Bishops, Nuns and Righteousness

One of the criticisms regularly leveled at organized religion is that theological rigidity and ritual formalities inevitably crowd out human compassion and the thirst for justice.

Enter the Vatican, and its recent reprimand of American nuns for emphasizing issues of health care and social welfare over same-sex marriage  and contraception.

As (Catholic) Andrew Sullivan writes

I don’t think the bishops will either ever forgive the nuns for backing universal healthcare as the highest priority rather than the control of women’s contraception. Their witness to a balanced and sane Christianity put the cramped authoritarianism of Dolan et al in an unflattering light, and Dolan takes his orders from Rome. An example of the nuns’ alleged “doctrinal problems”:

In 2009, a woman arrived in the emergency room at St. Joseph’s hospital in Phoenix. She was twenty-seven years old, eleven weeks pregnant, and she was dying. Her heart was failing, and her doctors agreed that the only way to save her life was to end her pregnancy, and that her condition was too critical to move her to another, non-Catholic hospital. The member of the ethics committee who was on call was Sister Margaret McBride. She gave her approval, under the theory that termination of the pregnancy would be the result but not the purpose of the procedure. The woman, who had four small children, went home to them. When the Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix heard what happened, he excommunicated Sister Margaret on the spot. A Church that had been so protective of priests who deliberately hurt children—keeping them in its fold, sending them, as priests, to new assignments—couldn’t tolerate her. A spokesman for the diocese called her a party to “murder.”

The report criticizing the nuns noted in passing the good work they did with the poor and in running schools and hospitals, but focused upon what it called a “grave” doctrinal crisis. It said the sisters were promoting radical feminist themes and criticised US nuns for challenging the bishops, who it said were “the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals”.

Those of us who are not Catholic may be forgiven for drawing some unflattering conclusions about the male hierarchy of the Church from this unseemly effort to chastise the American nuns. From the outside, at least, it looks like a sclerotic group of insiders intent upon keeping control of an institution in crisis, of diverting attention from its own serious problems. It also looks like a group of men defending their authority over women who are increasingly unwilling to take their marching orders from bishops far removed from the realities of daily parish life.

Every religious community, ultimately, must choose between the righteous and the self-righteous. The lines between them aren’t necessarily easy to determine; there are reasons humans develop traditions and rules, and those reasons are often very good ones. That said, when a controversy pits the compassionate against the imperious, it’s hard not to take sides.

I’m with the nuns.

And I have to say, I have a feeling the Bishops may live to regret picking this particular fight.

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Lies, Damned Lies and Politics

My husband regularly listens to right-wing radio. He enjoys regaling me with the latest in what passes for wing-nut argumentation; when I express annoyance, he generally reminds me that it is important to know what all manner of people are saying.

This morning, he presented me with the latest gem being used to defend Republicans against charges that they are waging war on women. Right-wing pundits are insisting that it was bad for women when Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Act because–wait for it–requiring employers to pay men and women equal wages for equal work cost 500,000 women their jobs. Employers simply couldn’t afford equality.

To the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of job losses attributable to the passage of the Lily Ledbetter Act. This accusation thus joins the growing number of fact-free assertions–okay, flat-out lies–that increasingly constitute American political discourse. Partisans of all stripes have gone well beyond spin, and are deep into “making shit up” territory.

We all know that facts have been taking a real beating, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise when I came across Fact’s obituary.

Read it and weep.

RIP.

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The Buffet Rule and the Self-Made Myth

Predictably, the Buffet Rule–which would have raised tax rates on those making a million dollars or more a year–failed for lack of the 60 votes needed to break a Republican filibuster. The GOP defended its position as necessary to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation, despite literally mountains of data disproving the link between lower taxes and economic prosperity.

It may be instructive to consider a couple of observations from a new book written by Bill Gates Senior. It’s titled “Self-Made Myth.”

In the book, Gates explains that Bill Jr. could not have built Microsoft without the United States’ publicly-supported infrastructure, tax laws, government-funded scientific research, public education and patent protection.

The book cites a number of other successful entrepreneurs who readily acknowledge their immense debt to the broad-based, publicly-financed goods our society offers, from the roads over which they ship their goods to the police and firefighters who maintain public safety.

A foreign student of mine once observed that there are plenty of bright, entrepreneurial people in third-world countries who cannot succeed on the scale Americans can, precisely because they lack those public goods, and because the absence of our extensive but largely taken-for-granted public infrastructure prevents the development of a middle class with the wherewithal to purchase their products. Market-based economies require–duh!–markets.

The question we face right now is what happens if we continue down the reckless path we seem to be traveling, a path that promises–among other things–to eliminate or vastly reduce the American middle class?

Ironically, in their zeal to avoid even moderately higher taxation, their unwillingness to repair or improve our crumbling infrastructure, their attacks on the public servants who provide security and education, the wealthiest Americans and their apologists and courtiers run a significant risk of killing the goose that makes their golden eggs possible.

The reality, as Neil Pierce has recently noted, is that government has been an indispensable player in developing America’s prosperity, from the early canals to our transcontinental railways, great dams to the interstate highway system, the first telegraph lines to the government-funded research that led to the Internet. It’s equally true at the local and state level, from public schools for all to our great public universities, the first minimum wage and workplace safety laws.

None of these public goods are free. They are an investment, and over the years, they’ve generated a remarkable rate of return in general prosperity and in all of those “self-made” men.

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And the Prize Goes To….

It’s primary election time, boys and girls, and once again there’s a robust competition for the most intellectually dishonest political ad of the season.

I gotta tell you, this year’s competition has been tough! The Mourdock/Lugar contest has certainly given us some top contenders, and it has been really hard to decide which of the Dan Burton-wannabes running for the 5th congressional district is pandering most shamelessly to the cretins they evidently think are most likely to vote in the primary in that district.

But in the past few days, we’ve had a new entrant, and he has absolutely blown away the competition. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Luke Messer.

Actually, that may be unfair; watching this spot, I have to assume that the real Luke Messer has been the victim of some alien body-snatcher.  I can’t believe a real human would run what looks like a clumsy parody of a political pitch by someone from a galaxy far, far away.

The Messer figure in this ad (addressing people who evidently don’t know anything about how our government works–or these days, fails to work) says if we send him to Washington, he’ll “repeal Obamacare” “stop bailouts” and “balance the budget.” All by his little self, according to this spiel, which includes no suggestion that such tasks might require the cooperation of others.

Now–assuming this really is Mr. Messer and not a simulacrum–there are two possible explanations for this pitch: he’s a moron, or he thinks GOP primary voters are.

Either way, I’m declaring a winner! For political obtuseness, pomposity and sheer chutzpah on a scale not previously achieved, the award for most embarrassing candidate of the primary season, Indiana edition, goes to Luke Messer!

Stay tuned for the general election, when the Democrats will also compete.

And may God have mercy on us all…..

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The Challenges of Complexity

Last night, I attended a dinner in Lafayette. A delightful man at my table turned out to be a retired environmental engineer, and during the conversation, the subject of fracking came up.

I’ve had a good deal of trepidation about the practice, so I was surprised when he said that–done with a reasonable level of care–it doesn’t pose a threat to environmental safety. He also noted that the abundance, and relatively low cost, of natural gas could both lessen our dependence on foreign oil and give the economy a needed boost.

On the way home, I thought about our conversation, and realized that I had absolutely no way to evaluate the accuracy of his observations, or to weigh them against the arguments of those who oppose fracking. I don’t know enough.

The problem is, in so many areas of our communal life, we are all in the position of not knowing enough to make sound, evidence-based decisions. In an increasingly complex world, a world in which none of us can possibly have the knowledge needed to make independent decisions, we have no alternative but to place our trust in experts.

I’ve written a lot about the “trust deficit” in America, and its various causes. This dinner-table conversation focused me on one of the most troubling results of that deficit.

How do we make sound policy decisions when so many of the issues we face require considerable expertise, but we don’t know who has that expertise, who is able to render an unbiased and informed opinion, and who is “in the pocket” of an interest group or otherwise untrustworthy?

What was the old Chinese curse? “May you live in interesting times.”

We are.

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