The Guam Legislature is considering a bill to create a new legal status of “domestic partnership” distinct from “marriage” but conferring the same rights and duties. The Catholic Archbishop there disapproves of the legislation. In a pastoral letter, the Archbishop said that the bill goes against “right reason” because homosexual relations are “objectively disordered” and that the legislature could not pass it without “stripping its own laws of any force to bind the consciences of the citizens of this island” and that by passing the bill the legislature would “forfeit its moral authority to continue to govern.”
Some official of Archdiocese put out a statement arguing against the bill. That statement falsely claims that the legislation would abolish marriage. It goes on to say that homosexuality (like contraception) “an example of what John Paul II calls the culture of death.”
Then comes the interesting part:
Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. That is why they repress such behavior by death. Their culture is anything but one of self-absorption. It may be brutal at times, but any culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers (women as well as men) is a culture that at least knows how to value self-sacrifice. Terrorism as a way to oppose the degeneration of the culture is to be rejected completely since such violence is itself another form of degeneracy. One, however, does not have to agree with the gruesome ways that the fundamentalists use to curb the forces that undermine their culture to admit that the Islamic fundamentalist charge that Western Civilization in general and the U.S.A. in particular is the “Great Satan” is not without an element of truth. It makes no sense for the U.S. Government to send our boys to fight Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, while at the same time it embraces the social policies embodied in Bill 185 (as President Obama has done). Such policies only furnish further arguments for the fundamentalists in their efforts to gain more recruits for the war against the “Great Satan.”
The statement goes on to predict that passage of the bill will contribute to “the end of Western Civilization,” because the Islamic fundamentalists who hate democracy are “resisting with all the force at their command the forces that oppose marriage and the family. If we do not do the same, they will win the contest by sheer numbers alone.” [I think that means we have to repress homosexuality in order to out-breed the Muslims.]
No, really. That’s not from The Onion. That’s an actual archidiocesan statement, and one that the Archbishop, who has since offered a non-apology to gays offended by his pastoral letter, has yet to renounce.
So the Archdiocese (1) cites the death penalty for homosexuality under sharia as evidence for the objective wrongness of the practice, without even hinting that carrying out the death penalty in such cases might not be the right thing to do, (2) offers suicide bombing as evidence of the moral health of extremist Islam (by contrast with the self-absorption it attributes to gays), and (3) says that the identification of the United States as the Great Satan is “not without an element of truth.”
Just remember: If you think that there are important commonalities of thoughts and purposes between the Islamic extremists currently ruling Iran and running the Taliban and the Christian extremists currently in control of the Vatican, you’re just an anti-Catholic bigot, because there’s no evidence whatever behind your fears.
h/t Eugene Volokh, who was astonished first by the statement and then by some of his commenters’ inability to see what about it he found appalling
Horseball says
One should hope that the people running the Vatican are "Christian extremists" — whatever that means — or indeed extreme Christians.
My guess is that your comment that there are "…Christian extremists currently in control of the Vatican…" is meant to imply that: 1) the Vatican is under the control of usurpers, 2) the Vatican should be under the control of persons more authentically Christian than the extremists, and 3) that you are in a position to judge who and who is not appropriate to run the Vatican.
I'd like to know what evidence you have that the Vatican is under the control of "Christian extremists". I'd also like to know what puts you in a position to judge what the appropriate Catholic position ought to be — which is entirely severable from the issue of your absolute right to disagree or denounce any such teaching in the political sphere.
I am aware of the vast spectrum of Jewish practice, but it would never occur to me to lecture my Jewish compatriots about how they ought to practice their religion, which religious authorities are authoritative, or which political beliefs ought to naturally follow from their religion.
As to the substance of the letter, do you believe that the view of the West as decadent and sexually licentious has nothing to do with perceptions of the United States in the Islamic world? And that toleration of homosexuality does not contribute to that view? While that might be a price that we are willing to pay, I don't believe that anyone seriously can disagree that these facts contribute to negative views of our country.
One thing interesting about your reaction is that this bishop apparently tried to look at our society from the point of view of our enemies, and suggested that we not further confirm their feelings in this respect. When this is done from the left, I don't hear anyone on this blog suggesting that President Obama has "… important commonalities of thoughts and purposes…" with Hamas when he said "…The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements…" in Cairo. http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/…
By the way, did you denounce Bill Maher when he said this?:
"We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away," said Bill Maher, the host of Politically Incorrect. "That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."
http://forums.dealofday.com/general-chit-chat/550…
Brett Bellmore says
Religion is organized irrationality. Why does this surprise you?
Barbara says
Dear Horseball, As an ex-Catholic, I can only say that it is a gift to American Catholics that they don't actually have to live in a society that reflects the retrograde thinking of their own Catholic hierarchy. That realization is why I am an ex-Catholic, along with having to face the reality that I simply couldn't impart the Church's views on women and sexuality to my daughters as an ideal for their own lives. Unlike the more "extreme" Jewish sects that are usually content to be a people apart, the Catholic Church thrives on being mainstream and institutional and is truly alarmed by the prospect of being an outlier on public policies affecting gays and women. Thus, the propensity of American Catholics to duck or deny the excesses and extremes in the Church's ideology is not a sustainable practice for the next generation.
Mark Kleiman says
Horseball,
By your standards I'm not allowed to criticize the Ayatollahs in Iran, because I'm not a Muslim. No,thanks. Of course I don't know what "real Islam" or "real Christianity" is; neither does any Muslim or Christian. I do know what real evil looks like, no matter what religious dress it wears.
The archidiocesan statement doesn't merely "look at our society from the viewpoint of our enemies." It agrees with our enemies, citing with apparent approval the execution of gays under sharia. Of course the current leadership of the Church is free to hold that view, just as I'm free to criticize them for doing so, especially when they ask the rest of us to take their fear and hatred as a guide to our public policy.
JM says
Imagine all the people….
Brian Schmidt says
At some point the grudging respect that wingnuts have for the worst aspects of Islam will turn into a faction of converts. Look out for some especially weird little towns in Utah, white skinhead Muslims emerging from prison populations, and a small number of "intellectuals" making a splash when the Southern Baptist Convention finally becomes slightly less intolerant.
Horseball says
Prof. Kleiman-
I never said that you can't criticize the Ayatollahs or anybody else - you can disagree with them in the harshest possible language for all I care. You seem to say that because you share in the ignorance that no Christian or Muslim knows what "real Christianity" or "real Islam" is that you have equal standing in the argument. The problem is that, unlike followers of other religions, you actually don't care what the "real" one is and presumably are advocating for a view of another's religion that is most congenial to your own views rather than out of a desire to "get it right."
I suppose we can all hope that within everyone else's religion there's an Episcopalianism dying to get out, but I rather doubt it.
Brett says
It's the usual thing, Mark - go around far enough on the extreme, and the extremes often meet in methods if not ideology. Sort of like how Stalinism and Fascism, even though they despised each other, both endorsed totalitarianism.
SRW1 says
Yes indeed, what’s not to like here? The barely suppressed admiration of Archdiocese officials for Islamic fundamentalists who still have the guts to really be militant about their beliefs and go beyond ultimately ineffective words? The perfunctory condemnation of terrorism as a ’gruesome way’ to curb the ’degeneration of culture’, hardly sufficient to hide the utter absence of any word of opposition against the idea of meting out death as an appropriate response for such transgressions? The secret longing for the days when Catholicism knew how to fight whoever opposed it with fire & sword, and had no qualms to burn apostates and foes at the stakes? Those were the days, baby, those were the days.
Ed Whitney says
Top of the morning, Horseball!
Bill Maher was correct in denying that the 9-11 hijackers were cowards. This does not mean that they displayed the virtue of fortitude when they crashed into the towers, but cowardice was not their moral defect.
An accurate philosophy of virtue is indispensable in properly ordering our thoughts. My understanding of a Thomist approach comes from Josef Pieper and a book titled The Four Cardinal Virtues. I am quoting from memory, but Pieper takes Aquinas to conceive of virtue as a system of attributes (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) which work together and depend on one another. An unjust act (hijacking a plane) deprives that act of virtue, regardless of the physical courage it required to carry it out; the act is disordered by reason of wrongly applying general principles to particular situations (the virtue of prudence); opposition to evil is a general principle wrongly applied to innocent airline passengers and office workers. “Self-sacrifice” ceases to be a virtue when applied unjustly; that is a point that the Archbishop seems to have overlooked. Simple calling terrorism another form of degeneracy misses the principle that virtue ceases to be virtue when it is separated from the ground that makes it virtuous.
As Mark point out, and you concede, he has the right to condemn Islamic fundamentalism in spite of not being Muslim. You criticize him for not knowing what “real Christianity” is. But Malcolm Muggeridge was right to condemn Stalinism during the Ukrainian famine in spite of not being a party member. The true believers (who were at least willing to recognize the crimes of Stalin) never ceased to insist that he had not practiced “true Communism.” They may have thought that they knew what real Communism was, but they never made a convincing case that theirs was the “correct” version, except to themselves .
Ben M says
"Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture."
That sounds like projection. In a country with religious law, homosexuality is illegal simply because the Koran says so, not as part of a general concern about declining morality. In the US and other secular countries, anti-gay activists *can't* make their public-policy arguments by citing the Bible—and that's the reason, as I see it, that the Lemon-test-compatible "damage to culture", "threat to straight marriage", etc., arguments come to the forefront: because they've got a secular veneer. I suspect that the Archbishop has spent much much more time contemplating "damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture" than any comparable Islamic authority. (I'm no expert; please correct me if I'm wrong.) "Understanding" this "damage" is necessary for fighting the US culture wars; it's not necessary for condemning homosexuality on religious grounds.
Imagine, by analogy: "I admire that they do not teach evolution in madrassas. Clearly these fundamentalists understand Intelligent Design very deeply."
Robert Waldmann says
Excellent and appalling catch. I would have edited the wisdom of the archdio differently
homosexuality is “an example of what John Paul II calls the culture of death. …, but any culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers (women as well as men) is a culture that at least knows how to value self-sacrifice."
homosexuality is an example of the culture of death, but, evidently, suicide bombing isn't.
The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing, but above all strange.
Maynard Handley says
Hmm, Mark.
You view all this (including the comments above) and you still want to stick to your views that those of us mocking religion are being rude and unfair?
Horseball, for all his faults, is expressing the essential truth here. Religion is not primarily about MORALITY, it is about THEOLOGY. It is the theology that is poisonous, it is the theology that is exclusive, AND it is the theology that is ESSENTIAL; and confusing the issue by talking about morality is simply hiding the truth.
Likewise hiding the truth is attempts to retreat into epistemological wordplay. No-one affected by the very real hurt caused by theology gives a damn whether the protagonists are "real" christians, or jews, or muslims. What matters is that plenty of self-identified christians not only supported Prop 8, but gave theology as their justification — likewise for their support of torture, likewise for their support of the harshest aspects of Israel's current Generalplan Ost. Likewise, of course, for those who find, without much difficulty, plenty of support in the Koran for killing whomever they feel like killing.
Maynard Handley says
"An accurate philosophy of virtue is indispensable in properly ordering our thoughts. My understanding of a Thomist approach comes from Josef Pieper and a book titled The Four Cardinal Virtues. I am quoting from memory, but Pieper takes Aquinas to conceive of virtue as a system of attributes (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) which work together and depend on one another. An unjust act (hijacking a plane) deprives that act of virtue, regardless of the physical courage it required to carry it out; the act is disordered by reason of wrongly applying general principles to particular situations (the virtue of prudence); opposition to evil is a general principle wrongly applied to innocent airline passengers and office workers. “Self-sacrifice” ceases to be a virtue when applied unjustly; that is a point that the Archbishop seems to have overlooked. Simple calling terrorism another form of degeneracy misses the principle that virtue ceases to be virtue when it is separated from the ground that makes it virtuous."
I appreciate what you are trying to do in clarifying thoughts, but this particular path strikes me as foolish. In fact the whole enterprise of trying to label a pure action, independent of the context (why was it done, what was the hoped for outcome, etc) as right or wrong seems foolish.
Are you taking the absolutist stance that certain acts are evil and wrong under all circumstances? Even Asimov ("zeroth law of robotics") couldn't get that to fly. Would you have that killing Hitler (and in the process blowing up Eva Braun) would have been wrong? Was Chase killing Dibala evil?
I think what you are trying to do is justify an intuition that it's wrong to kill/harm "innocents" in the pursuit of some goal. But I think this is a simply an intuition, not something that fits into logical reasoning. Trying to embed it within a logical schema simply ties you up in knots: Who is a "real" innocent — after all plenty of this in the Twin Towers actively supported, made function, the system that Al Qaeda is opposing. And if they were non-muslim (theology again) in a world where everyone can learn about Allah, they actively chose the path of evil. And, as I said above, at what point does the death of a single innocent stop outweighing the resultant benefit — is one innocent worth the death of a hundred other people (who are also innocents)? A thousand? Ten million?
We live in a world where the convenience of the ultra-rich is accepted as just fine, regardless of whether some of their consumption could be usedto benefit the poor — this is the issue flipped around — the "innocent poor" are dying as a consequence of the (in)actions of the wealthy — but no-one (apart from Peter Singer) wants to plug that into the framework you gave above.
I don't want to be nihilist here. I support these same intuitions and more; lord knows I've been pretty absolute in my opposition to torture at all times, in all places. But, as I said, I think the framework you're expressing above is silly and irrelevant. I think a more realistic framework would have to content itself with less lofty aims, with the fact that these are *intuitions* that don't quantify, that most of us are unhappy with pushing the fat man onto the railway tracks to save the lives of five passengers. And this in turn leads to the sad, but real fact, that our attitudes to these behaviors are very much relative — their terrorists car bomb us and kill innocents, whereas our soldiers air bomb them and kill sympathizers.
Ed Whitney says
Maynard:
Let me clarify (or muddify, as the case may be).
Saying that virtues work together as a system is a contextual and not an absolutist way of thinking. Systems are relational (and therefore contextual) almost by definition. The four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude are not isolated essences. They interact with one another. The key word is “system.” The components have no absolute or fixed nature in themselves.
The prelate in question was praising the “self-sacrifice” of Islamic extremists as if it were a virtue in itself. He was not taking into account the systemic nature of the virtues, that they depend on one another and cannot be “themselves” without fitting into one another. He was putting forth a delusional notion of pure attributes. Far from accepting this, I was rejecting it in favor of what I saw in Pieper’s exposition of Thomism as a systemic philosophy of virtue.
Dennis says
If you want to begin to understand fundamentalism (at least in the Judaism/Christianity/Islam setting), Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is required reading.
Armstrong finds a recurrent thread in the outbreaks of fundamentalist thought in the monotheisms. The recurrent thread is fear, and the three religions react similarly to that fear. The sources of the fear vary, but the response is to go back to the holy book and find salvation there.
I've read Armstrong and I've talked with Christian fundamentalists extensively. I cannot say that I understand them, but I believe Armstrong is on the right track.
James Wimberley says
Maynard Handley: "…the harshest aspects of Israel’s current Generalplan Ost."
Please consider this blog's commitment to civility. Wikipedia on the actual Nazi Generalplan Ost of 1940:
"In ten years' time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanisation or enslavement of most or all East and West Slavs living behind the front lines in Europe."
The extremist ultra-Zionist wing in Israel proposes, as I understand it, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (current Israel plus the West Bank) of its Arab population. This is a very bad and immoral proposal (not a policy), but it actually weakens the criticism to compare it hyperbolically with the Nazis' genocide of millions of Slaves. Even though the plan was only carried out on a very reduced scale, this was still large enough to make it considered by some (eg Snyder, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875) the worst in history but for the even greater one of the European Jews.
Ed Whitney says
True enough, Dennis, it is a matter of fear. Their weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms.
Wareq says
Wow. THAT is the most traitorous thing I've ever heard.