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Rules of Engagement (annotated)

SDG here with excerpts from the the agreement worked out for the Presidential debates (courtesy of NewYorker.com) [my comments in blue]:

Paragraph Two: Dress.
Candidates shall wear business attire. At no time during the debates shall either candidate remove any article of clothing, such as tie, belt, socks, suspenders, etc. Candidates shall not wear helmets, padding, girdles, prosthetic devices, or “elevator”-type shoes. Per above, candidates shall not remove shoes or throw same at each other during debate. Once a debate is concluded, candidates shall be permitted to toss articles of clothing, excepting underwear, into the audience for keepsake purposes. [Hey, if there’s no chance of getting their underwear, what’s the point?]
Paragraph Six: Hand gestures.
“Italian,” “French,” “Latino,” “Bulgarian,” or other ethnic-style gestures intended to demean, impugn, or otherwise derogate opponent by casting aspersions on opponent’s manhood, abilities as lover, or cuckold status are prohibited. Standard “American”-style gestures meant to convey honest bewilderment, doubt, etc., shall be permitted. [Language buffs like Jimmy may say that all human languages have approximately equal expressive power, but when it comes to obscene gestures European gesticulation has it all over standard American.] Candidates shall not point rotating index fingers at their own temples to imply that opponent is mentally deranged. Candidates shall at no time insert fingers in their own throats to signify urge to vomit. Candidates shall under no circumstances insert fingers into opponent’s throat. [I’m pretty sure this is allowed in European political debates.]
Paragraph Seventeen A: Bodily fluids – Perspiration. [If there’s a Paragraph Seventeen C, I don’t want to know about it.]
Debate sponsors shall make every effort to maintain comfortable temperature onstage. Candidates shall make reasonable use of underarm deodorant and other antiperspirant measures, subject to review by Secret Service, before the debates. [“Place your hands on your head… POTUS is clear for entry.”] In the event that perspiration is unavoidable, candidates may deploy one plain white cotton handkerchief measuring eight inches square. Handkerchief may not be used to suggest that opponent wants to surrender in global war on terrorism. [Hm, wonder which campaign felt it necessary to stipulate THAT point?]
Paragraph Forty-two: Language.
Candidates shall address each other in terms of mutual respect (“Mr. President,” “Senator,” etc.). Use of endearing modifiers (“my distinguished opponent,” “the honorable gentleman,” “Pookie,” “Diddums,” etc.) is permitted. [Any candidate who has the guts to call his opponent “Pookie” automatically gets MY vote.] The following terms are specifically forbidden and may not be used until after each debate is formally concluded: “girlie-man,” “draft dodger,” “drunk,” “ignoramus,” “Jesus freak,” “frog,” “bozo,” “wimp,” “toad,” “lickspittle,” “rat bastard,” “polluting bastard,” “lying bastard,” “demon spawn,” “archfiend,” or compound nouns ending in “-hole” or “-ucker.” [How many proscribed terms can YOU identify as having been stipulated by one or the other campaign?]
Paragraph Fifty-eight: Spousal references.
Each candidate may make one reference to his spouse. All references to consist of boilerplate praise, e.g., “I would not be standing here without [spouse’s first name]” or “[Spouse’s name] would make a magnificent First Lady.” Candidates shall not pose hypothetical scenarios involving violent rape or murder of opponent’s spouse so as to taunt opponent with respect to his views on the death penalty. [And we don’t want any OTHER hypothetical scenarios involving the opponent’s spouse, either (cf. Paragraph Six).]
Paragraph Ninety-eight: Vietnam.
Neither candidate shall mention the word “Vietnam.” [And both candidates said “AMEN.”] In the event that either candidate utters said word in the course of a debate, the debate shall be concluded immediately and declared forfeit to the third-party candidate. [Contingency: In the event that a questioner refers to Vietnam, candidates shall put cotton in their ears, join hands, and sing all four verses of “Kum Bah Yah.”]

The original story

The heretical “or” and the Catholic “and”

SDG here with part one of some musings related to an apologetical discussion I’m having in another forum.

One of the most helpful insights I’ve ever gotten into the nature of divine truth comes from one the 20th century’s most interesting theologians, Henri de Lubac. It has to do with the sense in which all of the great theological questions could be phrased as “or” questions — and how these questions inevitably falsify the issue. For example:

Is Jesus human, or is he divine?
Is Jesus both God and man, or is he one person?
Is the Father God, or is Jesus God, or is the Holy Spirit God?
Are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit one, or are they three?
Are human beings noble, created in God’s image, or evil, steeped in sin and corruption?
Is salvation by grace alone, or do we cooperate in our own salvation?
Does God predestine, or do men choose freely?
Is the author of scripture God or human beings?
Is God all-powerful, or is he all-good, or is evil unreal?

And so on. And of course everyone knows that historically Christian orthodoxy has always said “Yes” to BOTH sides of all these questions, while all of the great heresies involve pitting the two sides against one another and affirming one while rejecting the other.

For this reason, heresies often come in ordered pairs of opposites, each of which affirms one truth while denying the complementary truth, while catholic orthodoxy affirms what is affirmed by each heresy, but also affirms what the heresy denies.

For example, if you affirm Jesus’ humanity but deny his divinity, you wind up with a form of Arianism; if you affirm his divinity but deny his humanity, you wind up with Docetism. OTOH, if you affirm that he is both God and man, but deny that he is one person, you wind up with Nestorianism; if you affirm that he is one person but deny his dual natures, you wind up with Monophysitism (though whether historically the groups associated with Nestorianism or Monophysitism actually materially denied the oneness of Christ’s person or his dual divine and human natures is another question).

Again, if you affirm only the human aspect of responsibility and working out our salvation, you end up with some form of Pelagianism; if you affirm only the divine aspect of predestination and sovereignty, you end up with some form of (hyper?) Calvinism. Likewise, if you affirm only God as the author of scripture, you wind up with Fundamentalist hyper-literalism; if you affirm only human beings as its authors, you wind up with modernist relativism.

This is why the very word “heresy” is derived via Latin from a Greek word meaning to take or to choose, suggestive of the English idiom “picking and choosing,” while truth is always seen as “catholic” or universal, pertaining to the whole. Catholic orthodoxy is always defined in terms of affirming BOTH the truth that each heresy affirms AND ALSO the truth that the heresy denies (but is affirmed by some other heresy that denies the first truth).

The essence of catholic orthodoxy is in this “both / and,” this repudiation of the heretical “either / or” alternative. Catholic orthodoxy always involves fidelity to the whole, the ability to maintain both this truth over here and that truth over there, and not to allow any element of the truth to be pitted against any other element. Catholic orthodoxy insists that the truth is always larger, more comprehensive, more complete, more catholic than any heretical alternative; heresy always essentially involves denial of one aspect of truth — not adding some novelty to the sum total of Christian truth.

There is a tendency, therefore, for Christian truth to have a paradoxical appearance to finite, mortal creatures. And this is not the case because God has a fondness for sending us doctrine in neat ordered pairs of alternatives, but because divine truth is too large for us to apprehend in its totality, or understand how it all fits together, and so the most we can do is to affirm both this aspect of it and that aspect, and to distinguish the sense in which (say) God is One (i.e., in substance) from the sense in which he is Three (i.e., in number of persons), so that we see that there is no formal logical contradiction — though no one pretends thereby to have made the mystery comprehensible.

More later….

The heretical "or" and the Catholic "and"

SDG here with part one of some musings related to an apologetical discussion I’m having in another forum.

Is Jesus human, or is he divine?
Is Jesus both God and man, or is he one person?
Is the Father God, or is Jesus God, or is the Holy Spirit God?
Are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit one, or are they three?
Are human beings noble, created in God’s image, or evil, steeped in sin and corruption?
Is salvation by grace alone, or do we cooperate in our own salvation?
Does God predestine, or do men choose freely?
Is the author of scripture God or human beings?
Is God all-powerful, or is he all-good, or is evil unreal?

More later….

Bush beats Kerry by single percentage point!

…for email newsletter usability, that is.

SDG here. In my day job, which is Web development, usability occupies a significant part of my focus and energy. It began with a seminar at a computer conference a number of years ago, after which I gave a couple of presentations at the company I work for, and before I knew it I had become the usability guy in my Web development department.

So one of the things I do is periodically comb through the biweekly “AlertBox” column of usability guru Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen is full of helpful tips and perspectives, and is famous for saying such things as “Users spend most of their time on OTHER sites” and “Zero learning curve or death.”

Anyway, I was interested and amused to see in his last column an analysis of the usability of the official email newsletters of the Bush and Kerry campaigns. Nielsen gives low scores to both services, with Bush scoring particularly low in “subscription maintenance and unsubscribing” and Kerry weaker in “subscription interface” and “newsletter content and presentation.” In the end, though, Bush comes out ahead by a single point, with a 58% score over Kerry’s 57%.

On newsletter content, Nielsen finds that Bush’s content is mostly “positive campaigning” and “announcements and instructions,” while Kerry’s is mostly “negative campaigning” and appeals for readers to “volunteer and donate.”

On the battle for inbox attention and differentiation from spam, Nielsen writes:

Subject lines were universally lame, with Kerry having the most user-repellant subjects, like “Tonight,” “Don’t stop now,” and “Deadline almost here.” Why would anybody think that those messages were anything but spam? Bush had somewhat better subject lines, like “Kerry’s Flip Flop Olympics,” and “Participate in W ROCKS in Alameda County,” though he also had content-free subjects like “Brace Yourselves.”

Interestingly, Kerry has something like twice as many subscribers as Bush.

Finally, Nielsen closes with what I assume is an at least partly tongue-in-cheek warning to candidates who ignore his recommendations at their own peril:

In 1996, I wrote a review for The New York Times on the campaign websites for Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. I concluded that the two sites scored about even in usability, and I provided several recommendations for improving each site. Two weeks after the article ran, Clinton’s site had been updated to incorporate all of my recommendations. In contrast, Dole’s site stayed the same throughout the campaign. We all know who won the 1996 election, so maybe this example will motivate the campaigns to pay closer attention to usability this time around.

What Ratzinger Said

[NOTE TO FELLOW BLOGGERS: This topic is important enough that I’d encourage you to link to this post so more people can get the straight story on it. Thanks!–Jimmy]

“A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.”

So wrote Cardinal Ratzinger in a confidential memorandum titled Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles that became public earlier this year.

Many Catholics were at a loss to understand the Cardinal’s statement. “Has Ratzinger lost his mind?” some wondered. “Isn’t he departing from sound Catholic theology?”

Others, including well-known dissidents, pounced on the statement as vindication for their cause and wrote newspaper columns trumpeting it as proof that in the Vatican’s view it is okay to vote for pro-abortion politicians as long as you don’t share their pro-abortion view. In other words, a voter can be “personally opposed but . . .”

Both responses fail to do justice to the Cardinal’s remark. Contrary to the first response, he is not departing from the established principles of Catholic moral theology. In fact, he is emphasizing them. Contrary to the second response, he is not offering an easy pretext for voting for pro-abort politicians.

Continue reading “What Ratzinger Said”

Democrats and abortion

SDG here with an interesting commentary challenging the Democrats to “do better” on abortion.

I wish they would. My blood is not Republican red. I would vote for a pro-life Democrat in a heartbeat, if for no other reason than to make the point.

Lefties often say that the pro-life movement has a stranglehold on the Republican party. The truth is closer to the other way around. Between the two major parties, the Democratic Party has allowed the Republicans to have a monopoly on pro-life candidates — and voters.

And, for reasons rather well laid out in Catholic Answers’ “Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics, I find it necessary to give black-and-white issues like abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage priority over other issues about which men of good will, including Catholics, may in good faith legitimately dispute.

But the Republicans didn’t always have a monopoly on concern over protecting the weakest of the weak. To be a pro-life Democrat wasn’t always a virtual contradiction in terms. In fact, there’s still a pro-life movement within the Democratic Party, though party bosses won’t give them a voice. According to this article, a recent gathering of Democrats for Life included:

Thomas Finneran, Massachusetts House Speaker
Bob Casey Jr., auditor general of my former state of Pennsylvania and son of Robert Casey Sr., the late pro-life former governor of Pennsylvania
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of JFK, wife of pro-life Boston Democrat Sargent Shriver, and mother of Maria Shriver, California’s first lady
Ray Flynn, former mayor of Boston and ambassador to the Vatican

However, according to an article in the paper I write for, the National Catholic Register, Democrats For Life were not allowed to have a visible presence at the Democratic National Convention — no banners, no signs, etc. Planned Parenthood, OTOH, was a highly visible presence at the convention.

And while party chairman Terry McAuliffe made noises that there would be no ban on pro-life speakers at the convention, and touted the appearance of pro-life Rep. James Langevin from Rhode Island, Langevin’s topic was one on which, unlike abortion, he is not pro-life, embryonic stem cell research.

So, for all intents and purposes, the Democratic establishment brooks no dissent, at least so far. But perhaps Democrats for Life will be effective in bringing about some change in the Democratic party. Perhaps the Democrats will do better in the future, and again extend their traditional concern for the weak and powerless to the weakest of all. If they gave us a choice, I think they’d be surprised how many default Republicans there are who would vote for a pro-life Democrat.

"Laughoutloud funny!"

SDG here with an ego check for critics… like me.

Tom Payne, a literary critic, turns in a wickedly funny… er, make that a pointedly satiric exposé on the special jargon critics use, partly as a matter of trade necessity and precision, partly by carelessness and imitation, and partly to sound as if they know what they’re talking about and better than you.

The article is about literary critics, but I must confess that as a film critic I winced more than once at a well-skewered foible found in my own reviews. Not that all the listed clichés are necessarily bad. Phrases like “darkly comic” or “emotional rollercoaster” may be clichés, but they’re also useful — we know what they mean, and what would be the point of digging through the thesaurus for some less familiar way of describing a quality we already have a good term for?

That said, I hereby vow to be very careful in the future about phrases like “vast, sprawling epic,” and never, ever again to write “But these are minor quibbles.” (Aren’t quibbles minor by definition?) And I must confess that even before discovering this article I was already uncomfortably aware of my reliance on phrases like “at its core” and “at its center” (though not combined with Payne’s phrase about “a deeply moral work”).

Take that, fellow critics!

“Laughoutloud funny!”

SDG here with an ego check for critics… like me.

Take that, fellow critics!

Notes on the gay "marriage" debate

SDG here with some (lengthy) excerpts from a recent correspondence on gay “marriage.”

Q. Gay marriage is one area where I, as a non-Catholic, would begin to wonder if Catholic politicians who were supposed to represent me were actually trying to impose their religious hierarchs’ beliefs on me and my fellow citizens instead. The state must NOT take sides in religious disputes of this sort.

A. Religion is not the point. From a civil point of view, this is a socio-anthropological issue. To describe marriage as the union of man and woman as a “sectarian” issue or “religious dispute” is as nonsensical as defining sex or pregnancy as patriarchal inventions.

Marriage, i.e., the union of man and woman, is a fundamental cornerstone of human society as such, the common heritage of every society, every culture, every civilization. No religion invented marriage; religions, like states, merely regulate it. The universal recognition of this institution across cultural, social, community, and religious borders strongly indicates that the marriage of man and woman is irreducibly rooted in human nature and in the interest of the state and the common good.

Q. How? How is this institution “rooted in human nature and in the interest of the state and the common good”?

A. Because the union of man and woman tends to produce, and indeed is ordered toward producing, offspring; and human offspring require a high level of nurture for a long period of time; and a stable household with father and mother provides for that need better than other arrangements. Children raised in this way tend on average to be better cared for, and thus tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, more productive, and better educated than children raised in other ways, and less likely to become dependents of the state, or delinquents and criminals, etc.

Society thus has, and has always had, a vested interest in supporting the stable union of man and woman in a way that it does not have, and has never had, a vested interest in other domestic arrangements. And that is what marriage as a basic human social phonemonon IS, and has always been. That is what the word refers to.

Q. Would you be equally opposed to a politician who advocated “civil unions” for same-sex and opposite-sex couples, with all the same benefits and responsibilities that presently come with “marriage”? Or are you merely haggling over who gets to own and define a single word?

The word IS of great importance, as indicated by the refusal of determined gay activists themselves to settle for a separate-but-equal civil-union arrangement.

Having said that, the legal benefits and responsibilities of marriage are predicated on the historical socio-anthropological basis for marriage as a civil institution, relating to the procreation and adequate nurturing and rearing of children.

Same-sex unions not being ordered toward this end, I would say that society has no stake in supporting the stability of such arrangements, and would be opposed to any privileging of same-sex living arrangements that happen to be conjugal over other living arrangements that happen not to be conjugal, such as two siblings of same or mixed gender living together, a parent and child, platonic roommates, etc.

Q. Ah, but gay couples rear children, too. Why would we NOT encourage the stability of THOSE couples, too?

A. By the same token, there might be a child being raised within the context of any of the other domestic arrangements I mentioned. And certainly we aren’t going to stipulate the ACTUAL presence or absence of a child as the basis for whether or not to grant marital privileges and rights. So I see no conceivable reason (pun intended) to privilege gay couples above other domestic arrangements.

Q. People marry for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with children, and they often marry in circumstances where the procreation of children is impossible (e.g. where one partner is sterilized, where the female partner has already experienced menopause, etc.).

A. True, but the larger point is that if the union of man and woman were not where babies come from, and if babies didn’t require such intensive nurture for such a long period of time, marriage would not exist, either as a socio-anthropological category or as a religious institution.

In specific cases there may for one reason or another be no actual possibility of offspring, or very little possibility of offspring, or no intention of producing offspring, etc., but it is not society’s job to make such distinctions or to inquire into the likelihood, ability, and interest of this man and this woman in reproduction.

This is completely different from the case of two individuals of the same sex, which is NOT where babies come from, is not in any way ordered toward engendering and nurturing them.

Q. In what way will having two gay men down the street who are married undermine your marriage or your children growing up to get decent jobs and pay taxes?

A. For one thing, because society supports marriage as an investment, with a cost. By privileging married couples in certain legal and financial ways in order to support their stable union and potentially benefit any offspring that may result, society makes an investment in us as a couple on the understanding that we are participating in an institution that exists for the good of society, through the engendering and long-term nurture of children.

By definition, two gay men down the street cannot participate in the reality of that institution. However, it is true that society can privilege them in the same way as it does us.

This benefit to them, though, will come at an additional cost to society, and by substantially expanding the pool of living arrangements considered as “marriage,” society will have fewer resources to benefit each family individually.

Secondly, “marriages” in the gay community, because they are by definition not ordered toward the engendering and long-term nurture of children, will never offer society the same benefits and return on the social investment as true marriages of men and women.

Sociologically, too, civil acceptance of gay unions probably has deleterious consequences for marriage and family. Legal recognition of gay “marriage” further erodes the connection between marriage and child-rearing, thus creating less impetus for heterosexual couples to marry simply because they want to live together and possibly to procreate. This will lead to children being raised by couples who never bothered to marry, which will lead to more separations and more harm to the children.

Notes on the gay “marriage” debate