Year: 2004

Some Bad Ideas

SDG here with a couple of Bad Ideas from some clueless corporate types who Don’t Get It.

First up is this story about network executives trying to think outside the box regarding new sitcoms. Hands-down worst idea, courtesy of Fox:

Jesus… The Teenage Years.

Fox brass are said to be particularly high on a project that one could dub "That ’70s B.C. Show": It imagines Jesus as a slacker teen under pressure from his parents — God and Mary — to enter the family carpentry business.

I can just imagine the pitch:

"Let’s cast someone like Tom Wopat as Joseph. Some ethnic-looking chick as a teenaged Mary Magdalene, and a comic-relief sidekick named Simon. Oh, and throw in a young Judas Iscariot whose dark future is foreshadowed by his troubled relationship with his father. And every week there can be a different crisis in Nazareth, a different miracle, that sort of thing.

"Two rules though: Jesus doesn’t walk on water, and he doesn’t put on the robe.

"Otherwise, love it."

Then there’s this story about a greeting card company called MixedBlessing promoting a new line of syncretistic holiday greeting cards:

Every December, Zack Rudman and his wife used to send out nonsectarian cards with winter scenes and generic holiday greetings.
Now, however, the Kansas City lawyer has found a variety that seems to better suit a Jewish man and an Episcopal woman with two young children as familiar with the menorah as with a manger scene.

These cards proclaim: “Merry Chrismukkah!”

In related news, the company has also announced plans to introduce a new line of religious cards for its Narnian outlets, celebrating the birth of Tashlan.

Get the first story. Get the second story.

Yeowtch!

PARENTAL WARNING: This post is going to involve a discussion of marital relations in their moral aspect. I intend to keep the discussion delicate, but parents should be aware of the particular nature of this post.

I figured that I’d need to do a follow-up post or two after yesterday’s NFP vs. contraception post, but I had no idea that so many ideas would be surfaced in the comments box. Let’s see what we can do to clarify matters:

1) Repentance following an act of sterilization.

There is no sin in having marital congress when one is infertile. Infertility is not the issue.

Period.

This is a settled point of Catholic moral theology. It does not matter what the source of the infertility is, whether it is due to age, accident, disease, surgery, or chemicals. Neither does it matter whether it is temporary or permanent.

If somebody sneaks up on you (e.g., when you are sick in a hospital) and sterilizes you against your will, the fact that you are now infertile does not mean that you can never again engage in marital congress.

The act of sterilizing you was a sin, and if you consented to the act then that was a sin, but having marital relations in a condition of sterility is not a sin. Therefore, once one repents of having solicited a sterilization one is morally in the same condition as one who is infertile through some other means. One has corrected the misuse of will that was sinful. The remaining infertility is a biological defect but not a moral one. Its historical origin is rooted in a moral defect, but the infertility itself is not a continuing sin. Neither is having marital congress in this state.

To suppose that there is continuing sin in having marital relations after being sterilized and then repenting involves committing the genetic fallacy (no pun intended).

Under no circumstances is it permissible to tell couples that are infertile due to sterilization that they cannot have marital relations. The Church has never made this requirement of them, and it would be regarded as gravely pastorally damaging.

2) Non-obligation to reverse sterilization.

The Church has not required couples that have been sterilized to have the procedure reversed. Reversal often is not possible, it entails risks, it frequently (especially in the case of men) can cause permanent side-effects (e.g., pain), and it involves expense that may exceed what a couple can prudentially afford.

That being said, it can be praiseworthy to reverse sterilization if it is possible and responsible for a couple to do so, but the Church has not required this of those who are penitent any more than it has required reparatory surgeries of those who have culpably mutiliated their bodies in other ways. At the present state of medical knowledge, it the risks and expenses involved in reparatory surgery often exceed what is reasonable for a person or a couple to undertake.

Suggestions, such as Kippley’s, that couples employ NFP or otherwise refrain from having intercourse for a certain period each month might be voluntarily undertaken by couples by mutual consent but also are non-obligatory.

Further, I could not recommend that such penances are undertaken without the continuing counsel of a competent spiritual director, as it is not pastorally prudent for individuals to engage in any long-term or weighty penances without such direction. The risk of a penitent being spiritually harmed by keeping his own counsel on such matters is too great. Everybody needs a spiritually mature outsider to keep tabs on their situation and make sure that such penances are helping rather than harming one.

3) "Non-coital" relations.

This one is particularly difficult to answer in a delicate manner, but I want to keep the blog (particularly its main page entries) discreet. I will therefore have to rely on the reader to understand what I am talking about here.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as marital relations that are completely independent of coitus. While other, related activities may be associated with coitus, they cannot be pursued independently of it and without reference to it. If a couple is engaging in relations that in no way involve coitus then they are doing something immoral. One can do things to prepare for,  assist, and augment coitus, but one cannot replace it with something else. To do so involves replacing God’s design for marital relations with a fundamentally alien construction. Every genuine exercise of marital relations must, therefore, involve coitus (barring, for example, cases where the marital relations are interrupted apart from the couple’s will).

If you need more specificity on this, e-mail me privately.

4) When NFP is illicit.

The Church has not given a detailed treatment of this topic and a range of opinion is permitted. However, those who convey the impression that NFP can be used only in the most extreme circumstances are putting a greater burden on couples than the Church does. The Catechism speaks of NFP being licit for "just reasons" (CCC 2368) rather than the "grave reasons" some have urged as necessary. "Just reasons" and "grave reasons" are two different orders of magnitude in ecclesiastical language, and as a matter of professional ethics I seek to ensure that the language I use matches the language the Church uses in its current documents on the subject. In the future the Church may clarify this subject further, but for now it speaks of a "just reasons" test for the use of NFP, and thus so do I.

5) Condoms.

Contrary to what one commenter was told by a priests, condoms are not okay "if one is open to life at all times." Condoms represent a deliberate closing of the sexual act to life and thus are not okay. What the priest told the commenter was clearly erroneous and would be regarded as such by every faithful Catholic moral theologian.

6) Homosexuality & Infertility.

The reason that homosexuality is wrong is not that it involves infertile relations. The fact that infertile relations are not intrinsicaly sinful is something I have been trying to drive home in this discussion. A married but infertile couple is not sinning by having relations.

God designed human sexuality (and, indeed, all sexuality) to be oriented to procreation. In the case of humans (as opposed to sea angels) this means a man and a woman having coitus. Any time you have a man and a woman having coitus and not doing anything to impede the act, you have an act oriented to procreation. For a variety of causes, the act may not produce offspring. Indeed, it may be impossible in a given case for the act to produce offspring (e.g., because the man and the woman are too old), but the act nevertheless retains the orientation that God gave it.

It therefore thwarts God’s design for human sexuality if you have (a) two men or (b) two women or (c) a man and a woman doing something other than coitus or (d) a man and a woman having coitus but in some manner seeking to block its procreative potential. Cases (a)-(d) destroy the orientation to procreation that the act has and that even an infertile act has. The fact that cases (a)-(d) are all infertile (or intended to be infertile) is not the issue. God designed us so that many acts of coitus are by nature infertile. His design includes room for infertile acts; it is the deliberate rejection of his design (one man, one woman, having coitus, without deliberately blocking its procreative potential) that is what is wrong.

7) Intent.

A point that is often the source of confusion in this discussion and that came up in the comments box was the question of a couple’s intent. Consider the following two intents:

a) "I intend to have marital relations and yet not have a baby."

b) "I intend to have marital relations and do something to myself or to the act itself in order to destroy its procreative potential."

The first intention is not sinful. Couples have this intention all the time. Indeed, sooner or later, every married couple (that stays together and keeps having marital relations) eventually reaches a point in life where the partners have intention (a). This intention is compatible with God’s design for human sexuality since it is not God’s will that we have a baby each time we have marital relations. A person who merely has intention (a) is not doing anything to thwart God’s plan.

Intention (b) is sinful. Unlike intention (a), intention (b) deliberately intereferes with God’s design for human sexuality and so is sinful.

The intent of having marital relations yet not having a baby thus is not intrinsically sinful. The intent of interfering with a marital act so that it won’t produce a baby is.

8) "Artificial Contraception."

Everybody, please avoid using the term "artificial contraception." This term is intrinsically misleading as it suggests that there is such a thing as "natural contraception." There ain’t. No such critter. All contraception is artificial. It is thus dangerously misleading to tell people that the Church opposes "artificial contraception" as it suggests to them that there may be forms of "natural contraception" that are okay (e.g., coitus interruptus). This is not the case. The Church opposes contraception. Please use this language.

(Incidentally, I should have caught that the initial questioner used this language and clarified at that point, but I didn’t. My bad.)

Hoooooooooo-kay! Y’all got all that now?

Good. Now run along and play outside. I gots work ta do.

Our Roe To Hoe

Feddie over at Southern Appeal offers some analysis of this recent poll.

I think Feddie’s analysis is dead on: Americans’ support for Roe vs. Wade is part of a more general, narcissistic "culture of me," in his words, as well as a false (that is to say, one-sided) culture of sympathy and sentimentality that focuses on the visible (the ostensible harm to a mother’s interests) over the invisible (the actual harm done by killing an infant).

Feddie writes that:

Assuming that this poll accurately reflects the opinion of the American people, this finding disappoints me on two levels.

The assumption that any poll reported by the press accurately reflects the opinion of the American people is, of course, a whopping huge assumption that is not rashly to be made (as illustrated by the exit polls last Election Day). The chance of misleading wording and biased sampling are just too great (especially when, as in this case, the wording of the questions and the internals of the poll are not given).

But even making this assumption, I don’t know how disappointed I am. Of course, I am disappointed to see the lack of appreciation of constitutional law that the public displays, but then the media and the educational system have been systematically inculcating a totally irresponsible philosophy of judicial activism in the populace for the last fifty years at least. One can’t be surprised, therefore, that there is a shocking ignorance on this subject among the American populace.

But setting that issue aside, I think that what support may be found for Roe among the populace is likely to be overestimated. The support for the Evil Decision may be broad, but it isn’t deep in many quarters. While there are many die-hard abortion supporters (pun intended), there are many, many more who are soft supporters that don’t really understand what Roe says.

Indeed, many still think that Roe only allows for abortion in limited circumstances, as opposed to virtual abortion on demand from conception until birth.

Others are willing to voice a vague support for abortion–until you confront them with the reality of what abortion involves, at which point their support dries up and even reverses.

I’m not surprised, therefore, that we have a lot of public education to do on this subject or that we have a long fight ahead of us.

But it is a fight we are destined to win.

Pro-lifers inherently out populate anti-lifers, and therein lies longterm victory.

The present poll, to the extent it shows us anything about present opinion (an extent already noted to be extremely questionable), merely reveals for us the Roe we have to hoe.

Our Roe To Hoe

Feddie over at Southern Appeal offers some analysis of this recent poll.

I think Feddie’s analysis is dead on: Americans’ support for Roe vs. Wade is part of a more general, narcissistic "culture of me," in his words, as well as a false (that is to say, one-sided) culture of sympathy and sentimentality that focuses on the visible (the ostensible harm to a mother’s interests) over the invisible (the actual harm done by killing an infant).

Feddie writes that:

Assuming that this poll accurately reflects the opinion of the American people, this finding disappoints me on two levels.

The assumption that any poll reported by the press accurately reflects the opinion of the American people is, of course, a whopping huge assumption that is not rashly to be made (as illustrated by the exit polls last Election Day). The chance of misleading wording and biased sampling are just too great (especially when, as in this case, the wording of the questions and the internals of the poll are not given).

But even making this assumption, I don’t know how disappointed I am. Of course, I am disappointed to see the lack of appreciation of constitutional law that the public displays, but then the media and the educational system have been systematically inculcating a totally irresponsible philosophy of judicial activism in the populace for the last fifty years at least. One can’t be surprised, therefore, that there is a shocking ignorance on this subject among the American populace.

But setting that issue aside, I think that what support may be found for Roe among the populace is likely to be overestimated. The support for the Evil Decision may be broad, but it isn’t deep in many quarters. While there are many die-hard abortion supporters (pun intended), there are many, many more who are soft supporters that don’t really understand what Roe says.

Indeed, many still think that Roe only allows for abortion in limited circumstances, as opposed to virtual abortion on demand from conception until birth.

Others are willing to voice a vague support for abortion–until you confront them with the reality of what abortion involves, at which point their support dries up and even reverses.

I’m not surprised, therefore, that we have a lot of public education to do on this subject or that we have a long fight ahead of us.

But it is a fight we are destined to win.

Pro-lifers inherently out populate anti-lifers, and therein lies longterm victory.

The present poll, to the extent it shows us anything about present opinion (an extent already noted to be extremely questionable), merely reveals for us the Roe we have to hoe.

U.K. YAHOOS: Surging U.S. Conservative Tide Hurts Pro-Gay Hollywood Movie

As if!

THIS PIECE HAS TO BE THE SORRIEST EXCUSE I’VE SEEN FOR BOXOFFICE ANALYSIS.

First, there’s the insinuation that this all has something to do with the alledged recent "US swing towards conservativism," as if everything that goes on in America has to be explained through the lens of the election.

Second, there’s the implication that Americans aren’t willing to see the film because they’re "homophobes." Yeah, I suppose that’s why Oliver Stone’s previous film, JFK, which charged that the famous president was offed by a cabal of homosexual Republicans,  made $94 million dollars in U.S. boxoffice (figure adjusted for inflation), with a budget of about half that.

No, the floppage of the film would have nothing to do with the fact that it’s a bloated, 3-hour behemoth that’s so awful it’s got a 14% freshness rating from the left-of-center critics at RottenTomatoes.com, who say things
like:

"Our history teachers may have been bores, but at least the bell rang before they became wearying."

"You could literally chop Alexander up into six 30-minute blocks, reassemble it at random, and the movie would make the exact same amount of sense (i.e. none). "

"So misconceived, so shrill, so fetishy is Oliver Stone’s epic, so unintentionally hilarious a stew of paganism and Freudianism, that it makes Conan the Barbarian look like Gladiator."

"Not just a bad movie but a bad movie of truly epic proportions."

"I respect Stone as a filmmaker, but this movie is punishment rather than entertainment."

No, comments like these need not be taken into account. Not when American redstaters make such a handy scapegoat for the failure of a filmmaker’s campy, self-indulgent, politically correct bloatfest.

The Independent’s spin on this is, in the words of Don Lockwood, "pure publicity." It’s the reason Hollywood wishes the film flopped.

(NOTE: I will mention one criticism of the film that isn’t fair–the fact that Alexander was bisexual. Stone isn’t making that up. That’s what the historical sources indicate, and there is little reason to doubt them on this pont. If you simply read a little Greek philosophy, it swiftly becomes painfully obvoius that Greek culture at the time was awash in bisexuality. Whether or how such should be treated in cinematic recreations of the period today, however, is entirely another matter.)

Interesting Critter Alert!

Sea_angelsSee the critters on the left? (Click to enlarge photo. IMAGE SOURCE.)

They’re called "sea angels" (obviously for good reason).

They’re also known as Clionidae (a.k.a. Clione).

A related species is called the "Naked Sea Butterfly."

Grow to be about 2 inches long.

Wings flap with an undulating motion.

Related to sponges.

Have shells when they are tiny embryos, then fly free after being born.

Are hemaphrodites and mutually fertilize each other in mating.

Live in the Okhotsk between Japan and Russia.

They and their relatives are an important part of both the artic and antartic ecosystems.

One kind makes a natural fish-repellant (a previously unknown molecule) to keep from getting eaten.

Cool, huh?

LEARN MORE.

ALSO, SEE HERE.

How many are your works, O LORD !
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number–
living things both large and small [Ps. 104:24-25].

Simple Salt Spray Stops Spread Of SARS & Similar Sorts Of Sinister Stuff

Streptococcus_small_1Here’s some good news: It appears that giving folks a few minutes’ treatment with a salt spray nebulizer changes the surface tension of the fluids in their lungs so that when they breathe then they don’t exhale nearly as much of contagions such as SARS, TB, the flu, and other baddies. This offers the possibility of a new way of stopping the spread of diseases, particularly in hospitals and homes, where doctors, other patients, and family members may be at risk.

*Very* much hope this pans out.

Sometimes it’s the simple things that are the most effective.

GET THE STORY.

Simple Salt Spray Stops Spread Of SARS & Similar Sorts Of Sinister Stuff

Streptococcus_small_1Here’s some good news: It appears that giving folks a few minutes’ treatment with a salt spray nebulizer changes the surface tension of the fluids in their lungs so that when they breathe then they don’t exhale nearly as much of contagions such as SARS, TB, the flu, and other baddies. This offers the possibility of a new way of stopping the spread of diseases, particularly in hospitals and homes, where doctors, other patients, and family members may be at risk.

*Very* much hope this pans out.

Sometimes it’s the simple things that are the most effective.

GET THE STORY.

NFP vs. Contraception

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Please help me to better understand this issue. I don’t need convincing on the sinfulness of contraception. I need to better understand the relationship to NFP, which the Church allows.

In your initial post, you state: "The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, of every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful". But doesn’t this occur in NFP? Isn’t the couple planning their sexual relations around a time that it is almost certain to be unfruitful? Aren’t they divorcing the pleasure of the act from its openess to life? Isn’t their intent the same as the couple who uses artificial contraception; only the "means" being different?

I do understand that God did not design us so that every sexual act produces children. Of course, NFP takes advantage of this. I also know that there is always a chance of new life, even when practicing NFP properly. But there is also that chance with artificial contraception. It is not 100% effective.

Help me understand the distinction here. My logic must be flawed, because I know the thinkers in the Church are a lot smarter than I am!

You have put your finger on the decisive fact in this: "God did not design us so that every sexual act produces children. . . . NFP takes advantage of this."

In many mammalian species, God designed things so that the males are sexually receptive all the time, while females are only sexually receptive in proximity to their fertile period. Thus such species tend to only engage in sexual activity in proximity to fertility.

But God designed humans different. In our species both genders are sexually receptive in general, not just when a woman is fertile (though there appears to be an increase of sexual receptivity at that time). The result is that humans engage in sexual activity even though most of the time it has no chance of resulting in procreation.

The fact that we cannot, in the case of any given act of marital congress, utterly rule out the possibility of procreation, this says more about the limitations of our predictive ability than anything else. If we had better knowledge of what was happening in a woman’s body (as we well may one day), we would be able to say with certainty that there will be no procreation from a particular act of union.

Even so, we can in the case of a great many couples (those where the husband or the wife or both are infertile, either due to age or some other cause) say with certainty that there will be no procreation as the result of an act of union. Yet the Church has never expected such couples not to have marital congress in such cases.

The issue thus is not whether there is a chance of there being a conception. It is a red herring to suggest that NFP is okay because it is unreliable (always some chance of conception) while contraception is wrong because it is reliable (no chance of conception). In reality, many cases where NFP are used have no objective chance of resulting in conception (we just often can’t identify those cases up front), and in many cases contraceptive sex does have the chance of resulting in conception.

The question is not whether a particular act has the potential for fertility. The question is whether you are doing anything to render the act deliberately infertile. This is what the document I quoted refers to when it speaks of "marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful" (emphasis added).

In the case of an act of NFP the couple is not doing anything to make themselves infertile. They are simply having marital congress when nature makes them infertile.

Similarly, a couple with permanent infertility (due to age or some other cause) is not deliberately making themselves infertile each time they have marital congress. As with the first couple, they are simply having marital congress when they already are infertile.

But when a couple performs a specific act to make themselves infertile (having surgery, taking a chemical, employing a device) then that act is deliberately frustrates God’s design for human sexuality and so is sinful.

(Note the emphasis on "that act." The sinfulness does not extend to future acts of marital congress if the couple repents as they are no longer affirming by their will the act of rendering themselves infertile.)

The issue thus is not whether any given act of union has a chance of producing a child. Nor is the issue whether one ever has children (that is an important issue, but a different one than this). The issue is whether you are doing something to deliberately frustrate the fertility of a particular sexual act.

J.M.S., Hollywood Liberal?

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, is an unusually thoughtful guy. Though his political leanings are left of center, he isn’t a knee-jerk as many of the movers and shakers in Hollywood. In a recent usenet post, he addressed the current low state of political discussion in America.

Much of what he says is quite good, and I’d encourage you to read it.

I would take exception to some of what he says, though. For example, regarding chaning the current impasse, he says:

[L]et me now proceed to the problem, and explain why so much of this rests at the feet of the Republican party.

For the last twenty plus years, the Right has hammered away at one consistent theme: that liberals are bad people, that Democrats are just shy of being traitors to America.  You’ve had people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter out there spewing bile into the American spirit of the most hateful, false, and demonizing sort.

What happens is this: those who would like to believe this, do…and thus view the other side with hatred and distrust and the sense that they are traitors. And you don’t compromise or deal with traitors.

On the other side of the political spectrum, you have people who you’ve just called traitors who know that they’re no such thing…and when you call people disloyal traitors, they have a tendency to get real angry about it.  And you don’t compromise or deal with people who impugn your honor like that.

I think that there is a significant element of truth to what JMS is saying here. I don’t listen to talk radio or watch left/right debate TV shows because I can’t stand that attitudes displayed on them. Talk radio is filled with gloating smugness, and the left/right debate shows are filled with people yelling over each other (as well as gloating, question-ducking, and knive-twisting). I want to hear reasoned debate and disagreement, a challenging and testing of ideas, not an unrestrained snark fest.

But I have to question JMS’s laying this at the feet of the Republicans. It wasn’t Rush Limbaugh who started this style of discourse. In some ways, it has been there all through American history (I’ve got a little online project involving that which should be debuting soon), but JMS is right that there has been an uptic in it in the last few decades.

In the full version of his post (which I won’t quote here), he mentions how different things were in Nixon’s day than they are today, and he’s right. On the level of government there was more cooperation and statesmanship displayed by the parties.

But that’s when things were breaking down.

The protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s involved a huge amount of frankly irrational invective against "the Establishment" and those with traditional values. The media, by this point, also became infected with a rampant liberalism that it is still in denial about. The reason that Rush took off like he did and became as big a phenomenon as he did was that, as he himself put it, he was the equal time that conservatives had been denied for so long.

If the debate became more polarized after his advent, it was in significant measure because the conservative side was fighting back for a change instead of taking it on the chin as it had in previous years.

I’m perfectly happy to say that Rush and his imitators did things in an unhelpful manner and contributed to worsening the climate of discussion, but when it comes to the basic question of who poisoned the well, liberals dumped a whole load of poison in it before Rush and his ilk came along. Just listen to some of the over-the-top rhetoric that was used in the ’60s and ’70s. Listen to John Kerry’s over-the-top testimony, for that matter.

Now, perhaps one can argue that the problem went back further than this, that the level of irrational invective used by the 1970s liberals was equalled by rhetoric used by prior conservatives.

Perhaps.

We recognize the prior claim. But the reality is that Ragesh 3 has been
Centauri property for over a century. To start a war over blood spilt
so long ago – where does it end? You kill them and take their land.
They kill you and take the land back. On and on and on – a cycle of
hatred!

Seems like I heard that somewhere before.

In the present environment there is plenty of blame to spread around for the low state of social discourse. If there are Rushes and Coulters who wallow in snark, there are liberals who do so as well. Just look at the collective liberal snark fest that happened after the recent election, with the left’s pundits falling all over themselves to insult redstaters in ever new ways.

It seems to me that examining the historical eitology of the origins of the problem is less productive than simply trying to talk, today, in a calm and reasonable manner and urging others to do likewise.