bearing blog

Humorless.

"What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.  That's been a good thing for all of us, I think."

--Brett Kavanaugh, of his all-male high school, in a 2015 speech to the Columbus School of Law, to laughter from the audience

+ + +

As I get older and gain experience in the world, and in particular become a middle-aged woman on my way to becoming an older one, I have had occasion to muse about the stereotype of older women as humorless.

Here's what I have discovered:

The more time I have had to encounter the jokes of men, the more time I have had to realize just how effing often certain classes of jokes are employed as a tool to deflect, deny, disguise, and defend abusive and selfish and objective acts towards women and girls.

And, of course, toward other marginalized persons.

The older we are, the more likely we are to have experienced a particular class of joke as a threat instead of as an amusement.

After a while that class of joke simply ceases to be funny and is only ominous.

This is true even when it comes from a person who only intends to be amusing. 

It is still ominous, though for a different reason, when it comes from a good person who, because they generally have good intentions, can sometimes find it very difficult to believe in the badness of other people's intentions.   What's ominous about that is: to preserve their own innocence by refusing to believe in certain kinds of guilt, certain kinds of human vileness, they implicitly refuse to believe the testimony of those who have suffered from witnessing that violence.

Ominous can't be funny.  It can maybe be deployed as pointed, dark satire.  But not ha-ha funny.

+ + +

I believe I understand the "humorless" stereotype now.

When you've had a few more years to watch it happen, it becomes obvious, and then you see it everywhere: how very, very often the accusation of humorless (often tied to an accusation of being no longer young) is weaponized to control the discourse.

And then it’s not funny even from people who really do only want to amuse. Because it has associations with some other guy who we saw use it as a tool to cover up his awful treatment of someone or his terrible beliefs.

+ + + 

There are other jokes we could point to (those that involve slurs, for instance) but let's take a look at the timely one I quoted above.

The joke about “what happens in X stays in X” (popularized by an ad campaign for Las Vegas attractions) is a joke about lying to your spouse after deliberately doing something that you know would hurt them or damage their trust in you.   

Funny, right?

This is a classic example of imposing an expectation that the in-group will treat transgressions as a joke, precisely in order to escape consequences for the transgressions.

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So one time (not that long ago, I was 41) I had the experience of being called an unacceptably righteous prude who couldn't take a joke, among other things, because I called someone out (privately! with I-statements and everything!) for making jokes in front of my kids with slurs for gay people. 

Having this experience was a bit of an awakening for me because I found that for just about the first time I did not have one single fuck to give about how this person thought of me, or how they might describe me to other people. 

I attribute this to a certain long-awaited wisdom of middle age.

I realized in that moment that I honestly don’t give a shit about being perceived as humorless when it comes to jokes that are at base dehumanizing.

I might leave, I might try to undermine the jokes subversively, or I might call them out on the spot, depending in the circumstances; but I won’t laugh anymore and I don’t care what men think of me for it.

The power of older women is not giving a flying fuck what men think.  And I'm grateful for it.

Turning a little knowledge into more.

Refugees are people:  men, women, old people, young people, teenagers, children, infants.  

I typed and retyped the introductory sentence for my post and settled on that one, because apparently there's some controversy about that point.  Now I'll move on.

+ + +

Mark and I decide yearly where to send our family's charitable donations.   The summer's news moved me to look this year into helping and welcoming the families who are being directly resettled here after fleeing the violence in Syria.   Of course, there are national and international organizations who could use our money, but I also wondered who, if anyone, was doing that work locally.  

Although Gov. Mark Dayton sharply criticized those state governors who refused to accept people from Syria, I discovered, nobody in Minnesota really expects anyone from Syria to be directly resettled here.  There isn't an established community.  But Minnesota does expect to have welcome an increased number of refugees by the end of 2016.  The largest number, as for the last few years, are from Somalia.  

I knew this, of course, because I live in South Minneapolis, which is home to one of the largest communities of Somali people outside Somalia itself.  The greatest concentration, as well as the most visible cluster of businesses owned by and catering to Somali immigrants, is the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood a bit north of us.   But many Somali people live in our neighborhood as well.  Yesterday evening, a Tuesday, I was at the YMCA a mile from our house, running around the track that circles the second level of the gym; the gym was crowded, half by badminton players and half by basketball pick-up games, and the basketball side was (I estimate) 90 percent Somali.  Mostly young men and teenage boys, but a few little girls in brightly colored hijabs darted in and out, and there were a couple of teenage girls, too, practicing free throws.  Much of the signage in the YMCA is printed in English, Spanish, and Somali, and you'll see this in other places too, like on bank machines and sometimes shop windows.  In the winter, when everyone else at the bus stop seem to disappear under fluffy parkas, the distinctive skirts and hijab of Somali women still stand out above and below the winter coats, orange and green and turquoise and purple against the snow and the gray pavement.

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We will probably make a donation this year to one or more of the local organizations that work with refugees.  (See below* for a list.)  In the meantime I realized how very little I know about the community of refugees that already lives all around me.  I decided to change that.  

I picked up a book published in 2012 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, part of the People of Minnesota series: Somalis in Minnesota by Ahmed Ismail Yusuf.  It's less than 70 pages long and well footnoted.  The book describes the history of the nation of Somalia, how the fighting started and how its refugee crisis began.  It tells how Somalis began to be resettled in the United States in the early 1990s, almost all in the San Diego area, where there was already a small community of ethnic Somalis that had settled there from Ethiopia earlier.  But at the time, job prospects in the area were poor.  

Minnesota, at the time, had relatively low unemployment.   So when the owners of a single poultry plant in Marshall, MN wanted to expand operations from two shifts to three, they advertised in other states, hoping to draw workers with a starting rate of $6.95/hour (forty percent higher than the federal minimum wage at the time) plus benefits.  A few young men drove to Minnesota to check it out, an event which Yusuf places neatly in the context of the Somali nomadic tradition, in which a few members of a large group would travel ahead to scout out a new, high-quality living site that would support the community.  Those young men were hired immediately; they passed the news to the rest of the community in San Diego; more followed; and that became the cradle of the Minnesota Somali-American community.  Once that community had become established, additional refugees from Somalia began to be settled directly in Minnesota.

Yusuf goes on to describe some of the challenges that this first generation of Somali-Americans has had as it integrates into the wider communities of the local public school system, the Twin Cities, and the state of Minnesota.  Some of these early difficulties, I remember from the local news (kids fighting at Roosevelt High, some taxicab drivers -- Yusuf calls them "ignorant" -- who wouldn't transport dogs or alcohol from the airport) but that publicity had mostly faded away by the time the situations had been resolved.  These conflicts, Yusuf frames optimistically, pointing out that similar conflicts have marked the arrival of many other communities of immigrants who are now well accepted in American society.  He argues that the rapid growth of Somali-American businesses and the emergence of political and social leaders in the first generation is evidence that Somalis are doing relatively well, considering that they have been here less than 25 years and face significant cultural and language barriers.

 The most serious problem at this time is one that Yusuf treats at some length, and that is the active targeting of Somali boys and young men by paramilitary and terrorist organizations overseas.  Not long after I began reading the book, a 20-year-old Somali man injured 10 people in a mass stabbing at a St. Cloud mall before being shot by an off-duty police officer.   (As I write this, the nature of the attacker's connection to overseas terrorist organizations has not yet been clearly established.)  St. Cloud is 65 miles northwest of here, a much smaller city; earlier this year, a local and widely-read free newspaper proclaimed it "the worst place in Minnesota to be Somali."  But dozens of Minneapolis parents have lost sons,  some only teenagers, directly to recruitment from an al-Qaeda affiliate organization  in the Horn of Africa.  One became the first American citizen to commit murder-suicide by bomb in Somalia.  The FBI counterterrorism investigation in Minnesota is large and ongoing, and the topic casts a dark shadow.

Still, Yusuf's book is optimistic and informative, and it left me wanting to know more still.

+ + +

The next thing I wondered was whether I could learn any of the Somali language.  Signs everywhere around here bear phrases of Somali  -- some repeat the information on public signage, others are the names of shops and restaurants, still others appear in advertisements.  Qoraxey is the name of a home health care agency.  Dayax is the name of a grocery store.  I couldn't find any online tutorials; neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone nor Pimsleur offer courses in Somali.  The only textbook I found was kind of expensive, more than I wanted to spend for a brief introduction, so I started with a slim phrasebook and dictionary by Awde, Axmed, and Orwin.

I started at the pronunciation section.  Somali has used a Roman alphabet since it was imposed in 1972, which makes it a bit easier on English speakers, but there are some phonemes not found in English.

Got all that?  

I did find a helpful video online called "Somali Pronunciation:  Just The Tricky Ones."  The narrator, who has a British accent, demonstrates how to pronounce the graphemes x, c, kh, r, q, dh,  and d/t.  I only find c and dh hard, though; the r is just a trill, the kh is the familiar ending of loch and ach! , x is just a throaty h  and q just a really-far-back-in-your-throat k.  There's a glottal stop too.  Nothing complicated.  I think I can get the dh with a little practice.  The c will take a lot.

(It also left me wondering why the Somali spelling reformers decided to go with the c instead of something else.)

+ + +

I've been driving around and noticing signs and looking them up in the dictionary.  The Dayax grocery store is named "Moon."  The Qoraxey home health care agency appears to be named something like "sun" or "sunrise"  (qurax).  The Gargar clinic's name means "help," I think -- at least, that's what the dictionary says gargaar means.  Clearly I have a lot to learn.

Somali isn't Indo-European -- it is a Cushitic language, which means that it is in the same language family (Afro-Asiatic) as Arabic and ancient Egyptian but on a branch between them.  The grammar, therefore, is something entirely foreign to me, but maybe not so foreign as (say) a Sino-Tibetan language would be.  But there are words that leap out at me when I go through the dictionary:  aadami means human (hello, Adam!), roodhi is bread (must be a cognate of India's roti).  Colonialism and technology has left the language with many Western loanwords:  capsicum (sweet) peppers are berberooni, which has to be from the Italian peperoni; a physician is a dhakhtar or dhakhtarad; cheese is farmaajo; oven is foorno.

The other day, while I was running around the lake, I practiced the consonants, pronouncing the Somali word for "beautiful" over and over:  quruxsan, quruxsan, quruxsan.  A soft "k" in the back of the throat, the vowel of "put" twice with a trilled "r" between, then a throaty "hhh-san."

I haven't even started to look at how to put together a sentence, or assign the right endings to nouns and verbs, or differentiate between masculine and feminine nouns (except to delight in the trivia that a masculine singular noun often has a feminine plural, and vice versa).  I have to start with words and spellings and pronunciations, and then move on to a little grammar.  I know many people would start with "Hello" and "My name is" and "Thank you," but I'm a visual learner and an analytical one; I'm going to try to get an idea of the way sentences are put together first, and how words can vary; and I'm going to remember these things better if I think of the words as things that are spelled and seen rather than spoken and heard.  I know, it's not natural-language-learning, but I know myself -- when I hear words in English I see them inside my head, behind my eyes -- and I need the spelled-out words to be the hooks on which I can hang and remember spoken ones.

So this is my tiny side auto-didact project  for the fall.  I can already tell that I am going to need another book, probably the textbook that I'm now going to be willing to invest in, because the Awde book's grammar section emphasizes the importance of nouns' gender while its dictionary section does not list the gender of the nouns (!).  As soon as I can find a Somali-language newspaper in a rack of free publications at the front of a coffee house, I will be snatching one up.  And I'll visit the library around the corner, which boasts a small section of Somali-language children's books.

I'm a long way from even saying "hello," but I hope to crawl a little farther along.

_______

*Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis serves refugees through their Reception and Placement program, to which donors can designate donations.  The Minnesota Council of Churches provides refugee services as well. ECHO Minnesota provides multilingual broadcast programming and communication.  I'm particularly interested in finding out more about the International Institute of Minnesota, which I noticed when I lived near it in graduate school and looked into when I was considering taking Spanish classes myself; they provide immediate resettlement help but also offer job training and ongoing language education.

Writing your own charter.

Saturday morning I took a walk from Lyndale Farmstead Park, where I left the car, a mile and a half to the Lake Harriet bandstand.  I'm taking a break from running, because of my hip, and wore no athletic gear; just a tank dress and sandals. The late-summer sun beckoned me to the lake.  From the lakeside restaurant Bread & Pickle I bought ice water for $3 in a reusable stainless steel water bottle.  The cold bottle sweated big drops of water.  I took it to a table and rested my hip there for a while before walking back.

There was a 5K going on at the lake, a walk-and-run, and bluegrass-tinged rock music wafted from the bandstand.  August in Minneapolis can be brutally humid, but it usually looks beautiful, with lots of sunny days and blue skies.  There's something about August here that makes me wistful:  the cool weather will be here soon, and fall is sometimes cut short, with the snow arriving before the trees have even lost their leaves.  

It's hot now, but.  You know that the bitter cold is coming.  

I don't like to hide from the heat in August, at least not in the daytime, at least not all day.  I want to stand in the sun and soak it up, like a house of adobe, and radiate it inwardly all winter long.

+ + + 

As I wandered back with my empty metal bottle swinging by its lid-loop from my finger, I was passed by a woman and a tween boy walking quickly, a mother and son.  She was dressed in sunglasses and running clothes, he in the ten-year-old-boy uniform of basketball shorts and a graphic tee and well-worn-in sneakers, and they were chatting easily.  It sounded as if she were explaining something, and he was nodding with real interest.  They walked faster than me and soon disappeared ahead, one parent, one child, being together, here at the lake.

I find I don't spend a lot of one-on-one time with any of my children.  It's the kind of thing that you have to deliberately create, in a family of five children at home (practicing that terminology; it will feel soon enough before one of them has aged out).   I do try to create it:  take one with me to the grocery store, take another on a trip all by himself to buy shoes, drive my daughter to camp. A biteback effect of safety regulation on family life:  no one younger than twelve is legally allowed to ride in the front seat with me, and who knows how many would-be conversations were thereby squelched before they came to be.

Maybe the mother and son on the walking path are like me, stealing time away from a large family on a Saturday afternoon.  Or maybe the boy is the one child at home.  I considered what it could have been like, me homeschooling a smaller family, one where I felt that I had enough time to get around to everybody.  Things would be different for sure.  I have a few homeschooling friends with one or two kids, or maybe just one or two left at home after the others have grown and gone, and it always seems as if they get to go very deep and run very far, and all together, not so much sending the middle-schooler with another family to see plays, not so much dropping the teenager off to go with the group to the museum exhibit that frowns on toddlers.  

+ + +

Of course, I'll have a chance to find some of that out eventually, when the ones who are little now become big and there aren't more coming up behind them.  We'll see if I do all the things I imagine I would do.

+ + +

Comparing yourself, inside and out, to what you can see of other people, that's a losing game.  I know this.  I also know that I wouldn't have it another way:  the large family is exhiliarating and challenging (in a good way) and I'm so glad I have every one of the children, and am grateful that we were gifted with them, and aware of those who long for many children and haven't seen that longing become reality.  

The most important thing to remember -- I don't know why it seems so hard sometimes -- is that whatever you are, whatever your family is, you too have strengths that others don't have.  It's not a kind of "I'm better than they, so there" mentality, it's more -- let's restore some balance to our vision.  Instead of constantly seeing "They can do things I can't -- she has advantages I don't -- he accomplishes what I don't -- they can give their kids something I can't --"  see that you too have your specialties.  

There's something to the Incredibles message "When everybody's super, then no one is."  But there is another side of this,  entirely true: the differences among us mean we can excel in different things, for real, not in a wishful way.  We can be our own self better than anyone else.  

Sometimes the things in which we are uniquely gifted are not things that are widely celebrated, and that's too bad, but we can work to appreciate those things in our own quiet way, when we see them in ourselves and in others.

+ + +

Last week I was talking to a friend of mine, a homeschooling parent of four, a part-time working professional musician herself married to a music professor.  They're in almost the opposite academic position from Mark and me -- we are both engineers, one PhD between us, and Mark working full time.  She fretted about finding good science teachers for her bright science student (who, by the way, is also a gifted musician himself -- none of those in our family!) while I commiserated in an analogous sort of way because I'm nearly hopeless in the arts and am not a gifted English or writing teacher.  Both of our families have solved this problem by outsourcing the relevant subjects to someone better qualified, one way or another.  It's a common thing for homeschooling families to do, urban ones anyway.

"Think of it this way," I said, "it's not that your kids are unusually handicapped in a subject you aren't expert in.  You've had at least a high school education in everything, college classes in some of it, and you get to have the teacher's manual.  Lots of public schools put first-year teachers into classes that they've never taught before and don't have particular expertise in.  You meet the minimum standards in every subject, and you far exceed them in others.  And you can find tutors where necessary."

The notion of being Adequate not seeming to be comforting, I went on ---

"If you have to compare your family's achievement to a school, then think of your family as a super-exclusive, super-specialized magnet school, or charter school.   You run an arts magnet school.  I run a STEM academy.  And where we both are only so-so in the other sorts of things, we do make up for it with, you know, small class size and a lot of personalized attention.  

"Also an extremely flexible schedule."

+ + +

We all have to be who we are.  It's tempting to see that as only limiting.  There have certainly been times in human history where the limiting aspect was emphasized even more than it is now, where people were chastised for dreaming too much of things that were closed to them for purely arbitrary reasons -- or for reasons that were thought incorrectly to be rational but really weren't.  It turns out that we do well to eliminate the arbitrary limitations, but we can swing too far the other way in insisting that anyone can do and be anything or everything, and excel in it.  The main problem with that is that inevitable difficulties are sometimes cast as "not working hard enough," "not wanting it bad enough," "not believing in yourself enough."  There are certain realities that are not arbitrary, and except for the extraordinarily gifted and/or extraordinarily privileged, wanting is not enough to overcome them.

Buried within the truth that we all must be who we are, though, is that it isn't just a limitation but also an encouragement, an identity.  If I must be who I am, then no one else can be it for me.  I have unique gifts and I should exploit them, use them to every advantage.  If they are the sort of thing that is not recognized as a strength, or even if they are the sort of thing that some call out as a liability, then I still have options:  go where these qualities are rarer and valuable, or, well, surprise people.

+ + +

One precondition is logically necessary, and it cannot be taken for granted:  the philosophical conviction that every human person has equal value, whatever his or her circumstances.  It's a sad truth that not everyone agrees with that, and even fewer behave in accord with it.  Some people see the good in everyone except themselves;  such a reflex has a useful side, in that it maintains humility, but it has a dark side too, one that misses opportunities for gratitude and tempts to despair and apathy, and risks swallowing others in its wake.   You have to practice finding it in yourself too, as an exercise in truth-seeking if nothing else.

Anyway, once you have this conviction, the conclusion boils down to:  whoever you are, you have strengths.  They aren't the same as mine.  You can exploit them to your advantage, to your family's advantage.  Go forth and win at your own game.

 

Intrinsic.

"We were promised an election, not a damned trolley problem."

Such has been my one-liner about the 2016 presidential race.

+ + +

The big problem with the concept of "choosing the lesser evil" is that, in speaking the phrase, we reduce a fairly complicated, nuanced and lengthy moral discourse down to four words.  There are, so to speak, a lot of conditions and considerations that go into the discussion before you come out the other side with the conclusion, "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is permissible" or even "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is a positive good."  

A moral argument in complicated circumstances is a structure built carefully upward from a firm foundation, all of its pieces working together like a truss to support one another and ultimately to support the weight of unforeseen future circumstances that will test it.  Having dismantled the relatively intricate structure of the argument, reduced it to nothing but its shadow painted on the ground, we dubiously free ourselves to follow the traces of that shadow and build upon it, taking "choose the lesser evil" as the postulate of a new moral system -- sometimes building a structure that would be completely unrecognizable to the original architects, unless they happened to peer at it from just the right angle -- and that, the direction from which the light fell upon it.

But we want our philosophical structures to make sense from every direction, especially the directions that look toward it from the darkness.

+ + +

I find it interesting that "Choose the lesser evil" is being deployed both to justify voting for the GOP candidate and to justify voting for the Democratic Party candidate.  It is being deployed from both directions to say, "Even though you think you have to vote for [candidate] because [particular evil], I'm here to tell you that you may vote for [other candidate] because [different particular evil].  

I am detecting a common error in the arguments:  the notion that picking between the two major candidates is equivalent to some sort of referendum on which evil is worse (or which set of evils is worse).

As if "Choose the lesser evil" means "That which I choose, I declare its evils to be lesser."

Coming down to specifics right now because it's too exhausting to keep talking in generalities.  Here's the notion I'm talking about:

• That choosing Mrs. Clinton means "I say that mass deportations and other bad things that Trump champions are worse than abortion and other things that Clinton champions."
• And that choosing Mr. Trump means "I say that abortion and other Clinton-championed causes are worse than mass deportations and other Trump-championed causes."

We then devolve into an argument about which kind of devaluation of human life is the worse kind of devaluation of human life, complete with arguments that the other side is pro-degradation because it has a different favorite kind of degradation.

And that's not even getting into the wrinkle of both sides turning and attacking the ones who say, "I refuse to choose either."

+ + +

It's almost impossible to find a discussion of the moral nuances of voting that doesn't come at it from one side or another.  I thought this was a pretty good piece laying out advice from Bishop Flores of Brownsville, TX.  The direction it comes from is "You might think you have to vote for Mr. Trump because Mrs. Clinton clearly supports legal abortion.  But maybe that's not so, because it isn't that simple, and Mr. Trump's policies also represent an assault on human dignity."   I'm not highlighting the piece because I think this particular direction is the direction that most needs highlighting.  I'm highlighting it because it digs, a little, into the not-so-simple structure that gets simplified as "Choose the lesser evil":

Prudence judges circumstances in light of principles that are rightly ranked in terms of gravity. Keeping that in mind, circumstances are different this year. It is not possible now to take the issue of immigration policy only as a matter of having diverse positions on a badly needed reform of the system. One could argue that in prior elections there was a dispute between the parties about whether a reform was needed, and about what principles would guide a possible reform.

This year, there is a proposal on the table to proceed with mass deportations of undocumented men, women and children. One cannot in conscience countenance a program of mass deportation. It is a brutal proposal. In some instances, particularly dealing with the Central American mothers and children, and deportations into some parts of Mexico, we are dealing with placing them in proximate danger of death. I consider supporting the sending of an adult or child back to a place where he or she is marked for death, where there is lawlessness and societal collapse, to be formal cooperation with an intrinsic evil. Not unlike driving someone to an abortion clinic.

So, even as a Catholic finds the radical pro-abortion platform of the other party beyond reprehensible, there is no comfort for the conscience of a Catholic on the side of a radical program of mass deportation. Both positions are assaults on the dignity of life, and in the case of mass deportations, can be linked to no. 24 of Faithful Citizenship (FC), “treating the poor as disposable.” Overall, I think we have to look at nos. 35-38 of FC very carefully. We should all read it and think about its implications between now and Election Day.

I think it is worth citing number 36 in particular: “When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.”

It seems that if a Catholic votes for either major candidate, he or she must do so with a conviction that the evil the candidate supports can be successfully opposed, and that other aspects of their policy proposals are sufficiently good to warrant voting for them. Thus if a Catholic votes for a pro-abortion candidate or for a pro-mass deportation candidate, for what FC calls “morally grave reasons,” because the candidate is deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods there should be conscientious commitment by the voter to oppose strenuously the pro-abortion agenda or the pro mass-deportation agenda respectively And there are other factors that FC rightly asks us to think about, including a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue.

And note, that I have not even addressed the issues of targeting innocents (who may be relatives of evil-doers) in military actions, or indiscriminate use of drones in warfare. Nor have I mentioned a great many important issues raised in FC and which we must take into account.

...

The bishop reminds us not to fall back on a simple formula, like "Choose the lesser evil."  Rather, we should return to the source (the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount) and to its development in American pastoral theology (Faithful Citizenship, a.k.a. Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship:  A Call To Political Responsibility, a teaching document to U. S. Catholics advising us how to exercise our political voice.)  

 

We are in the situation described by paragraph 36 of that document, but not in the way that faithful Catholic voters expected to be.  The document reads:

36. When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

I submit that most pro-life voters imagined that this describes an election where every viable candidate is a pro-legal-abortion candidate.  

Instead we have the (much more realistic, technically ever-present, but now extremely obvious) situation where every viable candidate openly supports an intrinsic evil, but it's not the SAME intrinsic evil.

Thus we are divided, and distracted into arguing about which intrinsic evil is the worse intrinsic evil.

This is a fool's discussion.

"Intrinsic" evils do not permit us to distinguish between a greater or a lesser evil.  That is what "intrinsic" means.

It means that whichever way we go, we walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

We may as always distinguish prudentially between a greater or a lesser danger, but not between a greater or a lesser intrinsic evil.

And if you'll take a look at paragraph 36, you will note that the U. S. bishops do not advise U. S. Catholics to vote for the candidate whose evil is deemed lesser.

 Instead they advise us that we may (a) choose not to vote for either candidate or (b) may vote for the candidate that is less likely to advance the evil parts of his/her agenda and more likely to advance the good parts of his/her agenda.

In other words, if we are to vote at all, we are obligated to consider the structures of platforms and of power as wholes -- not merely their foundations.  How would each candidate be constrained in their political goals by opposing parties, by checks and balances, by the slow lurch of bureaucracy?  Who can inspire the masses to support them, and what can that inspiration accomplish?  Do the respective platforms contain (besides the rotted planks) sound, achievable goals that further justice and mercy?  What role will competence and incompetence play in the advancement of the good and evil parts of the agendas?  What role will self-interest play, and how strong is it in each candidate?

"Choose the lesser evil" is not going to work as a slogan this year.  We have a much harder decision ahead of us all.  

"A little knowledge..."

I don't believe in putting bumper stickers on my car.

The caveat here, before I explain myself, is that I don't care if you want to put bumper stickers on your car. Do it as much as you want. It is a matter of personal expression, and I am cool with that. But I don't put them on mine -- I guess you could say that an unadorned bumper is my personal expression.

It isn't that I don't appreciate a well-turned, pithy statement. I am fond of KILL YOUR TELEVISION. I like very much WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME TO QUESTION AUTHORITY? I wholeheartily agree with LOVE THEM BOTH. I have a special appreciation for outrageously large window decals of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You have a lovely stick figure family.

I just ... don't want such things on the outside of my car. Not even the tiniest, most unobtrusive rosary sticker in the corner of a back window. Definitely not anything political. There may be a sticker out there that I would be comfortable putting on my car, but I have not yet seen it.

Once, without consulting me, Mark put a sticker on the Volkswagen supporting a particular vote on a local ballot-initiative. Given that he knew I was planning to vote the same way he was, I think he was probably surprised by how annoyed I was that I had to drive around town in a car with a political bumper sticker on it. I made sour faces, I drove the minivan instead as much as possible for the next several weeks, and I made him peel it off the car on the first Wednesday in November. I didn't just feel annoyed about it, I felt unreasonably angry, and I spent a lot of time behind the wheel trying to articulate to myself why. I didn't quite come to an answer.

The other morning when Minneapolis and St. Paul woke up to the viral video of Phil Castile dying of five bullets in the front seat of his car while a panicked policeman shrieked "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I briefly wondered -- as I have wondered about various political and philosophical statements over the years as they became timely -- if it was maybe time to get a Black Lives Matter sticker. Some of my neighbors have the signs in their front yards. I don't mind signs in my yard as much, we've had candidate signs in the yard and that has never bothered me. I wondered very idly if I, bearing such a sticker, might be more likely to be pulled over. I wondered, too, if the same neighbors would see such a thing with appreciation or with derision, now that virtue-signaling is A Thing.

Two days later after the five Dallas murders I waded into one too many comment sections and I knew from my reaction to them that however sympathetic I may be to #BlackLivesMatter -- and even though I could still do the yard sign thing, like I said, I don't have the same feeling about yard signs -- I wasn't going to put any bumper stickers on my car, not of any sort. And I think I have figured out why.

It isn't that I don't want you to know what I think.

It's that I don't want you to think you know what I think.

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Last December Ken White, an attorney who blogs at Popehat, published an op-ed in the L. A. Times about "culture-bundling." He was writing about the unproductivity of most debates about gun control -- and it's a useful contribution to the discussion on that subject, too -- but what really stuck with me was just one of his three points, namely, the "bundling" concept. Bear with me, I know this passage uses gun control as its example, but I'm quoting it not for that particularity but because of the general concept that I have underlined.

We culture-bundle when we use one political issue as shorthand for a big group of cultural and social values. Our unproductive talk about guns is rife with this. Gun control advocates don't just attack support for guns; they attack conservative, Republican, rural and religious values. Second Amendment advocates don't just attack gun control advocates; they attack liberal, Democratic, urban and secular values. The gun control argument gets portrayed as the struggle against Bible-thumping, gay-bashing, NASCAR-watching hicks, and the gun rights argument gets portrayed as a struggle against godless, elitist, kale-chewing socialists.

That's great for rallying the base, I guess, but that's about all. When you culture-bundle guns, your opponents don't hear “I'm concerned about this limitation on rights” or “I think this restriction is constitutional and necessary.” They hear “I hate your flyover-country daddy who taught you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were 12” and “Your gay friends' getting married would ruin America and must be stopped.” That's unlikely to create consensus.

The original blog post , not bound by external editorial standards, uses a bit more colorful language. I think I prefer it. About an example of a pro-gun-control meme, White writes,

The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards."

And about an example of a pro-gun-rights meme,

Your intended message may be "the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need," nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns." But what you are conveying is that "the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays."

I encourage you to read the whole thing there.

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Even for straightforward messages that one might think could not be misinterpreted, the phenomenon of culture-bundling means that people are tempted to make assumptions about each other. The Jesus Fish drags a trail of associations behind it like so much grimy seaweed. The Black Lives Matter sticker is smugly, mentally, made to bow and scrape as a mere corollary to All Lives Matter. Every car can be neatly shunted into the left and right lanes.

Such assumptions are not warranted, ever.

Yes, but...

No. They are not warranted. Not ever. The environmental-responsibility sticker doesn't also mean "People are bad and abortion is good." The second-amendment sticker doesn't also mean "Gay marriage is an oxymoron." The Jesus-loves-you sticker doesn't also mean "Keep evolution out of the schools." The support-our-troops sticker doesn't also mean "I -heart- the death penalty." The opinions behind the strawmen may be correlated one way or another, but human persons are not correlations.

The assumptions aren't warranted. They aren't warranted because when we make them we are seeing a human being as an object: an object of our own self-gratification, the pecular good feeling because it reinforces all the things we already think.

Bumper stickers tempt people to see each other as objects.

Bumper stickers tempt people away from compassion and toward derision.

And that is not even counting the occasional sticker that actually expresses something that's not just unpopular, a minority opinion, or countercultural, but actually vile.

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And what about Christian witness? Have I got something against proclaiming Jesus Christ on the outside of my vehicle?

Yes, I do. I do not deserve to prominently display the Holy Name on the outside of my car. I have a lead foot. I have a big scrape on my minivan door where I hit a pole in the co-op parking lot on the day before Thanksgiving. I accidentally cut people off while shouting at squabbling kids. The best I can do for a justifiably pissed-off fellow commuter is that super-apologetic "Sorry! My bad!" wave. I don't think my displaying a Queen of the Rosary sticker is going to do either the Queen of the Rosary, or myself, or the guy leaning on his horn, any good in that moment. My mishap may do more damage because of it.

There are shades here of Luke 18:9-14. Being a Christian behind the wheel should mean driving with awareness, attention, and courtesy, not driving the right car or having the right sticker. I need the mercy of God inside my car.

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And the world needs the mercy of God outside it, too, which is one reason I don't want to tempt anyone to think nasty thoughts. There are plenty of other places to speak the truth: places where, unlike on the bumper of my car, I get to speak the whole truth, put things in context, show my face, be seen as a whole person and not a hashtag.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We have seen that this week, to our national grief.

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Presenting as imperfect.

I'm so glad that Anne at Preventing Grace gave me this kind shout out in her piece If I Work Hard Enough I Win the other day:

... I am about to turn in all my school reports. And I have made a detailed book list for the fall. And two friends were chatting away about bullet journaling (which turns out not to be at all what I imagined). And then Bearing Blog wrote about how she divvies up her time and keeps her mental health always in view. (Oh how I love Bearing Blog and her calm, rational way of thinking.) And it reminded me that, when I’m in the thick of a school year, I do get into an ugly, constraining loop of not being able to stop working.

In fact, sometimes when I am on holiday I am not able to stop working. And sometimes, when it’s a nice, pretty day outside, I am not able to stop working. Last year I spent most of our sunny weeks away cleaning, picking up, and neglecting the stack of books I had brought to read....

So, obviously, as per usual, of course, necessarily, as I vow every year, I don’t want to do this again. I want to find The Perfect Organizational System that will remove entirely the existential gaping maw of failure. Because, of course, if I just do all the work, I won’t fail. Right. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. It’s me just working hard enough and not forgetting anything that is the difference between life and death.

I was going to leave a comment at Anne's blog along the lines of "You really should say, 'Bearing Blog wrote about how she TRIES to keep her mental health always in view,'" but then I remembered my own advice to myself in the linked blog post, the one where I resolved to blog before I get any work done or do anything else.  Well, there was more to it than that, but  anyway, I should blog before I write the key to the chemistry test, and if I leave the comment at her blog first, my thought will be spent.

(One of my problems is that my mental health is always in view.  I am forever craning my neck to see over and around it.)

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At any rate, today I want to share a post from the excellent physics blog, Gravity and Levity.

Momentary digression.   I first started blogging in 2005, not quite a year after I finished my Ph.D. in chemical engineering.  It was probably right about the time that I was deciding to hang up the idea of switching to technical editing and developing a free-lance network.  And I hadn't yet gotten to  the place where I would accept that I wasn't ever going to get around to cutting and polishing the three publishable pieces of my thesis and shopping them to the appropriate journals, a place of acceptance that I wouldn't finally reach until my academic adviser passed away about two years later.

At the time, I thought that I might do quite a lot of science blogging, in between the recipes and the self-help, commentary on news articles and the like, and so I read some science blogs.  But as time went on, I got bored with all but a few.  It turns out that I don't have time to write commentary on all the Science News that passes by the world's eyes day after day, shining for a moment, inspiring a burst of chatter, then passing back into oblivion.  

It also turns out that a steady diet of Science News is extremely irritating -- maybe not to everybody with research training and a grasp of mathematics and statistics, but at least to me.  Oh my.  I don't even want to go there right now, lest I lose the whole point of my post, but Science Journalism is bad.  It's not all bad, but so much of it is very bad.  And Science Facebook is also very bad.  Painful, even.   Ok, I don't want to get into this, but just so I can be a little less vague, the features that bug me the most are 

• Identifying non-science (e.g., engineering, technology, and nature-education) as "science"
• The disturbing lack of a word other than "science" for fields in which reproducible experimentation is impossible, meaning that those fields' findings acquire an undeserved aura of certainty and universality that should be reserved for physical law
• Identifying the policy opinions of a person who is employed as a scientist as "science"
• Appeals to authority -- the logical-fallacy form, that is
• Ascribing magical certainty to anything called "science"
• Statistics deployed for any reason by people who do not understand them
• The entire system of publish-or-perish and peer review, which discourages negative results and which relentlessly pressures working scientists to get "good" results, thereby undermining the scientific method

There's also the problem of specialization.  I only studied in depth one little tiny area in materials science and engineering.  I can't comment with a post-graduate level of expertise on anything else, except for the general skills that one develops along the way (mostly math and procedure).  

Anyway, the gist of that is that I don't read many science blogs anymore.  I do read some scientists' blogs, though, because people who write generally and well and bring their perspective as a complete nerd to whatever interests them are the people I like to hang out with, virtually speaking.

Ahem.

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So, back to Brian's recent post at Gravity and Levity, Toward a Culture of Tolerating Ignorance.   He begins with some words about impostor syndrome, and then dives into the practical advice, which I'll quote at length.

There is one practice that I have found very helpful in my pursuit of a scientific career, and which I think is worth mentioning.  It’s what I call fostering a “culture of tolerating ignorance.”

Let me explain.

As a young (or even old) scientist, you continually feel embarrassed by the huge weight of things you don’t know or don’t understand.  Taking place all around you, among your colleagues, superiors, and even your students, are conversations about technical topics and ideas that you don’t understand or never learned.  And you will likely feel ashamed of your lack of knowledge.  You will experience some element of feeling like a fraud, like someone who hasn’t studied hard enough or learned quickly enough.  You will compare yourself, internally, to the sharpest minds around you, and you will wonder how you were allowed to have the same profession as them.

These kinds of feelings can kill you, and you need to find a way of dealing with them.

I have found that the best strategy is to free yourself to openly admit your ignorance.  Embrace the idea that all of us are awash in embarrassing levels of ignorance, and the quickest way to improve the situation is to admit your ignorance and find someone to teach you.

In particular, when some discussion is going on about a topic that you don’t understand, you should feel free to just admit that you don’t understand and ask someone to explain it to you.

If you find yourself on the other side of the conversation, and someone makes such an admission and request, there are only two acceptable responses:

1. Admit that you, also, don’t understand it very well.
2. Explain the topic as best as you can.

Most commonly, your response will be some combination of 1 and 2.  You will be able to explain some parts of the idea, and you will have to admit that there are other parts that you don’t understand well enough to explain.  But between the two of you (or, even better, a larger group) you will quickly start filling in the gaps in each others’ knowledge.

A culture where these kinds of discussions can take place is a truly wonderful thing to be a part of.  In such an environment you feel accepted and enthusiastic, and you feel yourself learning and improving very quickly.  It is also common for creative or insightful ideas to be generated in these kinds of discussions.  To me, a culture of tolerating ignorance is almost essential for enjoying my job as a scientist.

The enemies of this kind of ideal culture are shame and scorn.  The absolute worst way to respond to someone’s profession (or demonstration) of ignorance is to act incredulous that the person doesn’t know the idea already, and to assert that the question is obvious, trivial, and should have been learned a long time ago.  (And, of course, someone who responds this way almost never goes on to give a useful explanation.)  An environment where people respond this way is completely toxic to scientific work, and it is, sadly, very common.  My suggestion if you find yourself in such an environment to avoid the people who produce it, and to instead seek out the company of people with whom you can maintain enthusiastic and non-scornful conversations.

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Of course, I have two general responses to Brian's post, which you should really go read in its entirety (if only so you can follow the embedded links -- they are also very good -- and read some of the comments).

The first response is the almost obligatory, "I wish I had read and assimilated this before I started graduate school."

 High school, even.   I emerged into adulthood with a defensive habit of pretending I knew things instead of asking dumb questions or even shutting up and listening, because I feared scorn.  Even though I only had this habit in some contexts, not others, it didn't serve me well in the long term.  (Being able to bullshit very well can be a lucrative skill, but I don't possess that kind, at least not in person.  Maybe Anne's praise is evidence that I can do it in writing a little bit.) 

The second response is that one does not have to be working in academia to put this advice into practice.  Almost any collaborative community in which you find yourself is one in which people have varying levels of knowledge of the subjects at hand.  You can use it at work, in your volunteer groups, in your teams, and in your family.   

Ask questions.  Honor questioning.  The higher your position, the greater your responsibility.  Answer questions.   Eliminate scorn.   

(The hardest part?  Resisting the temptation to conversationally scorn for their ignorance people who are not present, including public figures in the news.  And yet, if you wish to send the message "You are valued, unconditionally, and it is no crime to be ignorant," to impressionable and vunerable people around you, you must demonstrate to them that your tone will be the same even when the vulnerable people are out of the room.)

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There are so many things I didn't have figured out when I was starting out, things I realize now that I wish I could have known then.   It was true about my brief time in academia, and it's true about my longer life making a home and raising children.   But that's the nature of living in time:  you get wiser as you go, and logically that means you must have started out pretty green.  Embracing that logic really does relieve a lot of stress.  

But that, too, is the sort of thing you get better at with practice.

Book review: The Sinner's Guide to NFP by Simcha Fisher.

Everybody knows who Simcha Fisher is, right? Right? I link to her blog and her other blog often enough, right? I don't have to fill you in?

OK, well, I recently had a chance to review a pre-publication copy of her soon-to-be-released e-book, The Sinner's Guide to NFP. (I am told there will also be an audiobook. When I find out the publication date, I'll update with a link.)

Let's start with two lines I considered including in my review of this book, and then thought better of.

Line number one: "I recommend The Sinner's Guide to NFP wholeheartedly. Why? Because it reinforces all my personal preconceptions about the exact attitude everyone should have towards NFP."

Line number two: "Simcha Fisher's attitude in The Sinner's Guide to NFP is a welcome addition to the many writings about marital chastity we've all been subjected to. If it helps your faith and practice, you should take their advice to heart. If it doesn't, you can freely ignore it. Kind of like an approved Marian apparition! Except not likely to get quite as much attention."

Now that I have those out of the way, here's a more helpful review.

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I am not Fisher's target audience. Here's a quote that explains why:

[This book is] for couples who are completely dedicated to the idea; couples who, as long as they have a good reason to postpone pregnancy, will be using NFP to do so. But so far, they have found the fabulous side effects to be elusive; and by “elusive,” I mean “horrible, horrible lies.”

I am the first person to admit that my husband and I have drunk the NFP kool-aid. Not from the very beginning of our marriage have either of us even considered artificial contraception to be an option that remains on the table. We enthusiastically recommend it to everyone we can, using Catholic arguments when we think those will work, and usingsecular arguments when we think those might work better. We "get" the concept of bearing the inevitable annoyances as a cross -- a cross that ultimately strengthens our marriage. We are temperamentally incapable of relying too much on "providence" and not enough on "prudence." We are rule-following engineer types for whom charting and data analysis practically count as a form of foreplay. By all evidence we even appear to be good at NFP.

But even if I am not the target audience, I am maybe the target reviewer, because I wholeheartedly endorse the attitude in this book. The truth is that even when you're both totally on board, NFP has features which, well, you might as well laugh at them so you don't

(a) cry or

(b) throw things at each other.

As for the state of NFP discourse, even (especially?) among faithful Catholics? Well, it can be even worse.

And that is why we need Fisher's book. It's frank, it's conversational, and it's funny. What's possibly most important: it firmly rejects the nosy judgmentalism that pervades the conversation today, choosing instead to emphasize the great variety of good paths that a couple may find as they discern together the right decisions for their family.

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Although the title of the book is The Sinner's Guide to NFP, it's really more of a loosely organized collection of essays, some of them reprinted from Fisher's popular columns in the National Catholic Register and other publications. This isn't the sort of book that takes you from "beginner" through "intermediate" to "advanced" stages of natural family planning expertise. It's more of a corrective to some of the less-helpful attitudes that often prevail. It's an attempt to help couples avoid common pitfalls -- mental, spiritual, and sexual ones.

Here are some of the topics that Fisher covers:

- Why the Church doesn't "make a list" of specific situations when it would be good to postpone a pregnancy and another list of specific situations when it's bad.

- That there are many ways to live according to God's will.

- That a cross is a cross even when you aren't the one carrying it.

- That you can follow a good path that works for you now without committing to doing it always. You get to change your plan, and you can do it without thinking that you used to be wrong.

- That if you can't laugh about sex, you're doing it wrong.

- Why we shouldn't judge others' hearts based on the appearance of their families or even on their stated reasons for their decisions.

- Some principles to keep in mind when talking to kids about sex and baby-making.

- Positive ways to think about sexual differences and disparities between husband and wife, and how to use them to grow together in chastity and complementarity.

- Why NFP is the worst family planning system in the world, except for all the others.

 

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I have a few quibbles with the way the book is presented.

First, the title is a little misleading, because it's not really organized as a guidebook. But that's not actually a problem with the content; since each chapter is a stand-alone essay, the reader can take them in any order, and skip whatever doesn't address her concerns. I could easily see individual chapters being reprinted for group discussions -- maybe even for marriage prep, if the leader is exceptionally bold.

Second, in one chapter Fisher contrasts couples "who space pregnancies using NFP" with "providentialists" who don't. An "ism" implies a belief, not a practice; I prefer not to classify couples as "providentialist" based on something they do, rather than something they think. Using that guideline, a "providentialist" (with respect to child spacing) is a person who believes one should generally not try to postpone pregnancies, and that's not the same as couple who discerns a personal calling to that path. This is a rare departure for Fisher, who generally makes a sensible distinction between what general principles advise and what particular circumstances dictate.

Third, the book doesn't quite manage to find a voice that consistently speaks to couples rather than to women. This is almost certainly a consequence of its organization as a collection of separate essays, which quite naturally were not all aimed at precisely the same audience. To Fisher's credit, it's also a natural consequence of the ease which which she can address both men and women. She clearly and sensitively articulates the concerns that seem to come up repeatedly among Catholic women; but at the same time she refuses to even dip a toe into sentimentality, let alone wallow in it.

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These three, however, are minor concerns. The Sinner's Guide can be a quick read or a lengthy immersion, depending on what you need from it. The informed Catholic reader will be glad to know that Fisher takes for granted that her reader understands basic Catholic teachings about marital chastity and family planning -- so it won't waste your time going over the fundamentals. Instead it dives right away into the lessons that can be learned from the daily putting of these principles into practice. It's a funny book, and it can be digested in small pieces. It contains a wealth of conversation starters for couples -- whether they are starting out or burning out, or just in the mood for a chat.

NFP may be the worst system in the world, but -- as Fisher writes -- it's the worst except for all the other ones. Maybe it's more accurate to say that NFP is actually a myriad of individualized systems, one for each couple striving to live out their faith through day-to-day expressions of marital sexuality -- naturally, a system that's intimate and personally tailored to circumstances, and also slightly ridiculous, because so is marital sexuality. Fisher's voice is a refreshing addition to the conversation.

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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?  

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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.  

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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.

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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.