Biden flipping on same-sex marriage?

Catholic Exchange reports that Biden said yesterday "that if I lived in California, I would vote against Proposition 8," i.e., he would vote against defining marriage in California to be "between a man and a woman." (Hat tip: Ignatius Insight.)

This appears to conflict with his claims in the VP debate with Sarah Palin that "neither Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage." CE notes that Bill Dohonue has pointed out the conflict between Biden’s apparent opposition to defining marriage to be between a man and a woman and the teaching of Pope Benedict in Sacramentum Caritatis (quoted here at greater length, emphasis mine):

Worship pleasing to God can never be a purely private matter, without consequences for our relationships with others: it demands a public witness to our faith. Evidently, this is true for all the baptized, yet it is especially incumbent upon those who, by virtue of their social or political position, must make decisions regarding fundamental values, such as respect for human life, its defence from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms (230). These values are not negotiable. Consequently, Catholic politicians and legislators, conscious of their grave responsibility before society, must feel particularly bound, on the basis of a properly formed conscience, to introduce and support laws inspired by values grounded in human nature (231).

Who gets to say what is Catholic? Part 2

Yesterday I wrote that Catholic Democrats (or Catholocrats) like Biden and Pelosi were essentially at war with the bishops — a “war of Who Gets to Say What Catholicism Is,” in which the aim is to relativize Catholic teaching (aka Pope John Paul Catholicism) as mere one Catholicism among many (“the Catholicism I grew up with” being another variety, also known as Pope John XXIII Catholicism).

This war is of course also being waged by such “Catholic” groups as “Catholics United” and “Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good,” both of whom came under fire last week by tireless and heroic Archbishop Chaput of Denver in a statement in which he also called Obama “the most commited ‘abortion-rights’ presidential candidate … since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973.”

Yesterday’s reports that multi-billionaire investor and political activist George Soros is a major source of funding to dissenting “Catholic” groups including Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good pose a potential new wrinkle of sorts in this war.

Efforts to subvert Catholic identity from within, whether from dissenting theologians like Hans Kung and Charles Curran or from lay groups like Voice of the Faithful, are bad enough.

But groups like “Catholics” United and “Catholics” in Alliance for the Common Good don’t even bother with that. They aren’t concerned with the Church — they’re out to change society, in part by fabricating a new definition of “Catholic” identity as free as possible from actual Church entanglements.

The suggestion that efforts to subvert Catholic identity are being funded from outside the Church by someone like Soros, a multi-billionaire promoter of global abortion, GLBT activism, euthanasia, is, to put it mildly, deeply troubling.

Incidentally, “Catholics” United has released a candidate comparison guide comparing Obama and McCain. Here is how CU describes the candidates’ views on life issues:

Obama: Seeks “common ground” efforts to reduce abortions by increasing education, health care, economic supports for women, children and families. Supports legal abortion and using taxpayer funds for embryonic stell cell research. Supports the death penalty.

McCain: Believes making abortion illegal is the best way to address the abortion issue. Supports legal abortion in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is in danger. Supports using taxpayer funds for embryonic stem cell research. Supports the death penalty.

Hm. Does anything, I don’t know, stand out to you about that?

No mention of Obama’s support for FOCA or partial-birth abortion, for “clone and kill,” or other aspects of Obama’s abortion extremism. No mention of euthanasia. No mention of McCain’s opposition to creating new embryos for ESCR, which Obama supports.

This is the kind of disinformation being circulated as a “Catholic” take on the candidates… reportedly, on Soros’s nickel.

The war of Who Gets to Say What is Catholic is heating up. The bishops are speaking out, and that’s good. The other side can probably outspend them, though, and they’ve got the sympathetic media on their side.

Biden pits John XXIII against John Paul II

It looks like it’s more or less official: The Catholic pro-choice Democrats are at war the US bishops.

The latest escalation: Joe Biden seeks to claim Pope John XXIII as a sort of mascot or icon of liberal pro-choice Catholocrat ideology over against Pope John Paul II. (Added: Okay, the "escalation" is a media artifact in that the interview is six months old. That’s what I get for attributing a master plan to Biden…)

Note the tacit distinction between "the Catholicism that I was raised in" (i.e., "John XXIII Catholicism") and what Biden implicitly suggests is the different Catholicism advocated by "Pope John Paul" (II, presumably) — and by extension by the U.S. bishops in recent months.

I was raised as a Catholic, I’m a practicing Catholic, and I’m totally at home with the Catholicism that I was raised in and this whole culture of social responsibility, reaction to abuse of power, the whole notion that there is collective civic responsibility. It’s the Catholic consciousness that I’m totally comfortable with. … To sum it up, as a Catholic, I’m a John XXIII guy, I’m not a Pope John Paul guy.

By now, of course, everyone knows that the first salvo in this war was fired by Nancy Pelosi in that fateful Meet the Press during the DNC convention. Her comments, in which she suggested that the Church’s stance on abortion was a novelty of the last half century and that the doctors of the Church had basically been tied in knots over it for centuries, elicited a series of episcopal corrections and clarifications.

Unfazed, Pelosi fired back attempting to back up her claims, prompting further episcopal responses including a fact sheet summing up the history of Catholic thought on the subject. Eventually Pelosi’s own ordinary, Archbishop Niederauer of San Francisco, issued a statement inviting Pelosi to meet with him — an invitation which she accepted within 24 hours. According to AmP’s ticking clock, that was 45 days ago.

The next campaign began with Biden himself backing up Pelosi in the same forum as her original comments, Meet the Press. Biden has since made subsequent comments the harmony of his views with "Catholic social teaching," etc. More and more bishops have added their voices to the chorus of clear teaching, which has been generally though not totally ignored or distorted by the MSM.

Biden’s latest comments, though, represent a new wrinkle in the war of Who Gets to Say What Catholicism Is.

So the bishops think it’s their job to authentically interpret the deposit of faith? Well, they can say what "John Paul II Catholicism" is, maybe. For a "John XXIII guy" like Biden, though, "the Catholicism that [he] was raised in" is something he’s "totally comfortable with"… whatever today’s JP2 bishops may say.

Biden also reiterates the now familiar talking points — "my church has wrestled with this for 2,000 years," yadda yadda — while floating a new claim: that "throughout the church’s history, we’ve argued between whether or not it is wrong in every circumstance and the degree of wrong" … and that "up until Pius IX, there were times
when we said, ‘Look, there are circumstances in which it’s wrong but it is not damnation," and only as of "Pius IX in the 1860s" that everything was written in stone.

How John XXIII, 100 years after Pius IX, fits into Biden’s timeline is not entirely clear to me. Is John XXIII supposed to have missed the memo from Pius IX? Or is Biden the one who missed a memo?

By now, of course, we can be pretty sure that there will be responses from bishops (unless it seems like old news), for the MSM to ignore and distort, while giving the Catholocrats headlines like "Biden balances his faith with social responsibility" (I bet you didn’t know faith needed balancing with social responsibility, did you?).

The Catholicrats are escalating. Where will the war go from here?

(Hat tip: Whispers by way of AmP.)

Elections, Part 4: The least problematic viable candidate

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

New comments link for Part 4! (TypePad says they’re working on this!)

SDG here (not Jimmy).

In previous posts, I’ve argued that, on the basis of what Catholic moral teaching understands as fundamental moral principles, the Obama–Biden ticket is far and away the more problematic of the two major-party candidacies, and the McCain–Palin ticket is far and away the less problematic of the two.

I would like to be able to leave the point there. Unfortunately, it has become necessary to make a defense for pro-life Catholics and others who agree with the above assessment — who, whatever objections, misgivings and reservations they may have about McCain–Palin, regard McCain–Palin as less problematic than Obama–Biden, who would prefer a McCain–Palin victory to an Obama–Biden victory — supporting and voting for McCain–Palin.

I don’t mean a defense of the thesis that such voters must vote for McCain–Palin. I mean a defense of the thesis that they may do so.

On first blush, this would seem to be too intuitive and obvious to need defending. Of course you vote for the candidate you hope to see win — what else?

As is often the case with intuitive insights, the reality turns out to be more complicated when you stop and think about it, with some conceptual speed bumps along the way. At the same time, also as is often the case, the intuitive insight is basically on the money. To support and vote for the candidate you hope to see win — or, as I’ve put it in previous posts, for the candidate you regard as the least problematic viable candidate — is always morally licit.

However, as I noted in my first post, some serious and thoughtful Catholics, including my friend Mark Shea and his sometime co-belligerent Zippy Catholic, have suggested or argued that McCain’s support of embryonic stem-cell research makes it objectively wrong for any Catholic to vote for him as well as Obama — even though Obama  supports ESCR as well as abortion, euthanasia and other intrinsically evil policies. (Added: Zippy has taken exception to my original characterization of his views, arguing that "in circumstances like ours there is no proportionate reason to vote for a presidential candidate who supports and promotes a policy of murdering the innocent." Mark seems at times to have proposed a similar view regarding voting for a candidate who supports any intrinsically evil policy.) Thus, on such a view, Catholics who support and vote for either major-party ticket, whatever their sincerity or their culpability may be, are engaged in objectively wrong behavior.

Among other things, it has been argued that voting for a candidate who supports objective evil as the lesser of two evils normalizes that level of evil as "the new normal." It has also been argued that voting for a candidate who supports objective evil involves remote material cooperation in evil, which requires a proportionate reason to be justifiable. But no one vote has any effect at all on the outcome of an election, the argument goes, so there is no proportionate reason.

The only moral alternatives, on this view, would seem to be (a) voting for some third-party candidate, however quixotic or hopeless, or (b) not voting at all. Mark and Zippy have thus become outspoken advocates of voting for a quixotic third-party candidate, strongly resisting any attempt, not only to encourage or pressure other Catholics to vote for McCain, but even to justify a Catholic vote for McCain.

Many Catholics and others who feel strongly about defeating Obama and wish to vote for the one ticket that could conceivably beat him have become unsettled by such claims, and are concerned that they cannot support or vote for McCain–Palin without betraying their faith. A growing number of Catholic voters, many apparently swayed by this scrupulous line of thinking, are joining Mark and Zippy in advocating quixotic candidates such as Chuck Baldwin (who, while he advocates no intrinsically evil policies, seems to be a bit of a kook) and Joe Schriner (a journalist and activist who seems to have some good ideas).

To the extent that quixotic-vote advocates may feel that the most prudent and productive course is to register dissent from all forms of intrinsically immoral policy by voting for a third-party candidate, they are within the bounds of legitimate prudential judgment.

However, to the extent that quixotic-vote advocates have been influenced by concerns over the alleged unjustifiability of voting for any candidate who supports any intrinsically immoral policy, even when the only other viable candidate is far worse, they have been led astray. Such concern is, I submit, unnecessary, unfounded and deeply unfortunate. Catholic moral theology does not
support the scrupulous conclusion that one cannot support or vote for
the candidate one regards as the least problematic viable candidate
unless that candidate is free of all support for intrinsically evil
policies.

To the extent that some quixotic-vote advocates have led others to believe that a vote for any candidate who supports any intrinsically immoral policy is objectively wrong, even when the only other viable candidate is far worse, I’m afraid that, with the best of intentions, they have done those others, and their country, a real disservice. By taking to public fora like blogs to actively influence Catholics in significant numbers to believe that they cannot vote for McCain in good conscience, it is in principle not impossible that quixotic-candidate advocates could help peel away critical support from McCain in battleground states, thereby indirectly contributing to an Obama victory. Morally speaking, this is not the same as actually supporting or voting for Obama, but the outcome for the common good of the country is no better for that.

In this and following posts I hope to contribute some needed clarity to the subject. Can informed and serious Catholics legitimately vote in good conscience for McCain–Palin in an effort to defeat the most pro-abortion major-party candidate in history? In a word: Yes. We. Can!

First, a brief summary of the argument.

  1. The outcome of any election has implications for the common good. In any election that offers more than one possible outcome, different outcomes will have differing implications for the common good, almost always including both positive and negative implications for any outcome. (In American presidential politics, once the primaries are over, the campaign underway and the VP choices announced, the number of possible outcomes is in a basic sense no more than two, and strictly limited to the major-party tickets. Note that we are concerned here with possible outcomes, not theoretical scenarios.) 

  2. Comparing and contrasting the implications for the common good of possible outcomes may be complex and uncertain, but it will often be possible for individual voters to arrive at prudential judgments regarding how positively or negatively they believe any possible outcome is likely to impact the common good, and thus to arrive at a preferential ranking of possible outcomes — or, in other words, a preferential ranking of viable candidates. This doesn’t necessarily mean liking or approving of any of the possible outcomes in any general way, only not regarding possible outcomes as equally desirable or undesirable. (In American presidential politics, this will almost invariably mean regarding one of the two major-party candidates as preferrable to, or less problematic than, the other.)

  3. In any election that offers more than one possible outcome, opinions among the electorate will differ widely, not only regarding the preferability of one candidate or another, but also the reasoning and the criteria for arriving at such judgments, even among those who agree on a particular candidate. (This is emphatically the case with our sharply divided American electorate.) There may in fact be no one policy, priority or factor that unites all who prefer a particular candidate, other than their common preference for their candidate over the major-party rival.

  4. Preferring one possible outcome to any others — regarding one viable candidate as preferable to or less problematic than any other viable candidates — seems to more or less entail hoping (or regarding it as in the interest of the common good) that the preferred possible outcome occurs, that the less problematic viable candidate wins. This in turn seems to more or less entail hoping that potential voters who share our preference for one viable candidate over any other(s) in fact vote for him in greater numbers than potential voters who feel otherwise will vote for his rival (on a state-by-state basis, in enough states to give him an electoral college victory). In other words, we believe that best possible outcome of the election as regards the common good depends on voters like us, voters who share our assessment of the candidates, voting for our preferred viable candidate, by a critical margin.

  5. What we wish to see other voters like ourselves do for the sake of the common good, we bear some responsibility or obligation to do ourselves. If we believe the common good is best served by voters like ourselves voting a certain way, that is how we ought to vote. How much responsibility we have in this regard may vary with circumstances (such as which state we live in), and other courses may sometimes be justifiable, including in some cases voting quixotic, which may also serve the public good in various ways. However, the benefit for the public good of voters voting in numbers for the least problematic viable candidate is never nonexistent (and always proportionate to the cooperation in evil), so the obligation to vote for the candidate we regard as the least problematic viable candidate is never nonexistent. And what we are in any degree obliged to do is always permissible to do.

That’s the short version. My next post will start to explore the argument in depth.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Roe v. Wade probably hangs in the balance”

So says Barack Obama, in the third and final presidential debate, speaking about the importance of the Supreme Court nominations to be made by the next administration.

"Pro-life pro-Obama"-ites: Are you listening?

Disaffected third-party quixotic voters: Are you listening?

How far back will an Obama administration set us? How long until we get this close again?

Why Worship? Why Praise?

Earth_2
 
(Courtesy NASA.gov)

Last week in the combox discussion related to SDG’s post, I wrote
the following in response to an unbeliever who held that the praise and
worship of God – especially in heaven for all eternity – strikes even
most Christians as a bore and a drudgery, but they do it anyway because
it’s what God commands;

I have always been an artist. I have always understood that the
world is a work of art, that it means something, and if it means
something, then there must be someone to mean it.

(I know I’m paraphrasing Chesterton here and there)

The worship of God – due praise to the artist – is not only
something I don’t find AT ALL to be a dreary duty, but is something
that can hardly be helped. It wants to leap out on its own, like a
laugh or the "Oooohs and Aaahhhs" you hear at a fireworks show. They
won’t be able to shut me up in heaven.

I believe I did get the point across that the praise and worship of
God is a very natural response, and this statement is alright as far as
it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough and could leave the false
impression that we worship God mainly for what he does, rather than who he is.

God does deserve endless praise just for his work, his artfulness in
creating the universe, but that is only the beginning of the story. The
universe is as achingly beautiful and subtle and powerful and
fascinating as it is because it reflects in many ways the character –
the attributes – of the artist who made it. If the world is an artwork
and does have meaning as I maintained above, then it all points back to
the one who made it and what he is like. Not that a
person would be able to really understand everything about God from
nature alone (the pagans demonstrate that), but as St. Paul said in
Romans 1:20, "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible
qualities—his
eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being
understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.".

As we pray in the Gloria, "We praise you for your glory.".
God’s glory is this revelation of himself, this radiant presence that
comes to us through all of his creation. His glory consists in the very fact that the Triune God, infinitely perfect and complete, does not keep himself to himself.
He continually shares his divine life with all creation, holding every
atom in existence by his will from moment to moment. God shares with us
the attributes of existence and free will in a completely unnecessary
and ongoing act of love.

We praise God for who he is, and we only know who he is because he
has revealed it to us in this radiant penumbra of glory called Creation. We often think of Creation as a noun, like it’s
only a thing. Creation is also a verb, the ongoing act of God.

Visit Tim’s blog Old World Swine)