It is vital that we recover an understanding of law and justice which both strengthens the rule of law with authentic moral force and recognizes that unjust, tyrannical, or self-serving law can have no such force.

And it is very important that each of us differentiate between our responsibility, insofar as we have authority to act, and any temptation to disregard authority and become mobs & petty tyrants, ourselves!

First, a recent passage with very high authority, establishing the relevance of the tradition to the current situation:

In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.

(source: Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons)

Or, as St. Augustine puts it in a dialogue:

Even Tertullian falls in line on this one: Continue reading →

Remember, kids, Barbie sez: “The power of the state should be predicated

on the consent of the governed, not the threat of force!”

Today, as part of a Patheos symposium on morality in animated films, I expand my emerging thesis on the New Disney as a source of cultural renewal. Included in the article is my capsule review of five of the New Disney’s films, such as Toy Story 3:

This, strange as it may seem, is a movie about politics. The nature of political community grows from our understanding of the meaning of human life, and the great political conflict of our own time is between two views that are contrasted in this movie. If we exist to serve a purpose higher than ourselves, the political community can have a standard of justice that transcends the will of the rulers. Hence the toys in a good child’s room, who exist to serve the child, have a free and virtuous social order. But if we have no higher purpose – if, as the villain declares, “we’re all just junk headed for the dump” – then our rulers will treat us accordingly. Hence the toys in the day care live in a prison camp. (WALL-E touched on similar themes, although in a more economic context; those who live for nothing but pleasure are fit for nothing but slavery.) Over against Hayao Miyazaki’s attempt to build an anti-political cosmos in Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises, Toy Story 3 upholds the nobility of the political vocation and the justice – articulated by no less a philosophical authority than Barbie herself – of government by the consent of the governed.

I may just have to write a book on all this. Your thoughts are, as always, appreciated!

Pride believes it can change the world through sheer force of will, and is crippled with despair when the world proves too big to lift. Cleverness searches for angles and levers, and is crippled with despair when the ground shifts and the fulcrum breaks.

Humility knows it is a creature, and is not free to change the Creator’s will in the world. Humility knows it is a creature, and is free to cooperate in the Creation and Redemption of the whole humane cosmos, or to join those whose Pride and Cleverness bind them in self-destruction, at so great a cost.

Humility is therefore bold where Pride and Cleverness are tongue-tied.

(source: Pride believes it can change the world–Peter Gordon Epps)

This Non Nobis from Henry V, by the way, is one of the finest moments in culture from the past half-century.

A friend is thinking out loud about what exactly is right and wrong, in the complex racket Planned Parenthood and StemExpress and their ilk make their living at:

Consider this scenario: Bill and Susan Jones are driving their 8-year-old son, Tommy, to his soccer game. Susan is pregnant. Suddenly, a drunken driver plows into the side of the Jones car. Tommy is killed. Susan suffers a miscarriage. In the hospital, after many tears and prayers with their minister, the couple agrees to donate Tommy’s heart, lungs, kidneys and eyes to suffering children. Then, after many more tears and many more prayers, Bill and Susan agree to donate the fetal tissue from their unborn child—a child they very much wanted—to medical research.

(source: Don’t be so afraid of science | News OK)

What, he asks, is it that we object to, if both of these can save lives?

This is a good question, especially in light of CCC 2296.

My answer:

Well, there’s “science” and then there’s disrespect for humans and their bodies. As a culture, we have travelled a long way down a road that will not hear any serious discussion of the difference between those two things. Yes, it is possible for me to obligate myself to work for someone–but can I obligate myself to use my body *any* way that person wants? Can I sell my right arm to pay the bills?

The ideas that my body parts are property, and that property can be bought and sold by anybody whose claim to title over that property is not contested, are related and dangerous errors. When they are combined–when Planned Parenthood’s murder-for-hire operation crosses yet *another* line and so displays its obvious mercenary interest in keeping vulnerable women weak and panicky, and politicians and citizens too afraid to criticize the slaughter of innocents–then we have something we really *must* point out.

Offering my tissue and organs to save the life of a vulnerable person surely expresses some real virtues of courage and sacrifice. Taking the body parts of slaughtered babies and trafficking them for negotiated fees is not even similar to this, morally. It is abhorrent, and if we refuse to see it, we are no different from the Germans in 1930.

In our culture, we will not listen to serious *reasons* that the treating of bodies as property, and property as always subject to morally neutral exchange, is bad; so we are left stirring up honest and realistic feelings of revulsion that common people have. It’s not the way we should prefer to do things, but until reason has a public voice again, we have no choice but to publicize and accentuate the moments when people finally notice the stark contrasts between glorious, joyful, life-giving truth and the horrible, hidden, death-dealing lies our mass-market democracy insists we tell in order to keep everybody comfortable.

Let me add a final note:

It is important to remember that there are always justifications offered for evil, and they are always plausible within the culture.  That is why the evil can happen.

In light of recent events, I keep reverting to something I said months ago, referencing a strong conviction that has been growing stronger since my days in Europe as the graduate assistant for Baylor’s Study Abroad program in Maastricht–a thought that took concrete form when that group of mostly pre-med students toured the medical history museum at the Charite in Berlin, where the likes of Virchow worked:  

More empirical facts are better than fewer, but they are not a good apart from and incommensurable with other goods, such as the respect for the integrity of human bodies that should have prevented a science from founding itself on stolen corpses and bodies in Bell jars.

(source: Et Seq. | Hang Together)

It is no accident that opposition to the authoritative revelation of the creaturely nature of humans and anti-human views of science are routinely found together:

As Matyssek makes clear, Virchow’s interest in promoting science among the lay public stemmed in large part from his well-known support for the Kulturkampf. Although the museum itself was founded after the Kulturkampf, Virchow himself adhered to his suspicion of “ultramontanism.” While Virchow and others regarded the Kulturkampf as a struggle for science and “Kultur” (what we would today call civilization) against the influence of Catholicism in public life, the struggle was neither religiously nor ethnically neutral. Indeed, the Kulturkampf was often explicitly anti-Polish and, as Michael Gross has shown, liberal Jews also worried about an easy slide from anti-Catholicism to anti-Semitism.[1] While Virchow himself described the Kulturkampf in the language of science versus religion, it was, in fact, as much about enforcing religious conformism as about secularization.

(source: H-Net Reviews)

It is vital that you understand that there are entire classes of people, at all strata from the wage-slave to the well-funded, from the beaten-down lab tech to the people who run the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation and their cronies, who have for generations been trained to view humans like this:

…and when they awaken, they haltingly admit what has troubled their dreams, like this:

It is up to us to witness the evil, and to bear witness to the truth about Creator and creature; to listen, and to speak, and to act.

Let us find a way to act, decisively, now. (Here’s a start.)