Pete, you’re wrong to talk bad about Canada’s moral condition. Loudmouth Catholic public person Martin Sheen says it’s in great shape. I’ll quote this in its entirety, because it will doubtless disappear from Drudge soon:
American actor and activist Martin Sheen had kind words for Canada when he received an award for being a Christian role model, the CANADIAN PRESS reports.
“Every time I cross this border I feel like I’ve left the land of lunatics,” Sheen said Saturday, adding he was “proud” of Canada for not entering the Iraq war.
“You are not armed and dangerous. You do not shoot each other. I always feel a bit more human when I come here.”
Sheen, who has been outspoken recently in his opposition the U.S.-led war in Iraq, was in Windsor to receive the Christian Culture Gold Medal from Assumption University.
The university will offer a new scholarship in his name.
I have a plea for Mr. Sheen, if he’s still up north: Stay there, Christian role model! Stay there and be more human! Come back and visit sometimes, but by all means, if you’re beset by all the insanity of living in the USA, and you’ve found a better place, it’s time to move. Maybe Martin and Pete can trade citizenship? Let’s find a lawyer to arrange it.
I’d have a lot more tolerance for the man if he talked about the injustice of abortion instead of his boutique moral concerns like the School of the Americas, or running interference for Marxist thugs like the Sandinistas. He prattles on and on about the poor, but in this country at least, the “root cause” of most poverty is bad morals: infidelity leading to divorce, illegitimacy, drug and alcohol addictions, etc.
Similarly, it’s fine that he’s a pacifist, and I admire his willingness to get arrested for his beliefs (over 200 times!), but Sheen never seems to suffer any real consequences. Does getting arrested that way really help change people’s minds? People would be impressed if he risked 5-to-10 in the Federal slammer for sabotaging a nuclear weapons lab, but if all he has to do is pay a fine, he can’t expect anyone to take him too seriously.
The more I hear him, the more I realize that the drugged-up schizoid character he played in “Apocalypse Now” wasn’t much of a stretch for him as an actor.
Sheen will probably decline voluntary exile, and return to the shootin’ gallery that is America. After all, he has to pick up his “West Wing” paychecks on this side of the border.
Eric, if you really believe that addictions are caused by bad morals then you are a fool. I’m sorry to sound so harsh, but it’s true.
Gordon, you have an erratic history when it comes to the quality of your posts.
I do think there is a moral component to addictions. Each addict differs in culpability — some people are more prone to them than others, as medical science has pretty well established. Some are barely culpable. In the later stages of addiction, the addict’s will is probably so hollowed out that to say he “chooses” to persist in his behavior may be an exaggeration.
But there is always the element of free will in any action, however small it might be. Addictions aren’t like breathing or heartbeats. They do require some kind of cooperation with the soul. If the person chooses the wrong thing, that’s a moral problem.
So yeah, I’ll stand by my statement. In closing: I pity the fool who calls me a fool!
To Mr Sheen, Re Great White North: Take off, Hoser!
Andrew Stuttaford, in a notable piece in National Review earlier this year, wrote of Martin Sheen’s many carefully-staged arrests:
There is another way in which these martyrdoms have been a touch theatrical. None were likely to have serious consequences. Now that there’s a chance that they might, Sheen has seemed to shy away. Following a conviction for trespass at a demonstration at Vandenberg Air Force Base, he is on three years’ probation and is taking care to avoid the police, handcuffs, and the judiciary. As he explained to Newsday last fall, “If I get arrested for anything now, I go right in the slammer.” The actor’s taste for martyrdom clearly includes neither the big house nor the loss of hundreds of thousands in dollars from his appearances in Aaron Sorkin’s fake White House (Sheen reportedly earns around $300,000 for each episode of The West Wing, not so much less than the $400,000 that George W. Bush makes for a year in the real thing), but it’s telling that it has taken this, rather than any change of heart, to stop — at least until his probation expires — the seemingly endless run of arrests.
To get arrested once is unfortunate, to get arrested 70 times looks rather more like arrogance. We live in a democracy, a system that, for all its flaws, does offer a legal mechanism for peaceful change. It’s called voting. But in a democracy no one, not even Barbra Streisand, always gets his or her way. Most people accept that they have, at least temporarily, to live under some laws with which they may profoundly disagree. In his repeated recourse to (let’s be euphemistic) “direct action,” Sheen appears not to — an approach that is, at its core, undeniably undemocratic.
Just want to second Eric re;bad morals and addiction.
Looked at spiritually, the addictive substance becomes more important than God to the addict; one he will commit all manner of immoral acts to attain. No addict is forced into addiction, it is a choice, a free-will capitulation to the flesh. Addiction is contrary to the First Commandment. The theory that addiction is a “disease” is simple sophostry from those who are benighted spiritually and live in denial of God and Man’s fallen nature.
Let Canada keep Sheen and we’ll keep Vere. OK, Vere and a player to be named later. . .
Speaking as someone who has a real soft spot in my heart for Canada (wife and mother both Canadian) I would ask kindly that Mister Sheen return home. My Canadian friends and family have enough problems to deal with without having a whack-job like Sheen be more than a occasional visitor, eh.
I stand by my statement, and I notice that Eric did not actually disagree in his followup. Instead, he sidesteps the issue and talks about a ‘moral component to addictions’ which is a VERY different point than the one I replied to. It’s side-stepping the question.
I did not for a moment say that addicts bear no responsibility for their actions, that there is no culpability. What I take issue with is the notion that Eric evinced in his statement that ‘the “root cause” of most poverty is bad morals… drug and alcohol addictions, etc.’ Drug and alcohol addictions are most certainly NOT merely “bad morals” and it is, pardon me for saying so, unChristian to suggest that it is. It also does not square with a great deal of real research which shows real causes for addictive personalities. To deny them is, in fact, foolish.
I’ll point out in closing that if I have “an erratic history” in posting, to my knowledge it’s only in response to you. I have few or no problems with your colleagues at Catholic Light.
Please see the main blog for my response.
First, on manner:
Gordon, your posts in this thread are using some shocking language: “if you really believe X, then you are a fool”; “it is unChristian to suggest X”. Now that’s a word loaded with moral opprobrium: it sounds like an act of rash judgment in itself! This X-doctrine must be really bad, if holding it makes Eric deserve this kind of talk.
On the question itself:
I think Gordon’s reading into Eric’s post something he didn’t write: the concept “merely”.
Eric cited “drug and alcohol addictions” as an example of bad morals causing poverty. He didn’t claim that addictions are exclusively a matter of bad morals. Honestly, I don’t see much difference between his and Gordon’s positions on culpability in drug users.
Gordon has taken this thread over to his own blog, where he admits he wrote “somewhat heatedly.”