2006 – Page 2 – Jimmy Akin

Music To Surf By

A BIG CHT to the reader who recommended

Which was suggested to him by a gracious Christian lady.

It’s a free, Internet jukebox that you can use while you are reading blogs–or otherwise surfing the Internet.

It advertises itself as "The best of the top 100 from the golden years of popular music," and the main section is divided into years from 1952 to 1982. When you click on a year, it generates a pop-up window with a playlist of famous songs from that year that you can listen to in the background as you surf other sites.

In addition, it has links to specialized collections, such as the "Swing Era" (before 1952), the featured artist of the week (e.g., Nat King Cole), Movie Themes, TV Themes, Christmas music, Pop Gospel, and others.

The playlists aren’t (so far as I can tell) randomly generated, making it easy to pick up where you left off last time if you weren’t finished with one. Just scroll down to the same song you left off on.

Enjoy.

GET THE TUNES!

P.S. I really love the fact that the 1955 playlist has the Ames Brothers’ "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane" (it’s #13 on the list; scroll down and click on it). This is a song I’m used to round dancing to that presents itself as if it’s naughty, but which reveals itself in the last two verses (and really the last line of the song) to be entirely innocent. Great fake-out. Good things come to those who wait.

Blog Day Off

Wasn’t able to blog last night.

Feel free to do your own guest blogging in the combox, though!

Shooting Down Hijacked Planes

A reader writes:

As Holy Innocents Day approaches, I take the liberty of presenting for your consideration a problem which is currently exercising me.

The morality of intentionally shooting-down passenger aircraft believed to be under the control of suicide hijackers.

Post September 11, it is assumed that if a passenger aircraft failed to respond, and appeared to be heading towards a ‘big’ target eg a city, the government would assume it had been taken over by suicide hijackers and, as a last resort, order the Air Force to shoot down the passenger aircraft to reduce the loss of innocent life at the assumed target. This seems the ‘sensible’ utilitarian things to do.

But…

Is this a Utilitarian calculus, where the laudable end (preventing the deaths of thousands of non-combatants) is gained via the impermissible means of the deaths of hundreds of non-combatants? or are the passengers’ deaths a double-effect ie a foreseen but not (primarily) intended consequence?

The prohibition against intentionally killing innocents (ie non-combatants) is absolute.

Intentional = as a means towards an end (not whether one likes or loathes the means). The definition of non-combatant is not always black and white, but the ordinary passengers of a normal civilian airliner eg those used on 9-11 are clearly protected non-combatants.

I don’t know that aircraft are automatically assumed to be under the control of hijackers simply because they fail to respond by radio and are heading toward a city. I think that they’re looked at and fighter jets are scrambled to intercept them and determine whether they are under the control of hijackers. There are a variety of ways that this can be assessed by an interceptor, such as looking into the cockpit (do the people at the controls look like real pilots? are they awake and in control of the plane or could they have just passed out?), sending hand signals to the pilots, using wing waggles and message lights, etc. I’m no expert on all the techniques that can be used, but I know that they do exist.

In some cases there might not be time to try all of these things, but my understanding is that, even post 9/11, the assumption is not automatically made that a plane has been hijacked just because it isn’t responding by radio. There can be innocent reasons for that, most notably equipment failure.

What if it turns out that the plane has been hijacked?

In that case it must be assumed, post 9/11, that the hijackers are planning to use the plane as a weapon of mass destruction (assuming that there is anything within the plane’s range that is a plausible target or target of opportunity–which will be the case almost anywhere). Prior to 9/11 it would have been assumed that the hijackers weren’t planning this, but that presumption changed as soon as the second plane slammed into the World Trade Center, and we’ll have to live with it for the foreseeable future. Even if the hijackers get on the radio and say that they just want to negotiate the release of prisoners or something, you can’t take them at their word. It could just be a ruse to let them get near their target.

So can you shoot them down, even knowing that there will be civilian lives lost in the process?

This is a situation in which a straightforward application of the law of double-effect is possible.

The law of double-effect can be formulated various ways, but let’s formulate it like this:

1) An action is morally permissible if it has two effects, one good and one bad, if and only if
2) The action itself is not morally impermissible and
3) The bad effect is not an end in itself and
4) The bad effect is not a means to the good end and
5) The good effect is proportionate to the bad and
6) There is no better, alternative solution

BTW, for folks keeping score at home, note that we just used the word "proportionate." This term or a synonym is always present in articulations of the law of double-effect, showing that proportion is a valid consideration in Catholic moral theology. Not all reference to something being proportional means that a person is committing the error of proportionalism. Proportionalism treats the proportion of good and bad as the only morally relevant criterion in a moral system. The truth is that it can be a criterion in a moral system but not the only criterion, as is the case here, where we’ve got conditions (2)-(4), which are clearly non-proportional.

So let’s look at conditions (1)-(6) and ask if they are fulfilled, or potentially fulfilled, in the case of shooting down a plane whose hijackers must be assumed to plan on using it as a weapon of mass destruction.

Is condition 1 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. Shooting down the plane will have the good effect of stopping it from being used as a WMD. It also has the bad effect of killing everyone (or virtually everyone) on board, as well as additional possible people on the ground who might get killed or injured when the plane comes out of the sky.

Is condition 2 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. It is not immoral in itself to shoot down a plane. If it were then it would be immoral for the British to shoot down Nazi bombers in World War II.

Is condition 3 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. The deaths of the people in the plane and on the ground are not an end in themselves. The object of the moral act is stopping the plane.

Is condition 4 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. The deaths of the passengers and those on the ground are not the means by which the plane is stopped. The plane itself is stopped, and the people’s deaths are a side-effect of that.

With the fulfillment of this condition we pass into the realm whereby the act of shooting down the plane is potentially morally justifiable. We have established that the act (physically disabling a WMD) is not wrong in itself (condition 1) and that the deaths that will ensue from this act are neither a means nor an end, meaning that they are a side-effect of the act, which is what needs to happen for the law of double-effect to apply.

There are still two conditions that need to be fulfilled, though, before you can actually fire the missle.

Is condition 5 fulfilled or fulfillable? Whether it’s fulfilled in a particular case would depend on the circumstances, but it’s certainly fulfillable in some circumstances. If there is a target within range of the plane that would result in more harm being done than the cost of the lives that would be incurred by shooting the plane down then the good to be achieved (keeping it from its target) is proportionate to the bad effect of the act of shooting it down.

Is condition 6 fulfilled or fulfillable? It’s fulfilled if you don’t have any better way to stop the plane from reaching its target than shooting a missle at it. I suspect that, much of the time at present, this is the most effective and least harmful way to keep it from its target. However, I suspect that in some circumstances, and increasingly with time, it will be possible to find other, better solutions.

For example, means might be found of denying the hijackers control of the plane without totally disabling it. This could happen if there was a way to kill or render unconscious everyone in the cockpit and still have the plane be flyable afterwards. Or devices might be built that would allow people on the ground to gain remote control of the plane and safely bring it down.

I’m not an expert in such matters, or knowledgeable about what may already be possible in these respects, but the advance of technology should allow more "surgical" and less-lethal solutions to the problem that may not be practical at the moment.

I Don’t Like This Idea At All

Breitbart is reporting:

The Vatican may one day field a football team that could rival the top formations in Italy’s powerful Serie A, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said Sunday.

"I do not preclude the possibility that the Vatican, in the future, could put together a football team of great value, that could play on the same level as Roma, Inter Milan and Sampdoria," all first division teams, the Cardinal said, according to the Ansa agency.

Bertone has never hidden his passion for football, and has commented on matches in the past when he was archbishop of Genoa. He has mentioned on several occasions the possibility of the Vatican fielding a team. SOURCE. CHT to the reader who e-mailed.

I like Cardinal Bertone, and I’m glad he got the Secretary of State’s job at the Vatican, but I think this is a really bad idea.

I don’t know how serious he is about it. I can easily see this just being a kind of running joke between him and the Italian press that Breitbart isn’t getting, but if he is serious about the Holy See having a football (read: soccer) team, I think that’s a really bad idea.

First of all, how will the team reflect on the Holy See, simply in terms of its performance? If it isn’t a good team then it’s going to reflect poorly. If it is a good team then it’ll reflect poorly as the Vatican is perceived as crowding its way into an arena and diminishing the standings of other teams for no good reason.

Whether it’s an good team or not, where’s the money to run it going to come from? Will the Holy See be perceived as spending money on this that would better be spent on widows and orphans?

Even if the thing’s a money-maker, it will take time and attention on the part of those running the show at the Vatican. That’s a bad thing given that they already don’t have enough time to attend to all the real pastoral needs that exist out there.

Then there’s the fractiousness that sports teams breed. It’s one thing when you have inter-team rivalries that are completely arbitrary and everyone knows it, but if you start mixing team rivalries up with matters that actually do mean something–like religion or politics–then it’s another story. I don’t think American politics would be served well by the Democrats and the Republicans each starting their own NFL team and entangling the political sphere with the sports sphere. Having an official Vatican soccer team would produce a similar entanglement that we’d be better off without. It would, on some level, ask Catholics to side with the official Vatican team–or else teach them that it’s okay to side against the Church sometimes. And then there would be Catholic players on other teams being asked to compete against the Church’s official team.

And then there’s hooliganism. If the team is successful (or even if it isn’t), can we count on the Vatican soccer hooligans to be the most polite, least offensive, least violent of hooligans? Do we want Vatican soccer hooligans in the first place?

Assuming that this isn’t just a joke, what possible reason could the Holy See have for wanting to start such a thing? I’m sure that someone could come up with some nonsense about penetrating the secular culture with the message of Christ, but you know what? That’s the job of the laity, not the Vatican. The Vatican’s job in such matters is to support and educate the laity so that they can affect the culture for Christ, not to undermine the efforts of Catholic players and fans by starting their own rival franchise. That’s the same reason the Church doesn’t start it’s own political party.

If this is to be taken seriously, it sounds to me like an impermissible form of mission creep. The Vatican’s mission has nothing to do with fielding sports teams. I don’t even like the sport and culture office they opened up a while back, and I hope that goes on the chopping block in B16’s reorganization of the curia.

There is no special reason why the Vatican should start a sports team anymore than it should open up an ice cream plant or start its own shoe resoling service or undertake any other venture not related to its mission. "Because we can" is not a good enough reason for an organization to undertake unrelated ventures in areas that it’s not expert at. What happens is that this creates inefficiencies, wastes time and money, harms those already trying to do good work in the field, and generally fails and causes embarassment.

So I hope this is just a joke.

Timing Rumors

Catholic News Agency is reporting:

Sources close to the Vatican have told Catholic News Agency that the Motu Propio by which Pope Benedict XVI would allow for the universal use of the Missal of St. Pius V may be published after Christmas, while the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist could come in mid-January 2007.

MORE . . .

The Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, according to the same sources, has already been finished by Pope Benedict XVI and is being translated into the different languages in which it will be presented.

The document, which sources say will be issued after January 15, reaffirms the Church’s commitment to a celibate priesthood, encourages the use of Latin in liturgical celebrations, and even requests that seminarians learn the language as part of their formation.

It will also promote the recovery of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphonic music as a replacement to modern music, which would result in a gradual elimination of musical instruments that are “inappropriate” for the solemnity and reverence of the Eucharistic celebration.

GET THE STORY.

My General Christmas Present

Like everybody, when I give Christmas presents, I try to match the present to the person to whom I am giving it.

This ain’t always easy.

It’s often hard to figure out something (a) that the person would like and (b) that the person doesn’t already have.

Sometimes you have a promising candidate, but you’re not sure, and so you just have to take your best guess and accept the risk that they won’t like it or that they already have it.

But if you have a large number of people that you are buying presents for–family, friends, co-workers–then the process of finding individualized presents for everyone can be extraordinarily difficult.

One solution in recent years has been getting gift certificates/gift cards for people. Those get you around the problems mentioned above, since the person can pick for himself what he’d like, and they’re useful. This year I asked my own family for gift certificates from a particular online service so that they wouldn’t be burdened with figuring out something that I would like and that I didn’t already have.

But there can also be a desire to give something that is specific, and I have that desire myself. One of the ways I’ve tried to do this in recent years is by figuring out a general Christmas present that I can give people if I don’t already have something in mind for them.

I have several criteria that I look for in a general Christmas present. I want them to enjoy it, so I look for something that I myself have really enjoyed. I also don’t want them to already have it, so I generally try to pick something that has just come out.

A few years ago, when The Incredibles had just come out on DVD, that was my general Christmas gift. That was something I really liked; it was wholesome enough that almost everyone would enjoy it; and it was brand new.

This year my general Christmas present is occasioned by the election of His Most Awesomeness B16. It’s a new book that I really enjoy and appreciate.

It’s Robert Moynihan’s Let God’s Light Shine Forth: The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI.

The first third of the book is devoted to Joseph Ratzinger’s life story, and it hits the major events of it all the way up to his election as pope. It also includes the author’s personal reminisences of Pre-16 (Robert Moynihan is the editor of the magazine Inside the Vatican, and so he knew him before his election).

The last two thirds of the book are brief passages from a variety of writings by Cardinal Ratzinger that express his views on different topics. It’s divided into three sections: His Faith, Today’s World, and The Church Pilgrim.

The first covers Pre-16’s thoughts on things such as God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, Mary, Judaism, the Church, and the Sacraments.

The second covers things like Morality, Marriage and Family Life, Social Justice, Politics, Culture and the Arts, Modernity, Ecumenism and Other Religions, Bioethics, and the Challenges of the Future.

The third covers things like Loneliness, Suffering, Sin, Death, Faith, Hope, Love, Holiness, Eternal Life, and True Joy.

The final part of the book includes B16’s first words, his first message to the world, and his first homily as pope.

All in all, it is a book that I myself am really enjoying–so much so that I decided before I’d even finished it to make it my present for Catholic friends this year unless I already had something distinctive in mind for them.

You might consider it as well–or consider it for yourself.

B16 On Christmas Presents

A while back ago, SDG did a post in which he quoted Pre-16 on Christmas in which the predestined-to-be-pontiff took something other than the usual dour, scolding tone that priests and preachers are expected to take toward the way that Christmas is celebrated.

To be sure, he did say that "The hectic commercialism is repugnant to us, and rightly so," but he went on to say, "And yet, underneath it all, does it not originate in the notion of giving and thus the inner urgency of love, with its compulsion to share, to give of oneself to the other? And does not the notion of giving transport us directly into the core of the mystery that is Christmas?"

He went on to reflect more concretely on the custom of giving Christmas presents, saying:

In the offertory prayer of the Christmas Vigil liturgy, we ask God for the grace to receive with joy his everlasting gifts that come to us in the celebration of Christ’s birth. Thus the concept of gift-giving is squarely anchored in this liturgy of the Church and, at the same time, we are made aware of the primal mode of all giving at Christmas: that God, on this holy night, desired to make himself into a gift to mankind, that he turned himself over to us.

The one genuine Christmas gift to mankind, to history, to each one of us, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Even those who do not believe him to be God incarnate will have to admit that he has enriched and gifted the inner existence of generations upon generations.

This year Post-Pre-16, which is to say, B16 himself, took up this theme again in an address to college students , telling them:

"Christmas gifts remind us of the most perfect gift that the Son of God gave us of himself in the Incarnation,” Pope Benedict told the youth. “Christmas is the day in which God has given himself to human persons and this gift is made perfect, so to speak, in the Eucharist." (SOURCE.)

I don’t have the full text of his address, but I hope it appears on the web soon, because I’d like to read more about what he has to say on this subject.

In former days, I myself expected pastors to take the scolding attitude toward the commercialization of Christmas, not that this ever stopped me from giving Christmas presents to others.

To this day any talk that suggests a horizontalization of Christmas–that good will among men is the "real meaning" of Christmas–turns my stomach, and I am no fan of the endless holiday movies and TV shows that make this point, including remakes of Charles Dickens’ secular fairy-tale A Christmas Carol.

The real meaning of Christmas is Christ, and to convey the idea that it is anything else, whether commercialistic or sentimentalistic is to confuse the epiphenomena for the Phenomenon that occasions them.

Yet I find myself agreeing with B16, too.

It’s natural to give gifts as part of a celebration. When the Jewish people were saved from Haman’s plot against them in the book of Esther, they exchanged presents of food with each other (9:22). There’s a certain naturalness to that, particularly in an age when food was not as cheap and easily available as it is today. But even apart from the biblical precedent, the exchange of gifts as a sign of joy is a human universal.

There is a familiar pattern that shows up across cultures whenever something is being celebrated. The details may vary, and not every element may be present in each celebration or in each culture, but in the main, whenever humans celebrate something you’re going to find a familiar cluster: eating, drinking, singing, dancing, gift-giving, and decorating. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Christmas or Purim or Eid al-Fitr or Diwali or Chinese New Year. There’s going to be a substantial presence of what we might call the human "celebration pattern" present.

Why does the pattern exist?

I haven’t reflected on the matter until recently, but it seems to me that there are likely to be at least two main reasons:

1) Humans are tangible creatures and we need to externalize our feelings through physical actions. Vulcans might be able to commemorate an event of joy just by meditating on it (assuming they weren’t wrong-headedly repressing their joy), but not humans. We’ve got ants in our pants, and we need to do something.

2) This blends into the second reason, which is that we need to externalize joy not just to express it but to promote it as well. All of the things in the human celebration pattern promote joy–they (when done well) make us happy, and so it’s natural to use them to promote joy over the thing we are celebrating. If you will, they are the occasion of natural happiness that, in religious contexts, becomes supernaturalized by pointing us to something beyond themselves.

Let’s look at gratitude for a moment. Suppose that you had come down with a horrible disease that was going to kill you or otherwise ruin your life. Then a doctor shows up and tells you that there’s a cure, and he gives it to you. In the moments of joy and relief that follow, you would not need any elements of the human celebration pattern to get you to feel joy and gratitude. You’d just feel it. Immediately. Hugely. Without any assistance.

But what about ten years later? The feelings wouldn’t be the same at that point, and while they’d still be there, latent, it would require more effort to bring them to the surface.

Something similar happens in religious contexts.

If you were one of the Israelites who came through the Red Sea, you wouldn’t have needed special celebrations to evoke feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving to God. But 3500 years later? It’s a different story.

In the same way, if we were there at the manger on the night of the first Christmas–in Bethlehem–knowing the significance of the night, we wouldn’t need special assistance in evoking feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving. But 2000 years later, it’s a different story.

Because of the distance that exists between us and the events we are celebrating, and given the way the human psyche works–at least in its fallen form–we need assistance to help evoke the feelings that we recognize are appropriate for the event we are celebrating. And so we employ elements of the human celebration pattern to help raise us to the level where–at least in a fallen, partial, incomplete way that doesn’t compare to what we would feel if we could go back and be in Bethlehem on that first Christmas–we feel some of what is appropriate.

We use the epiphenomena (the external elements of celebration) to help us appreciate the Phenomenon that occasions them.

That’s just the way humans work.

And so the celebration pattern not only allows us to express joy but to create joy as well.

The danger, in a religious setting, is that we will let the party become an end for its own sake. Parties are fine, and you don’t need a special occasion for them. My square dance club has one every month (that is, a special "Party Night," in addition to its weekly dances). But if you are having a party imbued with religious meaning, that meaning needs to be kept in sight.

This is something that we have to work at at times. It’s easy–when we are children–to focus exclusively on presents–or other elements of the celebration pattern (e.g., decorating Easter eggs, Halloween costumes, Halloween candy)–and we need our parents to help us keep a spiritual perspective in view.

But it is not wrong to use elements of celebration to evoke religious feeling. God knows how we’re made, and he expects us to do this, receiving and blessing the pattern. One of the purposes toward which the tithe was put in the Old Testament was to throw a party in thanksgiving for what God had given you. This was a matter of divine command at the time, and it shows the divine reception of external, joyful celebrations oriented toward the spiritual.

If we then ask: How much celebration is appropriate on a particular occasion, the answer will depend in part on what it is we are celebrating. If it’s the feast day of St. Paul well, as awesome as St. Paul is, that ain’t nothing compared to the birth of the Messiah. The joy occasioned by the latter should far outstrip the former–and St. Paul would say so himself. (Indeed, he would be positively insistent on the matter.)

The birth of God in human form–together with the rising of God from the dead for our salvation–should occasion the greatest joy and the greatest celebrations. One can argue that our culture doesn’t have the respective proportions between Christmas and Easter right, or that it allows other holidays to compete with them that shouldn’t, but at least among Christians they are recognized as the two most important religious holidays.

If we leave off comparing one holiday to another, though, and just ask ourselves "How much celebration is warranted for the birth of God in human form?" it seems to me that there is no intrinsic maximum to how much joy or how much celebration we should have. This is an event of such transcendant importance that the answer to how much joy you should feel or how big a celebration you should have, the answer is "As much as you can."

God doesn’t want you to exceed your means in these matters. He doesn’t want you to get so joyful that you become blind to your surroundings and rush out into the street shouting praises and get hit by a bus. Neither does he want you to ruin your family finances buying Christmas presents that you can’t afford. But within your means, it’s warranted to throw Christ a tremendous birthday party.

What counts as a tremendous birthday party depends on the means of the family and the culture throwing it. On the principle of the widow’s mite, a family or a culture that has very modest means will throw an externally modest party that is just as tremendous in God’s eyes as a family or culture with larger means which throws an externally larger party.

The key is not the size of the party but that it seeks to reflect the joy that is due the Event, within the means we have available, and that the party not lose sight of the purpose for which it is being celebrated.

I thus find my own reaction to the contemporary celebration of Christmas taking a somewhat different shape than it used to. It’s not the size of the party that our culture throws or all the economic activity that Christmas generates. My concern is more directed to orienting the celebration toward Christ rather than complaining about the excesses of the celebration (though there are certainly those in individual cases).

Which is why I was very pleased Friday night at my square dance club when our new caller confessed himself unashamed to wish people Merry Christmas. This not only drew immediate applause from the dancers but occasioned extensive Merry Christmassing for the rest of the evening.

I don’t know how religious everyone at the event is (it’s not a specifically Christian square dance club), but it helped keep Christ in Christmas–not to say keep Christmas in Christmas–and that made me happy.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

“From A Certain Point Of View”

Obi-Wan Kenobi once explained to Luke Skywalker that "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." What he meant was that the flat-out falsehood he had told Luke could actually be seen as a truth if looked at "from a certain point of view."

The same principle holds true in other areas of life.

So let’s look at some visual falsehoods generated by looking at things "from a certain point of view."

CHT to the reader who e-mailed!

Ramesh Dusts Off His Crystal Ball

In the FRC Blogger Briefing with Ramesh Ponnuru one of the subjects that came up was what we are likely to see politically in the next two years on the subject of abortion.

His basic prediction was that we will have a number of significant battles as Democratic lawmakers try to reverse gains made by pro-lifers. Specifically, he thought that they are likely to try to reverse the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits US foreign aid being given to nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion, to allow abortions on military bases again, and to patent human embryos.

This was interesting to me. In light of the Democrats’ realization that abortion is hurting them, it would be shrewd of them to keep the abortion genie in its bottle until after the 2008 elections. It was sounding less strident on the subject that helped them gain control of Congress, and if they immediately go all shrill on the subject again then it will remind voters of their recent weddedness to abortion and put them at a disadvantage come 2008.

So in the question period of the briefing, I asked Ramesh about this.

He said that he didn’t think that the Democrats would lead with the subject of abortion–that they wouldn’t put it on the front burner when they take control of Congress in January.

He acknowledged that this is "a potentially explosive issue in their caucus" and described a struggle in the party between those Democrats who were elected as pro-lifers (or pretending to be pro-lifers), saying that they wouldn’t want to have to "choose between the values of their districts and the values of Nancy Pelosi." But other Democrats would say, "Look, on these narrow abortion-related issues, the polling is good and we can win." He also could see DailyKos and similar folks weighing in in favor of taking up abortion.

Ultimately, he said, he didn’t think that the Democrats would be able to keep the pro-abortion wing of the party bottled up, saying that you are already seeing some on the left stating that the Mexico City Policy is a terrible, inhuman thing, that it’s killing people, and that if Nancy Pelosi doesn’t take it on then she’s spineless–a wimp.

I also asked Ramesh whether, if the Democrats do push the abortion issue, it is likely to give pro-lifers and opportunity to expose the insincerity of some Democratic politicians who try to present themselves as more pro-life than they are (what you might call PLINOs).

He said it absolutely would create such an opportunity and, if I understood him correctly, he thought that it would be of general benefit to the pro-life cause. One of the problems with the recent elections, he said, was that values voters didn’t have a lot to vote on. Abortion was not a central issue this election, and so many social conservatives ended up voting not on the values issues but on matters where they felt more in tune with the Democrats, such as the War or economic issues. If the values issues took center stage again, it would help pro-lifers.

He also addressed at some length the "common ground" tactic that some pro-aborts are using at present, saying that we should seek common ground by trying to reduce the number of abortions through things such as contraception.

Now, I would point out–and I’m speaking for myself rather than summarizing what Ramesh said at this point–that this common ground initiative is a sign of weakness on the part of pro-abort forces. It’s an attempt to shift the spotlight off of abortion, which hurts them politically, onto other issues on which they think they can win–or at least sound less extreme to voters. It’s also disingenuous, because the initiatives that they recommend we undertake (more contraception, more sex-ed, etc.) would not do diddly-do to decrease abortions. In fact, they would increase the number of abortions. That’s been the experience of the last thirty-five years, and that’s what would replicate in the future if these initiatives were pushed further than they have been.

Yet there is a politically shrewd side to this approach because contraception is widely supported by the American public. Even most in the Catholic and Evangelical communities support it, though orthodox Catholics don’t and many Evangelicals are coming around on it. As a result, not only do pro-lifers lose support from non-values voters if the issue is framed in this way (i.e., on contraception rather than abortion) but a split develops in pro-life ranks on the question as well.

Ramesh’s solution to this problem was to suggest that pro-lifers refuse to allow the issue to be defined in these terms and to suggest counter-proposals on how to limit abortion, such as new regulations on third-trimester abortions and cutting tax-payer funding for abortions. He cited the latter in particular–refusing to subsidize abortion with public funds–as a historically-proven way of reducing the number of abortions.

He also, in a somewhat different context, suggested revising the tax code to remove the disproportionate burden that is placed on families with children–a burden that he said has grown in recent years compared to the burden on tax-payers without children. This would help people invest more in children, which (in my opinion) is certainly something that American society needs to do for its long-term health.

Overall, Ramesh thought that "This is a pretty hopeful moment to be a pro-lifer." In spite of the recent elections, abortion is still a losing issue and pro-lifers can take the offensive and gain more ground.

Apologies, again, if I’ve mischaracterized anything, Ramesh. Just lemme know by e-mail or combox if I have. In the meantime, for more of his thought,

CHECK OUT THE PARTY OF DEATH.

Ramesh Ponnuru On Pro-Life Issues

I recently participated in a telephone Blogger Briefing put on by the Family Research Council (FRC). The event was organized by Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost, who works at FRC. His idea is to help pro-life/socially conservative bloggers connect with figures in Washington (lawmakers, think tank types, commentators) who thus far haven’t been as available to the pro-life part of the blogosphere.

I think the briefing is a great idea, and I want to publicly thank Joe and the FRC for it and wish them the best of success.

For the initial installment of the briefing, the guest was Ramesh Ponnuru (pictured), senior editor and commentator for National Review and the author of the book The Party of Death (BTW, Ramesh, I still owe you a review of the book; my apologies!).

The conversation began with Ramesh summarizing the recent history of abortion in American politics and what he thinks is likely to happen with it in the future.

In covering this ground, he addressed one of the questions that I have been fascinated by for a long time. It’s no secret that the Democratic Party used to be the more conservative party and the Republicans the more liberal party. That clearly was the case, for example, at the time of the Civil War, and much, much more recently as well.

The Republicans are still the more liberal party economically, which to say that they are the more free-market party (i.e., they are more supportive of classical liberal economic policies, as opposed to more conservative, protectionist ones). But on social issues, the parties have changed places.

The timing and the mechanics of how that happened are things I’m quite interested in.

In the blogger briefing, Ramesh cited 1972 as a key year in the social transformation of the two parties. In his book, I’m sure he goes into the background that the late 1960s played in setting up the events of 1972, but he cites the campaign of George McGovern in that year as the point at which the elite of the Democratic Party was taken over by socially liberal secular activists. The rank and file of the party still had a lot of socially conservative working-class Catholics, Evangelicals, and Southerners, but that was when the elite switched sides.

Two things then happened: The rank and file Democrats–being socially conservative–started to find Republican candidates more attractive, and social liberals in the Republican Party started finding Democratic candidates more attractive. A period thus followed in which members of each party found themselves being more attracted by and voting for candidates of the opposite party, and eventually a general realignment of the two took place. The Democrats became a smaller, more liberal party, with more of the most wealthy supporting it, while the Republicans ceased to be the party of the affluent and became larger and more conservative socially.

Democratic politicians also found that, even though they might represent pro-life districts and had historically been pro-life themselves, with the party elite in the control of secularists they had to switch and become pro-aborts if they wanted to make headway nationally in the party.

For a time, Ramesh said, it was not obvious to either Democrats or Republicans whether this strategy was a wise one politically. For a time it seemed that American support for abortion was growing, but eventually it became clear to Democrats that the strategy wasn’t working, and pro-lifers began to gain ground. Many Democrats (particularly Catholic ones) tried to say, "I’m personally opposed, but . . . " yet this strategy did not prove effective in the long run.

The point we are at now, he suggested, is one in which the leadership of the Democratic Party recognizes that the fact they have been wedded to abortion is hurting them more than it is helping them, and this explains why some Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton, have tried other forms of "window dressing," such as saying "I’m very interested in finding common ground between the two positions" and simply hoping that they will not be called on the fact that their voting record is solidly pro-abort (something the MSM is quite willing to not call attention to).

It also explains why Democrats were willing to run pro-life or nominally pro-life candidates in some races in the 2006 elections, and why Democrats were able to pick up as many seats as they were.

This was a bad year for pro-lifers as well as Republicans, but there was a difference between the two. If I caught the numbers Ramesh cited correctly, Republicans lost about thirty seats, while pro-life candidates only lost twenty seats, depending on how they are counted.

What this shift in the approach Democrats are taking will mean in the future is something that also came up in the call, and it’ll be the subject of my next blog post.

In the meantime, I want to thank Ramesh for taking the time to discuss matters with us, and my apologies if I have mischaracterized anything he said. Also,

CHECK OUT HIS BOOK.