bearing blog

Fling.

Jennifer Fulwiler has a moving post up today, brought on by an email from a reader who was suffering because after two children, her husband had a vasectomy against her wishes.  

What compounded "Jane's" suffering was how few people were sympathetic to her sadness:

She said that when she tried to talk to friends and family members about the difficult time she was having with the situation, almost nobody wanted to listen. The tone of most of the responses was surprise that she was upset in the first place, and a confusion about what the problem was. "Go take a vacation, and be happy that you're not overburdened with a bunch of little kids!" one relative told her...

[S]he remained surprisingly troubled by the fact that most people didn't seem to think that her story was one worth telling. Eager to know that she wasn't alone, she searched online for blogs or books in which other women in her position shared there experiences, but found few results. Women's websites told the tales of women undergoing all different types of challenges, but none showed much interest in discussing situations like Jane's, in which women were denied children by their husbands. It seemed clear to her that her pain was not deemed valid, and therefore was not considered to be worth discussing.

The comments thread in the post is instructive, and other people (both men and women) are chiming in with stories of their own.  Truly there is a lot of suffering out there that we never know about or see.  

A couple of trolls, natch.  Skip them and move on.

One commenter ("Renae"):

"It’s about accepting and recognizing other people’s loss as loss."

Another ("Terri"):

"It is not just those who don’t stand with the Church on these teachings who can be thoughtless or even cruel, whatever their true intention may be.  This is another example for me that those of us who are Catholic and following the Church’s teachings as it pertains to being open to life and avoiding pregnancies for grave reasons must never be flippant when speaking to others.

I was a little shocked to hear people make judgmental statements about couples with one or two children.  They assumed those couples were not faithful Catholics without knowing anything about their situation.  We never know what other people are dealing with or what suffering is theirs. 

... These teachings are not easy and we must never just fling them at people.  We must share the Church’s teachings with love and compassion.  Our charity must always be even greater than our zeal."

Another commenter pointed out, probably in response to this, that it was possible to talk about the Church's teachings without pointing fingers at individual families or presuming to know their motives, but I think Terri's entirely right.  Even when we formulate hypotheticals, we have to be SO careful not to use "those couples who stop after two children" as shorthand for "couples who stopped being open to life."  And you know you've heard people saying that.

Oh sure, you can say "Well, I didn't mean people with secondary infertility."  Or "Well, I didn't mean people who have very  serious reasons they must not have a longed-for third child."  Or "Well, I didn't mean anyone who yearns for a child but whose spouse refuses to be open to another."  If you didn't mean that you should have said what you meant.  Faithful Catholics with smaller families than they hoped for have enough to suffer, and one of the things that they have to suffer is the knowledge that people presume to know their motives.

Because if you're willing to say "families with two children" as shorthand for "not-so-faithful Catholics," the you're representative of lots of other people who might not say it but who probably think it.

We are supposed to hand on the teachings of the Church, not "fling" them -- a very apt choice of word.  Just throwing it out without any thought to the wording -- well, you sacrifice not only compassion, but accuracy.  (Show me from Church teaching where "two children" is the cutoff beyond which you are presumably open to life.)  

It may take longer to say it, but the only thing that sensitivity and compassion costs you is extra breath.  And if that costs too much, there is always the option of keeping your mouth shut, and letting someone more suited to the task step forward.

Obedience in dissent, with cultural notes.

Simcha has a great post today.  

(Beginning to think I should just have a category called DIRECT LINKS TO SIMCHA FISHER AND MARK BARNES.)

A reader asks her, 

I feel that I am a faithful Catholic- attend Mass, pray regularly, try to follow the Church in all things. But I fall short on this with one issue- I do disagree about the Church’s stance on homosexuality and gay marriage. My beloved sister is a lesbian...I cannot/ do not look at what my sister is doing as wrong. I’m happy she found someone she loves to spend her life with. I love her children, and I’m so happy that they exist. My sister and her partner are raising them wonderfully...

Sometimes conservative Catholic bloggers will talk about how they struggled with a Church teaching, but the post always ends with how they changed, and saw the light, and saw the truth and beauty in the Church’s teachings. But what are you supposed to do when that doesn’t happen?

There's more than one question wrapped up in that post, of course.  Let me pick one excerpt from Simcha's answer:

Sometimes people think that the Church requires us all to be prophets with bullhorns, or prissy grand inquisitors — that the only way we can ally ourselves with the Church is to be thoroughly obnoxious.

Or perhaps we believe that believing something means feeling good about believing it.  These ideas are actually very handy temptations, courtesy of the devil.  They make excellent obstacles to obedience.

So what is the reader supposed to do?  Certainly not shun or treat her sister, the partner, or the children with disdain; certainly not wish them misery, wish that they hadn’t been born.  Certainly not pick over their house, hunting for evidence of degeneracy.  Depending on the situation, the Church may or may not want the reader to even speak to the sister about her lifestyle, now that it’s so firmly established.

Read the whole thing.  The main thrust of the post is that we are all dissenters about something or other, to one degree or another, and because of that this is really a universal problem of the human heart.  If we value obedience --to legitimate authority within its legitimate sphere, of course -- sooner or later we must come up against some principle we haven't taken to heart.  How do we deal with that?  How do we recognize it?

But there's also another question here:  The question of how faithful Catholics are to live in a world, and sometimes in families, with a broader definition of "marriage" than we can parrot back.  It is still an open and vague one.  

For the time being, the official work of the Church in this area is to work to preserve, one way or another, our freedom to assert what we believe to be true about it.  The Church hasn't quite given up the hope that the larger culture can be steered back to an acceptance of something closer to that same truth.

Now, I don't wish to question the wisdom of this approach heavily, because I am not an expert in pastoral techniques of any kind, let alone large-scale culture-steering.  Cynicism is a fault of mine.  

But:  I tend to believe that this particular horse has already left the barn, and that it was my fellow heterosexuals who drove it out foaming at the mouth.  I think we are already in dire need for pastoral assistance in dealing charitably and truthfully with the world around us here.  It is NOT easy, as Simcha's reader's situation (and countless others) demonstrate.

 In many ways it's not new:  Families everywhere have always hosted an endless stream of intra- and inter-familial messages along the lines of "If you do not take steps to demonstrate your approval of my actions, that is the same to me as a demonstration that you do not love me."  If there is any difference now, it's that much more often the "approval" runs against values that transcend the merely cultural or habitual.   We expect family members to get used to a "black sheep" who merely dressed embarrassingly unconventionally, or pursued a career different from the expected one, or joined the "wrong" political party, or married a person from a different class or ethnic group, or wanted to move too far away or stay too close to home.   But -- and this is still a strong, widely held value in the United States -- it's entirely different to expect people to "get used to" being asked to deny, explicitly or implicitly, publically or privately, their religious beliefs.  

Don't we all get impatient with the bishops sometimes?  I think we're long overdue for some real pastoral advice on how to live, and how to love others, in a world where regular denial of our religious beliefs is expected of us -- both through public economic acts and through ordinary social rituals.

It's love and truth.  They are never in conflict -- not really.  One without the other is impossible.  But we ordinary, foolish humans can screw it up royally, trying to carry them both like a burden, and end up delivering neither.

A more interesting statistic about Catholics and birth control.

In one sense, statistics about "who does what" are irrelevant.   The fight to overturn the HHS mandate forcing insurers and/or employers to cover contraception is a fight about religious freedom, and it really doesn't matter how many people use contraception and how many employers object to paying for it directly or indirectly.  

It is, after all, religious minorities -- groups of people who adhere to beliefs that are unusual in the wider society -- who require the most protection and who desire the most accommodation in the civil structure.  If your philosophical beliefs and practices are common, ordinary, and widespread -- such as making time for worship on the weekends, or eating only non-animal foods, or giving presents to your children on a quiet, at-home Christmas morning -- we can assume that there is some accommodation for them built right into the fabric of society, since some of your co-believers will have helped put that society together.  Indeed, if we look around we see that many jobs (though not all) are available which leave room for weekend worship, that Christmas is a day when few people (though not without exception) have obligations outside the family, that vegetarianism is largely accepted and that many eating establishments offer meatless items year-round.

If you're a member of a religious minority, though, you occasionally may ask for, and legitimately receive, accommodations written into the law.  Laws like the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits the federal government from burdening a person's exercise of religion unless it demonstrates that it does so in furtherance of a compelling government interest AND  is the least restrictive means of doing so.  The mandate doesn't further the government's interest (which is stated to increase "access" to contraception, and that has been shown not to be a problem) and it's not the least restrictive means (which would be something like a rider that an employee can purchase) and so the 1993 law, enacted during the notoriously right-wing Clinton administration, almost certainly renders the HHS mandate illegal.  

But it's obvious that the media is happy to wave this "98 percent of Catholic women use birth control" statistic around because someone thinks  it matters, or that it will matter if enough people hear it.  I think the idea must be something along these lines: Few Catholics consistently obey the Church's teachings, therefore we can make the nation think that it isn't a "real" or sincere religious belief that deserves accommodation.

If that's the case, then there is a lot of misdirection going on.  Because of course the freedom that is being infringed here is not the freedom to refrain from taking contraceptive pills or being sterilized.  (The government had to stop forcing people to contracept and be sterilized some time ago... must have been back in the dark ages... oh wait, it was 1981.)

No, the freedom being infringed is the freedom not to buy pills and sterilization for other people who want them.  So perhaps a much, much better thing to ask is:  "How many Catholic employers and insurers either cover contraceptives in their employee insurance plan or directly pay for them for their employees?"

Oops, now we have a conundrum.  Because if the number is small compared to the general population of employers and insurers, well then, there just might be something to the argument that Catholic employers and insurers have a real and sincere religious belief that precludes them from paying for other people's contraceptives.  And if the number is similar or large compared to the general population of employers and insurers, well, then, what exactly is the problem that needs to be solved by forcing them?  

+ + +

But even the question of "how sincere is this religious belief" is misdirected.  There is no test for sincerity in the Clinton-era law protecting the free exercise of religion against the federal government.  

+ + +

Here is a pair of recent statistics that you may find interesting.  (Via Red Cardigan, who herself found it via Get Religion).  

Of U. S. Catholics:

•  Fraction who say they attend Mass once a week or more:  22%. 
•  Fraction who say they agree that using artificial means of birth control is wrong:  22%.

(The first statistic is from CARA, a Catholic think tank.  The second is from a recent CNN poll.)

Only twenty-two percent of people who call themselves Catholics are going to Mass once a week.  This number is, of course, disturbingly low.  Recall that weekly Mass attendance is, in the Catholic faith, compulsory (though allowances are made, on the honor system, for duties and conditions that interfere with the obligation).  

Often, when you wish to define who is and who isn't a "practicing" Catholic, weekly Mass attendance is used as a reasonable proxy.  It's a practice that is required by the Church, it is relatively easy to measure, and it is public.  It is debatable whether this is the best proxy, but it is at least convenient.

The same proportion of Catholics agree with the teaching against artificial birth control.

+ + +

Let's do a little calculation with estimates using data from the Pew Forum.   Nearly 24% of the U. S. population is Catholic.  Twenty-two percent of that is 5.3% of the U. S. population.  This is only a little bit more than the number of people (4.7%) who belong to non-Christian religions, who, I think most reasonable people agree, deserve careful attention to their religious accommodations because their minority status places them at the margins of public discourse.  Just as unpopular speech is the speech that most needs protection, uncommon exercises of religious belief are those that most need accommodation.

We are a religious minority.

It is not what we would choose, but it is the reality we live in.

 

Ugh: Anti-sibling messages.

Normally I am very pleased with the children's magazines put out by Carus Publications, producers of Cricket, Ask, Ladybug, and several other titles.  Each of my children receives one subscription.    Generally they're very child-positive, and the science articles in particular tend to be well done without much dumbing down.

Boy, howdy, though, I couldn't let this one slide.  This is the back cover of the January 2012 issue of Odyssey, the science magazine aimed at kids aged 10 to 16:

 

Yeah, you read that right.  The little sister is hugging the big sister, and the big sister is rolling her eyes and wishing the little sister had never been born.

The context here is that this month's issue is about "annoyance."  The consulting editor for the issue is a professor of psychology as well as brain/cognitive science.  There are articles about the role of cortisol, about talking being more effective at calming oneself than texting, about how the sound of whining children distracts mothers more than the sound of whining table saws, and about how psychologists classify "annoyance" among five basic emotional states.  There's even a sidebar explaining that some sounds, such as crying babies, are annoying for a good reason:  because they signal a need that we're supposed to meet.

But that picture... I'm sure it's supposed to be funny, but I'm disturbed even by the notion that this appears in an educational magazine.  If they had pictured a girl sitting in a desk rolling her eyes at a teacher and thinking, "Tell me again why I haven't dropped out yet," I bet they'd get an earful from the classroom teachers who make up a sizable portion of their subscriptions.

Anyway, I called.  "I'd better leave the room," said the 11yo as I dialed the phone, "because I don't want to hear you yell."

"I'm not going to yell," I said.  "It's not the fault of the person who answers the phone number published in the magazine."  So the kids watched.

I talked to a very nice young woman named (I think) Kirsten, who when I said, "I have a comment about the January issue of Odyssey" told me to hang on while she got a copy of the magazine to look at.  Once I got her onto the back cover, I described what I saw.  

"I see a younger sister giving a hug to her big sister.  The little girl is looking up at her big sister with a loving smile.  The older sister is looking away and expressing regret that her little sister was ever born."  I went on to explain that I found it disturbing, that my children found it disturbing (the 11yo was the one who showed it to me), and that I assumed it was supposed to be funny; but that the "funny" fell flat, because it's just not representative of the child-positive messages I expect to see in the Cricket family of publications.  Children aged ten to sixteen are exactly the age group who are most susceptible to negative messages about the value of younger siblings, I went on.  I am happy to have every one of my kids.  My children are happy to have every one of their siblings.  I want it to stay that way.

"See, I didn't yell," I pointed out to the kids after I had left my contact information, acquired the name and email address of the person to whom my message should be directed, and ended the call.  

"Sometimes you yell," observed my 8yo.

I thought about it.  "Yes, sometimes I do.  It helped that I knew the person on the other end of the line didn't have anything to do with the cover, and that she was very polite and listened to me.  It's much harder to keep yourself from yelling if the other person is rude."

The senior editor of Odyssey is Elizabeth Lindstrom, and her email is elindstrom@caruspub.com .  

(NB. If you're reading this long past the issue date of January 2012, consider the post outdated.)

 

Double effect, in the bathtub.

Jennifer Fitz, as part of a longer discourse on lying, offers a novel explanation of the principle of double effect.  I think it's very approachable (and as far as I can tell, accurately represents Church teaching) so if this oft-misused principle has ever confused you -- please, check it out.

Hint:  The principle of double effect is not just a way of saying, "We can do something bad if we can think up a good enough reason."  Money quote:  "That's the clincher of double effect -- there are two effects."

Double effect (also called “parallel effect”) is actually one of the two principles that work together to keep our moral system sane.  The other is ‘ends don’t justify the means’, but that isn’t our topic today until way down below where I go out on a limb and guess things.  Back to Double Effect:

#1 Reason to love Double Effect: It lets you take a shower.

Because here’s what: Showers and bathtubs are super dangerous.  You could slip and crack your head open. And if the bathroom weren’t bad enough, you probably keep a stove and a water heater around the house, and perhaps even some kind of Vehicle of Death in your garage.  (Or, if you are a Luddite, a Pack Animal of Death for your transportation needs.)

Double effect says that you are allowed to have all this and more!  Because you aren’t actually trying to drown, scald or maim anybody.  Those are unintended consequences of your perfectly reasonable efforts to stay clean, fed, mobile, and so forth.   You’ll try to avoid those bad effects if you possibly can.

[What you can't do: If your enemy fails to drown in his bath, you can't hold him under.  In fact you can't even lay out the bath things and light a scented candle in an effort to lure him to his death.  You may only lead him to the tub for a legitimately good reason, such as to reduce the general stinkiness and discourage the spread of impetigo.  Or perhaps so that he might unwind after a long day driving. you. crazy.  But not to kill him. Barring circumstances we'll get to down the page.]

So that’s the use of double effect.  It lets us do something good, even if there is a some risk of something bad happening in the process.

Now unless you suffer from deep scruples, you probable don’t lay awake nights wondering if your really did the right thing, caving in and buying a water heater.  So where double effect gets famous is because it permits seriously dangerous action if there’s a genuine need for it.

You may not, for example, throw yourself in front of a bus in order to get that drat fly at last. (Even though the fly is germy and annoying, and you only want to give your beloved a peaceful picnic.  Good cause, good action, but the risks are disproportionate.  It’s a no-go.  Hope the bus gets the fly, and live to swat another day.)  But if it is to push your hapless child out of harm’s way, yes you may take the risk of your likely death in order to save the child.  You aren’t trying to die.  You hope to avoid dying.  Everyone will be much happier if a guardian angel steps up and takes care of things.

And that’s the clincher of double effect — there are two effects: There is one thing good you are trying to achieve, and one bad bad you hope to avoid. Even if the bad effect is 100% likely barring supernatural intervention, you can’t be trying to achieve the bad effect.

There's more -- go read the whole thing.  I think Jennifer's explanation is really helpful.  Double effect is a seriously hard-to-understand principle.  I think that's because there's a long separation in logic, and usually time and distance, between convincing yourself in the abstract that the principle of double effect is correct and morally right (which isn't so hard), and many of its applications, which can sometimes seem convoluted and (shall I say it?) jesuitical.    To navigate some of these situations, it's like you have to wander through a long, twisty tunnel.  At the beginning of the tunnel, the principle of double effect is well understood.  At the end of the tunnel, you see the conclusions it leads to.  The principle goes with you through the long, twisty tunnel, your only source of light, and it remains true all the time, but once you get to the end sometimes the conclusion is surprising and hard to understand.

Take one example:  the end-point of Catholic moral theology with respect to ectopic (tubal) pregnancy.  We wind up with what must seem a very bizarre conclusion:  

• A persistent ectopic pregnancy creates a life-threatening disorder from the point of view of the mother.  
• Yes, the out-of-place and growing embryo is a human being who deserves our protection. 
•  No, that doesn't mean that the mother doesn't get medical treatment, because she is also a human being who deserves our protection.  
• So yes, she can seek treatment for it, treatment which will end the pregnancy and inevitably kill the embryo.  
• But (assuming the mother wishes to remain true to Catholic moral understanding of life issues, and understands all this) she won't choose to use the drug methotrexate to end the pregnancy by killing the embryo, even though it is first treatment choice of many doctors and is probably physically the least dangerous option that doctors offer her, 
• and it may be she won't even choose the least-invasive surgical method, salpingostomy (incision in the fallopian tube) followed by killing the embryo by removing it and its amnion;
• but she can choose salpingectomy, which is the removal of the section of fallopian tube containing the misplaced embryo, 
• even though that removal inevitably results in the death of the embryo,
• which we knew all along was going to happen,
• and even though it would be objectively physically safer for the mother to undergo methotrexate or salpingostomy,
• and even though the salpingectomy will likely damage the mother's fertility.

I mean, if you don't have any understanding of the principle of double effect, this sounds nuts.  Even if you do have an understanding of the principle of double effect, it might still sound nuts.  You have to sit down and take time to connect all the dots to figure out how we got from here to there, or why it matters that we prefer one option to the other when the end result is a no-longer-in-danger mother and a dead embryo for all of them, and especially why "but the salpingectomy is more dangerous!" isn't a good enough reason to use one of the other methods, considering that the embryo is dead either way.

And yet, this is where double effect, properly understood, gets you.  If it isn't obvious, why not head over to Jennifer's blog and see if you can make the connections between her bathtub assailant and the unfortunate ectopic pregnancy problem?  If nothing else, the exercise illustrates why it's important for ordinary Catholics who desire to follow Church teachings -- whether they understand them or not -- to be confident that their local Catholic hospital faithfully follows it, and why the bishops have to guard that confidence even if it means getting bad press.

 

(UPDATE.   Edited slightly to avoid implying that salpingostomy is definitively considered illicit.  See first comment.)

Challenge.

On my post about explaining abortion to kids in the context of American history education, in which I wrote that I would treat the subject as part of a unit on the changing experience of American childhood, I received a good question from "emma" in the combox.  Here it is:

Do you also ask them to put themselves in the positions of their once-younger siblings, now grown older, and facing an unwanted pregnancy?

I gave a quick answer for the combox:

Emma, that's absolutely got to be part of their education, yes -- just as I ask them to put themselves in the position of all kinds of people facing challenges in life. I've tried to do that repeatedly as we've studied American history: asked them to put themselves in the place of marginalized people as well as in the place of people who've done terrible things. I've asked them to put themselves in the place of undocumented immigrants, in the place of people who supported immigration amnesty, and in the place of people who support strict immigration law enforcement -- so they can understand where everyone is coming from. I asked them to put themselves in the place of white antebellum Southerners and white antebellum Northerners and free blacks and slaves. Heck, a couple of weeks ago I even asked them to put themselves in the place of Richard Nixon. "Can you understand how a person could imagine that their political opponents were really *enemies?* And if you thought that, would it still be okay to lie and cheat to win elections?"

How else can "do the right thing, always" sink in, how can "never help people commit injustice, never" sink in, until you really understand that sometimes doing the right thing is terribly, terribly difficult? That sometimes contributing to injustice is terribly, terribly tempting?

 I think it's a question worthy of highlighting for further discussion, don't you? 

My point, in putting Roe v. Wade within a unit on the experience of childhood, is to point out that it affected the legal status of children primarily -- much more than it did the legal status of women.   Of course, this only follows from the notion that unborn children are, in fact children; but I am sure the commenter understands that this is a fundamental assumption in my homeschool.

As with all my educational theories, we shall see how it plays out as my children get older and ask tougher questions. My philosophy about imparting the conviction that the unborn deserve protection  is that it's necessary to go beyond "abortion is bad, so don't ever have one or pay for one or recommend one, try to help people who think it's their only choice, and vote against it whenever you can."  

What's more fundamental than that?  What's more necessary than that?  Well -- ask yourself why abortion is a bad thing, why people shouldn't have them, pay for them, promote them, why it's better to help people make different choices, why its legal status should change.  The only good answer is that the unborn are persons, children, and all those judgments follow from it. 

The Catholic novelist and short-story master Flannery O'Connor once famously said about the Eucharist, "If it's just a symbol, then to hell with it."  Well.  About the anti-abortion movement, I can say:  "If the unborn aren't persons, than to hell with it." 

And so the thing that must be imparted is the gut-and-brain knowledge that unborn children are nothing more nor less than children, younger than themselves.   A ten-year-old boy will protect his little sister like a Rottweiler:  I have seen it.   A four-year-old girl will carefully care for her baby brother:  I have seen it.  The whole family will gather eagerly around Mom's belly to watch for the tiny kicks:   I have seen it.  They know.  They mustn't lose this knowledge.

If you know that an unborn child is a child, you don't need to be told that she needs care, not violence.

If you know that an unborn child is a child, you don't need to be told that a scared pregnant girl is a scared young mother with a baby, that a boy with a pregnant girlfriend is a worried young father.   I'll have completely failed any one of my sons if he makes it to adulthood without being able to imagine what it might be like, what it is like for too many American men: to fear that he can't care for his family.   I'll have failed my daughter if she grows up without putting herself in the place of a mother who's afraid she can't care adequately for herself and for her child.  

I believe that to awaken compassion for young mothers and young fathers and their children is to awaken a desire to help them all, not a desire to harm any of them.  Political positions come long after that.

Readers:  What do you think of Emma's question and challenge?  A good one, no?

Commenter ChristyP on blogtalkradio.

Link here to blog-friend Christy P promoting the Creighton model study that she posted about here in a guest post.  She explains a little bit more about what the study's for.  If you're interested or know someone who's interested, check it out! 

Here's the link - audio will play at the link.

A blog post with no audio here.

Especially if you know someone who's looking for a new method, or is engaged, you might want to recommend it.  This strikes me as a good way to broach the subject of NFP with an engaged couple you know.

Model election: "Life" language part II.

Last week I wrote a post in which I suggested I was going to explore further the nature of the obligation that Catholics have to "vote pro-life."  Assuming that we do have such an obligation, what does that mean?  Let's review:

Some think the obligation is only that we cannot prefer the pro-choice position.  We may (reluctantly) vote for Pro-Choice Charlie over Pro-Life Louie if Charlie has a better stance on other issues and if we think those issues are more important.  This is the answer which, if correct, restricts our voting behavior the least.

Others say, no, we are obligated to consider life issues as most important, and we may not vote for any pro-choice candidates over any viable pro-life candidates:  if Pro-Choice Charlie runs against Pro-Life Louie, we may not vote for Charlie.  However, if there are no pro-life candidates who have a chance of winning -- if we have to choose between Pro-Choice Charlie and Pro-Choice Chester -- we may vote for Charlie if his stance on other issues is better.  This form of the negative obligation would be a bit more restrictive than the first.

A third interpretation would be that we commit actual sin if we cast a vote for any supporter of legal abortion at all.  If there are no viable pro-life candidates, the only moral choice is to withhold our vote or "throw it away" on a non-viable pro-life candidate.  If Charlie is on the ballot running against Chester, then we are stuck with writing in Louie or else not voting.  This negative obligation is still more restrictive, as it strikes some candidates permanently off our potential list of choices.

And a fourth interpretation is that we must orchestrate our support so as to maximize the possibility that a pro-life candidate will be elected in the general election. This is a different, positive obligation, and also quite restrictive.  (In the case that no pro-life candidate can possibly be elected, the positive obligation disappears and you're left with one of the two latter negative obligations.)

I think it is instructive to consider exactly how our voting behavior is constrained under each of the four interpretations of the obligations of a Catholic voter.  So I want to consider a stripped-down model of a race for one office:  two election days, two parties, two issues.

Here are the rules:

There are two political parties.  Call them the Canine Party (C) and the Feline Party (F).   Each party holds a primary election to decide which candidate will win the nomination for the general election.   A voter may vote in either the Feline primary or the Canine primary but not both, and then of course can go on to vote in the general election.

There are two political issues.  In principle these could be almost any two features that influence voters to pick one candidate over the other -- you might think of them as two quite specific policy questions ("Shall we promote single-payer health care?" "Shall we build a wall across the Mexican border?"), or you might think of them as aggregations of related policy questions ("The Economy" and "Social Issues"), or you might think of them as features of the candidates themselves ("Policies" and "Character").  For the purposes of setting up the model, though, they are simply two generic political issues:  Issue 1 and Issue 2.    Each issue has two possible policy positions, which we will call Yes or No. 

In the model, party affiliation and policy positions are the only meaningful distinctions among the candidates. It just so happens that all possible unique candidates happen to be running in this race. So four candidates will compete in the Canine party, representing the four policy positions:

Yes on 1, Yes on 2 (candidate yyC)
Yes on 1, No on 2 (candidate ynC)
No on 1, Yes on 2 (candidate nyC)
No on 1, No on 2 (candidate nnC)

And, of course, there are four candidates competing in the Feline party, which four are yyF, ynF, nyF, nnF.  Eight candidates.  The winner of each primary competes in the general election.  That's sixteen possible head-to-head pairings in the general election.

(My more smartypants readers have probably already noticed that this model can be generalized to the case of p political parties and n political issues, each with m possible policy positions.  You can even generalize it to a multi-level model election that will have little model people setting up "November Madness" brackets and placing bets around little model water coolers.  Go ahead and set up the equations if you like.  I'm not going to.)

 Now, let's imagine a rational voter:  Alice.  Alice doesn't need anyone to tell her how to vote in the general election, because she's so very rational that she could tell you not only who are her favorite candidates, but she can rank all eight in order of preference, and so given any of the possible sixteen head-to-head combinations, Alice knows who will get her vote.  This is because Alice follows a very rational algorithm to choose between two candidates:

(1) Always choose "Yes on 1" over "No on 1."
(2) If the candidates have the same position on  Issue 1, choose "Yes on 2" over "No on 2."
(3) If the candidates have the same position on Issues 1 and 2, choose Felines over Canines.

Clearly Alice's favorite candidate is yyF and her least favorite is nnC, but Alice is not completely specified until the three features (issue 1, issue 2, and party) are ranked in order of importance.  Her friend Bob also loves candidate yyF and hates candidate nnC, but his voting behavior is different because he always chooses a Feline over a Canine first, then moves on to consider Issue 1, and finally Issue 2.   Mathematically attentive but non-smartypants readers may have noticed that there are 2 x 2 x 2 x 6 = 48 different kinds of rational voters in this election.  (My smartypants readers, working out the general case, are deep in matrix algebra by now.)

This model offers us a lot of ways to play.  We could, for example, populate the electorate with so many rational voters like Alice, so many like Bob, so many like Carol, and so on.  We could sprinkle in a bunch of irrational voters, too, who don't follow any discernible rules in choosing one candidate or another.  We could pretend that we had poll results that allow us to predict the outcomes of the sixteen hypothetical general-election face-offs.  And then -- we can ask ourselves interesting questions, like:  "Given her preferences and this set of predicted general-election results, whom should Alice support in the primary election?"

I haven't brought any Catholicism into the model yet -- I've just tried to set up a simplified structure for thinking about it, one that perhaps can be enlarged upon later.  More on that in a subsequent post, in which we consider the constraints introduced by the various interpretations of the "Catholic voter's obligations."

"Life" language: political vs. pastoral, political vs. Christian.

I have been doing a little bit of out-of-season pondering about politics and morals.  No election is coming up, so maybe we can explore the topic of "single-issuevoting" without being bogged down in discussions about any particular candidates or ballot initiatives.  

(N.B.:  For simplicity and clarity, I am restricting the following discussion so that "pro-life" and "pro-choice" refer primarily to legality of abortion.  I won't be discussing in this post issues that many people find blurrier, like cloning or same-sex marriage laws.  I might generalize my arguments to these in a later post, but for now "legal abortion" is the model "life" issue:  that is, I will write as if it is the only one.)

* * *

Not quite two years ago I wrote a post called "Putting the careful thought up front," in which I described a conversation which gave me insight about being a so-called "single-issue voter:"

 

[My friend] said she appreciated hearing about my decision (not made without some struggle) to become what is often called a single-issue voter.  So often the so-called single-issue voters are derided for not putting much thought into the decision.  But in describing the process by which I became convinced to vote pro-life, I'd pointed out without noticing that there is usually a great deal of thought put into those decisions up front --- and that careful and reasoned thought shouldn't be discounted.  

I really appreciated that insight, because to be honest I hadn't been giving myself much credit for that up-front deliberation.  I'd sort of internalized that "single-issue-voters-don't-have-to-think-hard" message and have been kind of quietly bummed and embarrassed about being a primarily pro-life voter, as an identity, even if I've been fairly confident about each vote I've cast... 

 That struggle, that thought, isn't nothing.  It doesn't become nothing just because it is over and it ended in a firm conclusion.  

 

That conversation still ranks as one of the most personally important political conversations I've had, because it allowed me (finally) to "own" my identity as a voter who votes pro-life first.

So I was thinking a little bit about various bishops' directives of varying forcefulness exhorting the Catholics under their jurisdictions to avoid voting for pro-choice candidates.  I don't have a catalog in front of me of which bishop said what when, so I'm going with my general impression here which is that there's some variety in how they've phrased it:

• some have said that a Catholic incurs sin who votes for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life candidate without a "proportionate reason," i.e., some political reason that the voter honestly believes is as grave as the life issues
• some have said that it's practically impossible for a Catholic to vote for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life candidate without incurring sin, which is basically the same as the last category except that added to it is the force of the bishop's specific teaching that there is almost never an issue as grave as the life issues 
• some have only gone so far as to teach that a Catholic incurs sin who votes pro-choice candidates "on purpose," e.g. who really does support the pro-choice position and isn't even trying to balance the life issue with other political issues
• some may have been basically silent except for activities as part of the bishops' conference.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this sums up the various bishops' public pronouncements.  

Side note:  One thing I do not know anything about is whether any of the bishops have spoken about the case when voters are deciding only between pro-choice candidates -- may Catholics cast a vote for one of them, or must we withhold our vote?  I have generally assumed that if there aren't any viable pro-life candidates (this happens a lot in my Congressional district), we're still obligated to exert our voting power usefully, which to me means voting for the best candidate available, but I respect the choice to abstain from voting in this situation and, as I said before, I do not know whether any bishop has expressed an opinion or a directive telling his flock to avoid casting votes for pro-choice candidates even when there is no choice, or no viable choice, of pro-life candidate.

OK, so back to my main question.  One thing I want to know is:  What is the primary purpose of the bishops' teaching their flocks, with any strength at all, to avoid "voting pro-choice?"  Does that sound like a dumb question?  It's not.

Is it primarily:

(a) a warning to each individual Catholic to help each one of us avoid committing a sin in the voting booth, and to call to repentance those of us who have knowingly supported pro-choice candidates to a degree that constitutes sin.  This would be the bishop speaking to, and teaching, each Catholic as an individual.

or 

(b) a means of organizing Catholics into a bloc in order to get pro-life people elected so that we will get pro-life policies in our country.  This would be the bishop speaking to Catholics as a group, i.e., to the local church.

or 

(c) a means of spreading the Gospel, i.e., educating anyone who happens to hear or read the bishops' words, Catholic or not, about the operative principles here:  just about our highest worldly responsibility is to protect innocent and powerless people, and that means all kinds of innocent and powerless people, and when we live in a democracy we have to use our voting power as a means to do that.   Also known as:  converting hearts and minds.   This would be the bishop speaking to the whole population living in the boundaries of his diocese.

So, I'm thinking that all three of these purposes are probably in play, but that (a) and (c) are together the ones that actually comport with the bishop speaking in his role as a bishop.  (B) certainly is part of it, but I'm inclined to suggest that this constitutes what we would call "political activity" rather than "pastoral activity."  A bishop is a citizen, a voter, and a public figure and so he's certainly able to engage in political activity, so I'm not censuring him for engaging in it.  But I'm inclined to view the political purpose as secondary to the pastoral purpose.  After all, the role of the bishop is, mainly, successor to an apostle.  He is a pastor, which means that he properly confers sacraments and teaching.   (A) and (C) are teaching.  (B) really isn't.

So, why make the distinction?

Well, it occurred to me that a lot of Catholics speak about our religious obligation to vote pro-life as if it were equivalent to a religious obligation to get pro-life people elected.    These are not the same thing, and I think we should be more careful with our words, because of the logical consequences.  

The obvious difference here:  Individual vs. corporal.

To "vote pro-life" is an individual act, one act per vote, you could say.  I have a ballot before me:  assuming I understand the candidates' positions well, marking some of those boxes (depending on the roster of candidates) might constitute committing actual sin.  The bishop's role here in purposes A and C above is to help me understand the ramifications of the political positions so that I cast my vote in full knowledge and thus full freedom (even though with fuller freedom comes fuller responsibility and thus the possibility of fuller guilt).  The bishop's directive engages me just as if I were sitting in his office and he were telling me, "I really want to help you avoid doing something wrong, because I'm concerned about your soul."  He has a responsibility to teach in this way to every one of the Catholics in his diocese, and in a slightly different way to teach the non-Catholics he can reach as well.

But to "get pro-life candidates elected" is not like this.  No individual can "get pro-life candidates elected."  No individual can bear the responsibility to "get pro-life candidates elected."  

And yet, many Catholics who (like me) are personally convinced that they must vote only for pro-life candidates, at least when they have a chance of winning, put it in these terms.  

Why do you always vote pro-life?  Why are you a single-issue voter?  

 "I vote pro-life because the life issues are the most important, and we have to get pro-life candidates elected.  If only all the Catholics would consistently vote pro-life, then we would elect so many more pro-life candidates."  

This is probably true, but it is also a political answer.  When we answer that way, we are answering as a political actor, not as a Christian.  It is answering the question on a particular "turf":  the sandy ground in the arena of politics.

Now, in truth, we are both Christians and political actors, and so maybe in some situations the political answer is appropriate.  But the Christian doesn't have to answer on that turf, in those terms.  We could answer differently.  

Why are you a single-issue voter?  

"I vote for pro-life candidates when I can because I know that if I cast my vote to support abortion, I'd be committing a real sin.*  I can't have that on my conscience and I won't take part in it, even if that means I have to sacrifice my best interests when it comes to the other issues."

This is a Christian answer and an honest one.  Of course, it is guaranteed to lead to an awkward silence in certain situations.  Because it is a Christian answer and an honest one.

In this post, notice that I haven't said whether Catholics do have an obligation, not just to cast our own votes without committing sin (a negative moral obligation in our political lives), but to do all we reasonably can to get pro-life people elected (a positive moral obligation in our political lives).  I want to explore this more and I will do so very soon in a future post.  To get you started down the same road I'm looking at, you could read this short post at Disputations.

________________________________________________________________

*Note that this answer involves I-language:  "if I voted to support such-and-such a candidate, I'd be committing a sin."  This is intentional and is more than psychobabble interventionspeak:  it would be false to say or imply, "if YOU voted for such-and-such a candidate, YOU would be committing a sin," because this rests on the assumption that the "YOU" has full knowledge of the candidates, comprehension of the issues, and the conviction that pro-life voting is necessary.  It isn't fair to hold people to that standard unless you know them very well and you are sure they meet it, or you are a bishop and it is your job to teach them and bring them up to that standard.  But it's always fair to hold yourself to a strict moral standard.

 

Putting the careful thought up front.

One of the nice things about catching up with distant friends by going to stay with them for a couple of days is that you can spread your conversations out.  While I was in Iowa with Kim-in-IA we were able to chat about pregnancy, homeschooling, politics, home renovation, books... lots of stuff.  At a good leisurely pace, too.

So, politics and identity re: politics.  One of the things that bugs her a little bit about the local Catholic homeschooling group is that she gets email messages through it that promote generally conservative politics.  "I understand sending out political messages about life issues, or schooling stuff," she said, "but it bugs me that they would just sort of assume that just because I'm a Catholic and I'm in this homeschooling group, that I am a party-line Republican."

Yeah, that kind of stuff bugs me too.  And so we talked a bit about that.  I mentioned my post a while back about "conservative creep," and about not always being real happy about winding up voting Republican all the time just because I've made up my mind to vote pro-life. 

The answer, of course, is to get more politically active in general --- go to the caucuses, support the best candidates in the primaries (the ones who are pro-life  and who agree with me in other things besides that)... it could mean going to Democrat and third-party primaries and casting lonely votes for the struggling pro-life Democrats, God bless 'em, or it could mean getting more involved in the Republican party and trying to adjust the other planks in the platform.   Doing that requires identifying with one or the other.  

Sometimes I think that  pro-life voters who will always vote pro-life might have more inherent power to change the Democratic party (making it more pro-life) than to change the Republican party; after all, we can promise our final vote to the Democrats if they will only nominate a pro-life candidate, whereas the Republicans know damn well that until the Dems get more diverse with respect to life issues, they can put pro-lifers in their pocket and not listen to any other concerns we might have.

But I digress.  Anyway, Kim made a comment that struck me --- she said she appreciated hearing about my decision (not made without some struggle) to become what is often called a single-issue voter.  So often the so-called single-issue voters are derided for not putting much thought into the decision.  But in describing the process by which I became convinced to vote pro-life, I'd pointed out without noticing that there is usually a great deal of thought put into those decisions up front --- and that careful and reasoned thought shouldn't be discounted.  

I really appreciated that insight, because to be honest I hadn't been giving myself much credit for that up-front deliberation.  I'd sort of internalized that "single-issue-voters-don't-have-to-think-hard" message and have been kind of quietly bummed and embarrassed about being a primarily pro-life voter, as an identity, even if I've been fairly confident about each vote I've cast. 

 (Why are we all so wrapped up in what our vote says about what kind of person we are?  Can't it just be a tool to get done what we think should be done, and leave the personality out of it?)  

But Kim is right:  Like most so-called "single-issue voters" I know, I did put a lot of thought into that, and tried to figure out whether it was important to vote pro-life in, e.g., the "Soil and Water Commissioner" race, or what to do in various hypothetical combinations of three or more candidates with various likelihoods of winning and various levels of political attractiveness, things like that.  Looked for rules of thumb.  Weighed hopeful idealism vs. pessimistic pragmatism.  Had to consider how it all played out not just in final elections, but in primaries, and also how it plays out locally in a city and state where frequently Democrats (that is, "DFL-ers!") run opposed only by Greens and independents.  Struggled with the imagined consequences of becoming One Of Those Kind Of Voters.  Struggled with my conscience.

That struggle, that thought, isn't nothing.  It doesn't become nothing just because it is over and it ended in a firm conclusion.  I have settled on "the way I will vote" probably permanently.  One must always leave room for the possibilities of new evils coming along, graver than anything seen in this generation; but that's a hypothetical, and I live in the real present.  I did put a lot of thought into my vote, how to spend all my votes.

Anyway, I appreciated the kind word, which gives me just that much more confidence in my political decisions.   And that makes me feel readier to speak openly about them, and to defend them to others.