Man Bites Blog

Let’s imagine you consider the current exploitation of undocumented workers the be unjust, but you understand that agitating against it probably isn’t going to do much good, since it is generally accepted and many businesses benefit from it, and the rest of us benefit from lower prices.

Then, you learn that the government is going to embark on a project that would continue the exploitation of undocumented workers indefinitely.  You feel compelled to vigorously oppose this, since it makes all of us complicit in the exploitation of workers, and further entrenches the existing injustice.

According to Michael Kinsley’s favorite hobbyhorse argument for embryo-destructive research, this would expose you as morally unserious, since you are not out opposing the current exploitation.

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Ross Douthat had a nice response, to which Kinsley retorted, including:

My own suspicion is that this fertility-clinic anomaly hasn’t even occurred to most pro-lifers. And I think, or hope, that when they realize that their logic in opposing stem-cell research would condemn all IVF as well, it will give many reasonable pro-lifers pause—maybe even about their pro-life position in general, certainly about their opposition to stem-cell research. That’s why I keep harping on this analogy. And that is why the leaders of the pro-life movement keep avoiding it.

Except it obviously has occurred to the pro-lifer Kinsley was addressing in this particular post, and Douthat specifically addressed the issue.  When your point is being addressed by the first regular pro-life New York Times op-ed columnist, I don’t think you can continue to claim that, “the leaders of the pro-life movement keep avoiding” your argument.  I’m not sure if appealing to the assumed ignorance of those who share you adversary’s position is classified as logical fallacy, but if not, it should be.

But it’s also amazing that Kinsley really believes this is convincing.  As if we haven’t been hit over the head with the argument that these embryos are just going to be thrown away anyway.  As if we think they just appeared magically.
What’s going on in fertility clinics is a travesty.  But I don’t know how to address it.  Even modest efforts to confront this problem are labelled as “evil.”  But I do know how to address keeping the government from funding something I find morally repugnant.

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UPDATE:  One more thought — if there were a pro-life campaign against IVF clinics, do you think Mike Kinsley would be praising the pro-life movement for its moral seriousness and intellectual consistency?Me, neither.

To continue a theme I’ve touched on before, Rod Dreher writes of Ross Douthat:

But what if you, like Ross, honestly believe the Church has erred on the facts? Is an orthodox Catholic — that is, a Catholic who actually believes that his conscience is bound by the teachings of the Church — therefore required to counsel what the Church counsels, even if he thinks in good faith that the Church has fundamentally erred? Isn’t an orthodox Catholic required, moreover, to believe that the Church teaches truth in matters of faith and morals, and that despite the appearance of error, the individual Catholic is, in fact, wrong?

Emphasis mine. 

It’s important to note that the context in this case is Douthat’s dissent (yes, dissent) from the Vatican’s position on the morning-after pill.  Orthodox literally means “right belief.”   In the context of “orthodox Catholic,” it means belief in line with the magisterium.  So the question of what an “orthodox Catholic” should do when he dissents from the Church is literal nonsense.

It’s not nonsense because Douthat is a terrible heretic and thus unworthoy of the term; it’s nonsense because the very term “orthodox Catholic” is nonsense — none of us have our beliefs completely in line with the Magisterium, or with God.  In this world, orthodoxy is a journey, not a destination.

My point here isn’t to start trying Douthat for heresy, though I do wish there was some more evidence of some fear and trembling before endorsing Will Saletan’s snark at the Vatican’s expense.  But that there is not this dividing line between “orthodox Catholics” and other Catholics. 

Douthat is correct that Catholics must assent to teachings of faith and morals, though we often disagree on how to apply those to the world.   This is as true for someone like Douthat who questions whether Plan B is abortificient as well as one who prioritized electoral issues differently than some bishops.

Ross Douthat has a series of posts about the torture report.

As usual, Douthat is worth reading on this topic, but I think he makes the wrong emphasis — in short, he seems mostly concerned that George W. Bush be given a fair historical verdict, and thus emphasises what he would have done, what past presidents have done, and what other presidential candidates would have done.

I’m not so concerned with all that.  I’m concerned that as a society, we reject torture, and don’t consider adopting it again.  If that means George W. Bush gets a harsher historical judgement than deserved, well, that’s just too bad.  That’s the risk you take when you run for president.   Previous presidents were slaveholders too and survived with favorable historical judgments; that doesn’t mean we should tolerate a current president who owns slaves.

Maybe this explains what seems to me to be an inexplicable reluctance from some Christians to condemn some of the Administration’s tactics.  There’s a sense that “our guy” is being attacked, and that he doesn’t deserve it.

Maybe he’s right.  Perhaps Bush’s critics have made it too partisan, too personal.  Maybe many of these critics are more concerned with getting Bush than ending torture.  Douthat mentions draws a historical line from Dresden and Hiroshima to torture and torture lite, noting that if we condemn torture, we have to confront these sins.  But we were also able to as a society condemn and reject the internment of Japanese Americans without completely trashing the legacy of FDR, Truman or World War II.  

But given a choice, I would take the rejection of internment over the preservation of FDR and Truman’s legacies.  And given a choice, I will take the rejection of torture and a perhaps unfair historical judgement of George W. Bush rather than vice versa.

but Ross Douthat doesn’t.

BARGAINING FOR DISINTEGRATION
In the TNR’s online debate on Catholicism and politics, Damon Linker, author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, proposes that religious people’s involvement in politics be conditioned on the following:

Like every other citizen, you must be willing to accept what I call “the liberal bargain.” In my book, I describe this bargain as the act of believers giving up their “ambition to political rule in the name of their faith” in exchange for the freedom to worship God however they wish, without state interference. What does this mean, in practical terms? It means that your belief in what the Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches is irrelevant, politically speaking. It simply shouldn’t matter whether or not you think that justice has a divine underpinning, anymore than it should matter whether you prefer Jane Austen to Dostoevsky. In a word, liberal politics presumes that it’s possible and desirable for political life to be decoupled from theological questions and disputes.

In other words, if I want to participate in civil life, I need to leave my religious beliefs at the door — they are irrelevant.

But do secularists also take this bargain? I suspect Andrew Sullivan would be on Linker’s side in this debate, given his endless prattling on about “Christianists.” But elsewhere on TNR’s site, Sullivan writes the following about Republicans in the Foley scandal:

There is something deeply sick about a Republican elite that is comfortable around gay people, dependent on gay people, staffed by gay people–and yet also rests on brutal exploitation of homophobia to win elections at the base. These public homophobes, just like the ones in the Vatican, may even tolerate gay misbehavior more readily than adjusted gay people do. If you treat gay sex in any form as a shameful secret to keep concealed, the line between adult, consensual contact and the sexual exploitation of the young may not seem so stark. That’s how someone like Speaker Dennis Hastert could have chosen not to know: He was already choosing not to know Foley was gay. In this way, Hastert is a milquetoast, secular version of Cardinal Bernard Law.

Many in the GOP have overcome this shame. The Log Cabin Republicans, for example, have shown how gay people can operate in conservative politics without having to be embarrassed, screwed up, or pathological. Some Republican senators–John McCain, Gordon Smith, Arlen Specter–seem able to deal with gay people and gay issues forthrightly, even if they do not support full gay equality.

But such honesty is scarce in this White House and this Congress. The miserable example of Mary Cheney, Stepford daughter, shows the full force of this syndrome. It isn’t pretty. It depends upon knowing when to be silent, tip-toeing around bigotry, and shilling for people who may be personally accepting but publicly so in debt to the religious right that they cannot even formally speak the word “gay” in public.

It is this deeper, more nuanced hypocrisy that this episode exposes. The closet tolerants–and they include both the president and vice president–exist in a party that has built its electoral machine on systematic intolerance and the fueling of populist fear of homosexuals. This edifice cannot stand indefinitely, and the sudden collapse of Mark Foley’s career may be a portent of what is to come. The old manners of GOP Washington are being buffeted by the countervailing currents of gay mainstreaming and political opportunism. At some point, Republicans are going to have to choose between the two.

Let’s set aside for a moment that what Sullivan means by “equality” is redefining marriage to include same sex couples, and whether that logically flows from tolerance of gay people.

What Sullivan is saying is that there is a sickening hypocrisy for Republicans to privately tolerate gay people but publicly oppose gay issues. Sullivan says that this cannot stand, and will ruin Republicans from within unless they “choose between the two.”

But isn’t this dis-integration exactly what Linker is trying to sell religious people with the “liberal bargain?” Wouldn’t there be a deep hypocrisy in privately believing that legal abortions kill a million unborn children a year, and not using one’s political influence to try to stop it? And wouldn’t it eventually ruin us from the inside? Is “closet religiousness” any less ruinous than “closet tolerance?”

In the debate, Russ Douthat responded with the following:

This isn’t just blinkered, unfair, and contrary to the actual American tradition of how religion and politics interact; it’s also dangerous to liberalism, because it vindicates those people–Christians and secularists alike–who have always said that faith and liberalism aren’t compatible and that everyone need to choose between Christ and the republic, between God and Caesar. And, if you force Americans to make that choice, I’m not sure you’ll be happy with the results.

Secularists like to say that they are proposing no such choice — merely insisting that religious people compartmentalize their religious and political activities. But this is a ruinous disintegration, and as Sullivan’s column exhibits, secularists know that, too.

UPDATE: As I suspected Sullivan has backed Linker’s position. So I ask Mr. Sullivan — why should I accept a bargain that will lead to my ruin?