Category: Culture War

Many Catholics take a cavalier attitude toward mass immigration, including commenters on this here blog. “Sure, immigration might be a problem,” they say, “but at least most of the immigrants are Catholic!”
How can we face our fellow citizens in the public square and argue for our views if we take that attitude? Translated, this says to our opponents, “Either agree with our arguments, or we’ll import zillions of foreigners and your guys will never get elected again because Latin Americans aren’t keen on abortion or gay marriage or all those other things you like so much.”
There are two problems with that approach. First, it treats American citizenship as if it means nothing — hardly a convincing tactic to anyone who is the least bit patriotic. Second, it isn’t true, because the current wave of immigrants will enshrine the Culture of Death for at least another generation.
I’ve met lots of Mexicans, and I’ve been to Central America a couple of times; Latin America as a whole is unquestionably more morally traditional than the U.S. But in the end, it won’t matter: Latinos will vote for Democrats, because the Democrats will promise them welfare, medical care, and subsidized education, and in the end, those goodies will trump moral traditionalism.
This is not an ethnic slur, it’s a sociological fact. Immigrants of all ethnicities overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. This is true of poor Salvadoran laborers and wealthy Indian entrepreneurs. There are a few anomalies — Vietnamese and Cuban immigrants trend Republican — but they do not disprove the rule.
That’s why California, which 40 years ago elected Ronald Reagan, now will have pro-abortion governors in the future. Arizona, which sent Barry Goldwater to the Senate, now drifts leftward; Colorado continues on the same path, and as more Mexicans are naturalized and begin voting, Texas will follow in a decade or so.
And the Democrats they’re electing in these states aren’t like the morally conservative Democrat politicians that you can find in Mississippi or Alabama. Even if they elect Republicans, they will be weak on moral issues. Look at Schwarzenegger, and you will see the future of American politics.
If you agree with mass immigration on Catholic grounds, and I disagree with it on Catholic grounds, we can agree to disagree. Just don’t think the country will be moved closer to Catholic teachings because of it.
Two postscripts:
1. Latin immigrants won’t necessarily remain Catholic, even if they were Catholic to begin with. In the Arlington Diocese, where I reside, there are about 300,000 Spanish-speaking immigrants, and only about 10% actively practice the Catholic faith. Evangelical and Pentecostal groups are much better at getting Hispanics involved.
2. Read about the American Church in the 19th century, and the widespread resentment against the Irish domination of the Catholic clergy and institutions. But as the Mass was in Latin, there was no controversy about the language of the liturgy. Catholic schools taught their classes in English. But if the current illegals are given amnesty, and 40 million additional Latino immigrants come to the U.S. because of family reunification laws (a low number, by some estimates), we will essentially have two parallel churches in the same country, one English, one Spanish, each with their own liturgies, traditions, institutions, clergy, religious, and laity. Many bishops will be forced to contend with two linguistic blocs within their dioceses, and will have to adjudicate an endless series of disputes between the two.
Will that be a source of unity, or division?

Among my friends, there are plenty of ex-Slashdot readers. They just couldn’t take the number of asinine contributors in the discussion threads, and I don’t blame them for avoiding the site.
I still read the front page on most days, because are usually two or three items that are worth reading. Occasionally, I will read a thread if there is a good chance the participants aren’t mentally out to lunch. But on any political topic, the lefty-libertarian fringe comes out in full force, screaming at the top of its lungs about Bushitler MONITORING MY FREAKING BROADBAND CONNECTION!!!! This is interlaced with huge doses of adolescent sarcasm, misfired jokes, and signature lines referring to Unix system processes.
Case in point: you know how when you’re in a group of people, you can pretty much assume that everyone will agree that kiddie porn is horrible, and child pornographers are the lowest form of human scum? Not on Slashdot. A sample of the discussion is below — each paragraph is from a different person:

When will the think of the children bullshit stop?
It’s obvious why they want all this data retention, and it AINT child porn.
dataveilance…
The whole “child porn argument” is poorly thought out. It’s a knee-jerk line brought out by politicians when they don’t have any other way of garnering support for an unpopular and invasive policy, which is so polarizing that it automatically casts a shadow on anyone who opposes it.
If America sacrifices its ideals and stops being America, there won’t be any “American” children to protect.
Wholly 1984 Batman!
This is yet another attempt by the Bush administration to increase domestic surveilance, and to create a de-facto state of permanent constant survelliance on all Americans.
How many people are online? How many of those are surfing for child porn? A depressingly larger number than we’d want, yes, but compared to how mnay people aren’t? So they’re going to keep records of everyone’s activities online and sift through all of that to find the people surfing kiddie porn? Wouldn’t it be easier and faster to surf the internet for kiddie porn and bust the sites that are spreading it? Hey, maybe we could have the FBI do that…. no wait, theye’re too busy working for the RIAA and the MPAA instead investigating dangerous crimes like they used to.
Well, it’s like the AG said, the internet is creating a feedback loop where younger and younger children are exploited. Since there’s a lower limit to how young a child can be, those sickos have gone on to fantasize about children that aren’t even born yet! That’s why they’re using cartoons, because they can’t take pictures of people who haven’t even reached the stage of fertilized egg yet. They’re being victimized years before they’ll even exist. Think of the future children!
Funny thing is, I can take measures to protect my daughter from sex perverts, but how do I protect her from a government that is slowly turning into an orwellian police state?
I think that laws making child pornography possession illegal are, at best, in line with laws making drug possession illegal to try to reduce the demand to squeeze out drug sellers. We want to step on sexual abuse of children, so we stomp on child pornography production. To stomp on that, we try stomping on child pornography consumers to reduce demand. You’re talking about a pretty darn indirect benefit at a potentially steep privacy and civil rights cost.

This is what happens when you let Johnny have a computer in his room.

In Tuesday’s column, Maggie Gallagher told us “Why I am not a Crunchy Con“. I think she’s missing something in her response to Rod Dreher’s book.

If you want the key to Rod and his fellow crunchy cons, I think it is in statements like, “Beauty is more important than efficiency.” Well, gee sure, but only if you live in a society where the great public health threat to the poor is obesity. This level of affluence is what allows educated women to stay home, throw organic dinner parties, and home school their children instead of spending time at the hard labor of spinning wool, churning butter and chicken-farming. Rod knows this, of course.

Is Ms. Gallagher suggesting that concern about beauty in everyday life is mainly a luxury of rich moderns? I don’t believe that our immigrant forebears in America and Europe cared nothing about the quality of what they ate and where they lived. They didn’t always live in great places, but they cared about these things.
Gallagher also seems to argue that caring about beauty and dignity and living with a sense of cultural tradition are not really the American way:

But in his restless, dissatisfied search for Something More, Rod appears to me as less a traditionalist than a fellow postmodern, rootless, cosmopolitan American desperately seeking an identity group where he can believe and belong.
This is not his fault. Whether we like it or not, this is the American condition. We live in a society where ultimately our sense of who we are is self-created, not something that can be given at birth….
The real American tradition, for better or worse, was captured in the 1985 novella, “The Man Who Loved Levittown.” Tommy DiMaria, World War II vet, retired Grumman aircraft worker, describes his first glimpse of his own personal paradise, carved out of Long Island potato fields: “Down the street is a Quonset hut with a long line of men waiting out front, half of them still in uniform. Waiting for jobs, I figure, like in the Depression … here we go again.” Finally it dawns on him: “What these men are lined up for isn’t work, it’s homes!” But 32 years later, the wife is dead and the kids are gone to find their own Levittown: maybe a McMansion in Arlington, Va., or maybe a Dallas Arts and Crafts bungalow.
As far as I can tell, that’s the only available American way.

In a sense, she’s right: the standard “American dream” is one of material prosperity, not of maintaining traditions and developing virtues. But she doesn’t question whether this is really a good thing, so I dropped her a note about it, along the following lines:
Maggie’s response to Rod’s Crunchy Cons acknowledges that the American way of life has made us rootless, but doesn’t offer any comment about how the culture got to be this way.
I recently re-read Professor John Rao’s old essay about “Americanism”, and was reminded that the US, even though secularized, is still based on atomistic Puritanism at heart.
It’s no wonder Americans lack an experience of cultural and religious tradition: if the individual is the only important thing before God, then all the intermediate communities that carry tradition (Church, school, polis) are usurpers of individual rights, rather than mediators of divine truth and goodness.
No wonder Americans make material prosperity the high good around which all are to unite (the “American dream”): the country’s national identity and mythos is based on the English heritage, with its distrust of ideas and with its Anglican compromise downplaying the importance of truth and error in a bid to preserve social peace.
If I get Maggie’s drift, American rootlessness and “self-created” identity are just an unchangeable part of the culture. But (and I hope she’ll agree) from a Catholic point of view, man is meant to live in communities, and a “self-created” identity is impoverished.
Follow-up: Since a friend has pointed out some intemperate talk about Pope John Paul II on Dr. Rao’s web site, I want to express some reserve. By citing his essay above, I’m not endorsing his views in general; I haven’t kept up with them in the years since I heard him speak at one of William Marra’s conferences in NY.

What the heck was I thinking? I was being accosted by the most rabid form of Bible fundamentalist the other day, you know, a former Catholic who is also divorced-and-remarried outside of the Church. I kept thinking of Mark Shea’s maxim “Heresy begins in the groin” as the fundy yabbered away about Sola Scriptura.
When I blurted out without thinking: “You can justify anything using the Bible alone, including same-sex marriage. This is why we need Tradition.”
He laughed. “The Bible has plenty to say on that topic,” he said.
To my disbelieving ears, I replied: “Show me.”
He couldn’t. He showed me many passages where Scripture condemns homosexual acts of sexual nature, as well as many passages where the Bible speaks of marriage between a man and a woman.
Nevertheless, his smug expression soon turned to frantic fluster as he was unable to find a single passage where the Bible condemns same-sex marriage.
“But you gotta be reasonable,” he said in a moment of frustration, “you just can’t take the Bible at its letter alone.” It then dawned on him what he had said.
But yes, this is why we need Tradition. This is also why the Church needs a teaching magisterium. I was stunned to discover that the Bible Alone does not condemn ssm, but rather we know ssm is wrong because of both Scripture and Tradition.

In their encyclicals from 1789 until Vatican II, the popes frequently insinuate that the object of the Enlightenment wasn’t to increase human liberty, but to destroy Christian civilization. To modern ears, they can seem grumpy and intemperate (think of Leo XIII’s Syllabus of Errors), filled with passionate denunciations instead of calm refutations. For this reason, they were often dismissed as hopeless reactionaries.
It would be wrong to wholly dismiss the entire project of the Enlightenment — and indeed, the encyclicals do no such thing, identifying positive developments while they condemn errors and half-truths. Men of the Enlightenment improved man’s earthly life by emphasizing natural rights and forcing governments to recognize them. This is particularly true in the Anglo-American strain, much less so in the French, which begot mass bloodletting, vicious and supremely arrogant colonialism, and violent repression of the Church.
Common to all Enlightenment schools of thought was the belief in the right to free speech. At its noblest, this was a recognition that no human institution could long survive without honest criticism, protected from reprisals such as arrest or confiscation of property.
For most of the modern era, this belief has been loudly proclaimed by all of those who claim the Enlightenment as their intellectual lineage, most particularly by those who call themselves “liberals.” These classical liberals had an honorable record of defending the rights of the despised, particularly those who wanted to advance an unpopular view against powerful interests.
But those kinds of liberals were eclipsed in the 1960s by the New Left, which saw classical liberals as the enemy. In the New Left’s view, Western society was irredeemably corrupt, as it bore evil fruits such as colonialism and racism. Liberals, they thought, were much more dangerous to “progress” because they gave a veneer of legitimacy for Western values, most prominently Christianity, and thus they had to be destroyed.
After some initial resistance, the New Left triumphed in a rout. They now lead the left-leaning political parties in every Western nation. In the academy and the arts, they enjoy near-total dominance; whole communions of Protestant churches were given over to them. Thus, most of the people we call “liberals” today aren’t really liberals, they are the New Leftists and their progeny. They continue to belive that Western society must be undermined, but now they wield real power and influence.