medical officers. In one session, groups of students had to hammer out a strategy for a fictional company we supposedly worked for. In the course of the discussion, one of the officers suggested that "indoctrination" would be a good idea for line workers.

The civilian half of the group assumed he was either joking or revealing himself as a crypto-fascist, but he was doing neither. "Indoctrination" is often used as a pejorative, but that is not its primary definition:

in·doc·tri·nate
1 : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH
2 : to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle

Or as one weapons instructor said to us in boot camp, "Indoctrination doesn't mean brainwashing." Immersing yourself in "fundamentals or rudaments" doesn't mean you have to amputate your faculties of reason; if you're really ingesting what you're learning, the opposite is true.

Fear of "indoctrination" is, I think, at the heart of why adults today are reluctant to teach kids firm principles. But the only way you can get kids to learn something is to repeat it until they understand, and then reinforce it frequently. Kids don't want, much less need, fine distinctions -- they crave clarity. When they want a fuller explanation as to why it's wrong to clobber your brother with a mallet, you can provide it when they are ready. Until then, mallet-clobbering is bad because it's wrong to hurt people, period.

Proving that shoddy religious journalism is not an American phenomenon, the Times of London has decided to tell us that the "Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible."

"THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true," the article begins. Yes, it's true: Wisdom really isn't a woman, and she doesn't have teeth "like a flock of sheep that are even shorn." Also, when Jesus said we should be like serpents, he didn't expect us to grow scaly skins.

The article continues:

The document shows how far the Catholic Church has come since the 17th century, when Galileo was condemned as a heretic for flouting a near-universal belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible by advocating the Copernican view of the solar system. Only a century ago, Pope Pius X condemned Modernist Catholic scholars who adapted historical-critical methods of analysing ancient literature to the Bible.

There is an excellent, disinterested summary of the Galileo slander here, written by a non-Catholic. Somebody else can look up the Pius X quotation, but when I read it a few years ago, I remember that he was condemning the use of literary theories as the sole way to interpret scriptural truth. The Holy Father's condemnation fell thus not on those who wished to place the Bible in its historical context, or apply textual scholarship to the Bible (which is absurd on its face -- source criticism was invented to disintangle the early versions of scripture.)

"The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US," Ruth Gledhill writes. The "rise of the religious Right" has been proceeding for three decades in America, so it's nice of Ms. Gledhill to notice. Religion has played a starring role on the national stage since long before this country's birth; the question is not why religion is a political factor now, but why it was so dormant for so long.

Gledhill and the Times can run such stories, even though their audience is largely right-of-center, because to British elites, believing Christians are freaks of nature. Nevermind that the Evangelical movement was started by the Brits, including the indominable Wesleys, today that movement is populated by otherworldly dolts who long to bring back the rack and the Iron Maiden (excellent!).

When I was in London last month, the BBC ran some footage of a couple dozen earnest-looking folks who gathered on the Supreme Court steps to pray for a good incoming justice on the court. Not my thing, really, and they did look a tad goofy, but so what? Anybody who works in downtown D.C. knows that there are always a few people demonstrating for this or that; nobody pays that much attention unless the demonstration is blocking traffic, in which case the demonstrators are courting murder.

But to illustrate their theme of the benighted fools who dare to pray in public, the BBC was so pleased with this footage that they were still playing it several days later. Were they aware that about a third of the American public identifies itself as Evangelical? And that means there are more Evangelicals than, say, viewers of network evening news programs?

It's unfair to single out our British cousins, who are, after all, guided by the same constellation of class-based prejudices and hatreds as our American elite media. Such as the Washington Post: "Strong Grounding in the Church Could Be a Clue to Miers's Priorities," its headline blared Wednesday. Did they run an article called "Work as ACLU Lawyer May Indicate Future Rulings" when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was nominated?

As the headline indicates, the article attempts to rat out Harriet Miers for attending a church where they believe in the reality of Christ's sacrifice, if you can imagine. They even seem to think that the Gospel says something about how humans ought to live their lives -- "There are antiabortion pamphlets inside the church and literature opposing premarital sex," the Post helpfully reports.

About ten years ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote a terribly unfair book about Mother Theresa, intending it as a hatchet job. His main theme -- apart from the transparently absurd charge that she was a publicity-seeking fraud -- was that secularists shouldn't be taken in by Mother Theresa's corporal works of mercy. No, that tiny Albanian nun did not do these things because of an Enlightenment-inspired ethos, but because she thought she was bringing souls to heaven. Hitchens' book was wrong, but at least he bothered to take his subject seriously. The same cannot be said of practically any mainstream journalist writing about religion today.